Nuremberg, in spite of her wealth and commercial importance, had not, at the time of the coming of Hermann Vischer, given birth as yet to any great work of art in bronze. Almost the only old piece of bronze of any importance to be seen in the churches there is the font in St. Sebald’s Church. And its importance lies rather in the richness with which it is wrought than in its artistic excellence (1350). This is the font in which the Emperor Wenzel was baptized—a baptism which cost the town the beautiful old parsonage, burnt down by the fires used to heat the water for the imperial infant. The four squat apostolic figures represented here in their straight, heavy mantles bear witness already to that striving after a realistic representation of the great protagonists in the sacred drama which was beginning to betray itself at this time in the works of the nameless Nuremberg painters on the one hand, and, on the other, of the Nuremberg sculptors, such as Hans Decker, the forerunner of Adam Krafft. It was a tendency which the Nuremberg artists, like their brethren of the Swabian school and the school of Cologne owed to the influence of Flemish art. But this was a return to Nature not without its faults. The German artist, in his eager endeavour to reproduce the exact form of his models, of those, that is, whom he saw around him every day, was badly served by the figures of his countrymen. They could not give him the slim and graceful forms of the Italians to copy, and he had not yet learnt from Italy those theories of beauty, based on a study of the antique, which were one day to help an Albert Dürer to perform the true function of an artist by improving upon Nature.