Cecil Headlam

“ Nuremberg, at any rate, continues always to act as if she were a free town of the Empire. She was acutely conscious of the dignity of her charter. The great object for which the European towns, and Nuremberg among them, were all this time struggling was a charter of incorporation and a qualified privilege of internal self-government. Emperors and princes might try to get hold of a rich city like Nuremberg, and treat it as their private property, but, once she had won her charter, she was determined to remain a Reichstadt, and to enjoy all the privileges and liberties of a free city. ”

“ Their love of science was no less genuine than their love of art. In June 1471, a few weeks after the birth of Albert Durer, Johannes Muller, (surnamed Regiomontanus in allusion to Königsberg, his native village) the great mathematical genius, “the wonder of his generation,” took up his abode at Nuremberg, making her the true home of physical and mathematical science and contributing mightily to her reputation as “the capital of German art, the most precious jewel of the Empire, the meeting-place of art and industry.” ”

“ We have now dealt with the most famous of the Nuremberg craftsmen. It would be wearisome to do more than mention a few of the leading names amongst those who excelled in other branches of art. A host of locksmiths, glasscutters, potters and stovemakers, bookbinders and carvers turned out in the golden age of Nuremberg work which has never received its artist’s name, but which continues to delight us. The painted glass, which in spite of much modern restoration is one of Nuremberg’s most priceless possessions, is often by unknown hands. ”

“ More and more the patrician families drew together and separated themselves from the common people. They clung closer to their exclusive privileges as they became less worthy of them. Endeavouring to become more like the landed nobility, they began to abandon business, and withdrew from the State the capital and brains which had formerly made it prosperous. They grew, indeed, in their false pride, so ashamed of trade that they said that no Nuremberg patrician had ever had to do with business! So a proud and poor nobility came to take the place of rich and patriotic merchant princes. ”

“ At Ansbach he tried to repeat his Nuremberg success, and to confirm the existence of the mysterious persecutor who was supposed to haunt him. But this time he failed. Once more he got stabbed, but instead of a slight, he inflicted on himself a deadly wound. Now though he had taken much trouble to make the conditions of the affair as mysterious and misleading as possible, a long judicial investigation resulted in the irresistible conclusion that “no murder was committed.” At Ansbach stands the tomb of the poor deluded and deluding “Child of Europe,” a monument of folly not all his own. ”

“ The roads were strewn with sand; festoons and hangings brightened the streets which were lined by 5000 armed citizens. Bells were rung and cannon fired as Charles, clothed in black, with a felt hat on his head, rode into the town, beneath a magnificent red velvet canopy held by eight members of the Council in turn. He passed beneath a triumphal arch which had been erected near Neudörfer’s house, in the Burgstrasse. In the Rathaus a solemn act of homage was performed, and the Emperor confirmed all the privileges of the town. ”

“ For, as all the world knows, Hans Sachs has achieved a second lease of life on men’s lips, through the genius of Richard Wagner, dramatist, poet, satirist, and wonderful musician, who, in this opera, laughs at the conceit of the Incorporated Poets in assigning an extravagant antiquity to their Guilds, and at their pedantic sacrifice of matter to form. No more vivid and humorous picture of mediæval German life and of the people of quaint old Nuremberg has ever been drawn. ”

“ It is here that the mighty dead of the White City are sleeping the sleep that knows no waking; but, as we seek the graves of Durer, Sachs, or Pirkheimer, we pass along the rows of flat tombstones quietly, with hushed voices and reverent steps, as if dreading to disturb{266} even the silence of their inviolable repose. [64] On every side of us are emblems of the past glory and pride of Nuremberg. ”

“ Lastly, to those old chroniclers at whom I have sometimes laughed, but whose quaint phrases and legends may have saved these pages from too serious a dulness, I now hasten to make amends and to assure them that I am very conscious of my own inferiority as a storyteller.
The object of this book will have been in great part achieved if it succeeds in reviving the memories and quickening the affections of old lovers of Nuremberg; if it awakens a desire in those who have not yet known and loved her, to visit the old “White City,” and join the band of her worshippers. ”

“ For, apart from the beauty which Nuremberg owes to the wonderful grouping of her red roofs and ancient castle, her coronet of antique towers, her Gothic churches and Renaissance buildings or brown riverside houses dipping into the mud-coloured Pegnitz, she rejoices in treasures of art and architecture and in the possession of a splendid history such as Rothenburg cannot boast. ”

“ The first railway in Germany was opened in 1835 between Nuremberg and Fürth. Her hops, her toys, her cakes, her railway-carriages, her lead-pencils, are they not known the world over? New buildings have sprung up on every side of her: the suburbs are themselves great manufacturing towns. The population has grown to 170,000. These are all things on which she may most sincerely be congratulated; but whatever her prosperity in the present or the future, her golden age, we feel, is in the past. She is Albert Durer’s and Hans Sachs’ city. ”

“ True it is that outside the moat, beneath the smug grin of substantial modern houses, runs that mark of modernity, the electric tram. But let us for the moment forget these gratifying signs of modern prosperity and, turning to the left ere we enter the Frauen Thor, walk with our eyes on the towers which, with their steep-pitched roofs and myriad shapes and richly coloured tiles, mark the intervals in the red-bricked, stone-cased galleries and mighty bastions, till we come to the first beginnings of Nuremberg—the Castle. ”

“ The harmony of colours (green, red, and blue, on a gold background) is strong and happily attuned.
The artist is unknown, but, whoever he was, he had looked upon Nature with loving eyes and worshipped her; and this love of Nature, purified by his deep religious feeling, he had brought to the service{250} of his living faith. Frequently we shall observe in the old Nuremberg artists that this mixture of naivete and reverence in the conception of religious subjects produces too commonplace a representation of them. But here the result is not commonplace, only just towards Nature. ”

“ Wolgemut is seen to best advantage in his single figures of saints, as in his Peringsdörffer masterpiece, from the Augustinerkirche, now in the German Museum, the only painting of importance known to have been produced in his studio during Durer’s apprenticeship. But even in his best pieces we see little more than the fine feeling of a skilful workman. We look in vain for inspiration, in vain for imagination, we listen in vain for any echo from that world of Perfect{185} Beauty which Durer and the greatest artists have known in part and striven to express. ”

“ Still, at the stroke of noon, much as in the old mediæval days, the heralds blow their trumpets, the Emperor raises his sceptre, and out from their gloomy chamber the electors file forth and bow low in reverence to the dead representative of an empire which has ceased to exist. And they revive in our hearts something of the child-like pleasure which the Middle Ages took in these elaborate toys. ”

“ She was probably a woman of a practical and prosaic turn, to whom the dreamy, poetic, imaginative nature of the artist-student, her husband, was intolerably irritating. Yet as we look at his portraits of himself—and no man except Rembrandt has painted himself so often—it is difficult to understand how anyone could have been angry with Albert Durer. Never did the face of man bear a more sweet, benign, and trustful expression. ”

“ Thus the “last of the Knights” gave the death-blow to the chivalry of the Middle Ages. Hitherto every German noble holding fief directly from the Emperor had been on his own property a petty monarch, as it were, subordinate to the Imperial authority alone. These proud military barons,—an ever-increasing host of petty lords, since the rule of inheritance in Germany was division among the male heirs—esteemed above all other privileges the right of making war on each other, or on the towns, with no other ceremony than that of three days’ notice in writing (Fehdebrief) . ”

“ Painting was already in vogue at Nuremberg in the fourteenth century, but it was never much encouraged. One of the reasons may perhaps have been that there was little opportunity for fresco painting here, as in Italy; for the Gothic style of architecture offers no large surfaces that seem to demand the relief of colour and drawing. Painting was regarded at first merely as an assistant of architecture, glass-blowing and sculpture, for the purposes of decoration and ornament, and painters therefore always continued to be treated as mere artisans of one craft or another. ”

“ In those portraits we see something of the beauty, of the strength, of the weakness of the man so beloved in his generation. His fondness for fine clothes and his legitimate pride in his personal beauty reveal themselves in the rich vestments he wears and the wealth of silken curls, so carefully waved, so wondrously painted, falling proudly over his free neck. Joachim Camerarius, the first rector of the Melanchthon Gymnasium in Nuremberg, tells a pleasant story of how the aged Giovanni Bellini once asked Durer to present him with one of the brushes with which he drew hairs. ”

“ The Austrian poet Helbing echoed the public sentiment, during a later persecution, when he exclaimed, “There are too many Jews in our country. It is a shame and a sin to tolerate them. If I were King, if I could lay my hand on you, Jews, I tell you in truth I would have you all burnt.” And this is the opinion of the humanist, Conrad Celtes, in his praise of Nuremberg:—
“Exscindenda protecto gens aut ad Caucasum et ultra Sauromatas perpetuo exilio releganda, quæ, per universum orbem in se totiens iram numinum concitat, humani generis societatem violans et conturbans.” ”

“ The most superficial acquaintance with Durer’s drawings will have prepared us for the sight of his simple, unpretentious house and its contents. In his “Birth of the Virgin” he gives us a picture of the German home of his day, where there were few superfluous knick-knacks, but everything which served for daily use was well and strongly made and of good design. Ceilings, windows, doors and door-handles, chests, locks, candlesticks, banisters, waterpots, the very cooking utensils, all betray the fine taste and skilled labour, the personal interest of the man who made them. ”

“ Nuremberg joined in the universal rejoicings of all steady-going merchants. She had taken occasional part in the Hussite wars; but chiefly through paying money instead of sending a proper contingent of men—a fact which illustrates the narrow, selfish and lazy policy of the town communities where the Empire was concerned. It was impossible for the Emperor to keep order with insufficient means of police. For the Emperor got not a foot of German territory with his Imperial crown. He was merely the feudal head, and as such found it very hard to get troops or money from the German people. ”

“ The pride of the hereditary patrician Councillors had become notorious. The sturdy independent craftsmen began to murmur against this state of affairs. They felt they were entitled to a place in the government of the town, which they supported by their industry and, in war, with their arms. They were ready at last to take steps to secure that place. When their demands were refused by the patricians, bloodshed and strife resulted. In Rothenburg, Regensburg, and Munich the patricians were successful in retaining the Council in their own hands. And so it was with Nuremberg. ”

“ Maximilian, somewhat vexed, asked how this was, to which the artist replied, “I should not like your Majesty to be able to draw as well as I. It is my province to draw and yours to rule.” Aliud est plectrum, aliud sceptrum. The hand that wields the sceptre is too strong for the brush.
Maximilian was, in many aspects of his character, a typical product of the Renaissance. Nuremberg had felt the full force of the revival of learning, the new stimulus in art and literature which was being brought to the West from Constantinople by the Jews and Greeks who had been driven out by the Turks. ”

“ Instead of turning their attention to the development of their country, to the curtailment of the powers of the nobility, to the establishment of their thrones on enduring foundations, they were bewitched with the dream of a Roman-imperial world-monarchy, which was impossible to be realised when every nation was asserting more and more its characteristic peculiarities and arriving at consciousness of national and independent life. The Emperors were always divided between distinct callings, as Kings of Germany and Emperors of Rome. ”

“ When Ruprecht died (1410) Jobst and Sigismund were competitors for the Kaisership, Wenzel too striking in with claims for reinstatement. Both the former were elected, so that Germany rejoiced in as many Kaisers as Christianity had Popes. Happily Jobst died in three months, and Sigismund, chiefly through the faithful and unwearied diligence of Burggraf Frederick VI. of Nuremberg, became Kaiser, “an always hoping, never resting, unsuccessful, vain and empty Kaiser. Specious, speculative, given to eloquence, diplomacy, and the windy instead of the solid arts: always short of money for one thing.” ”

“ Now the eldest of the Guild offered the hand of his young daughter to that master who should win the prize at an approaching public singing-competition. The marker, who has already been wooing the maiden, finds a rival in the person of a young knight, who, fired by reading the ‘Book of Heroes’ and the old Minnesingers, leaves the poor and decaying castle of his ancestors to learn in Nuremberg the art of the master-singers. ”