Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

included placing at their disposal the Frauenhauser, or houses of

women; King Sigismund was honored with this privilege at Bern (1414)

and Ulm (1434), so heartily to his satisfaction that he publicly

thanked his hosts for it. `061530 Unlicensed women sometimes set up

Winkelhauser - irregular houses; in 1492 the licensed prostitutes

of Nuremberg complained to the burgomaster of this unfair competition;

in 1508 they received permission to storm the Winkelhaus; they

did. In the actual moral code of Europe in the later Middle Ages

resort to a prostitute was condoned as a venial but normal sin.

Perhaps the spread of syphilis after 1492 made it a mortal affair.

Marriage, as elsewhere, was a union of properties. Love was

considered a normal result, not a reasonable cause, of marriage.

Betrothal was as binding as matrimony. Weddings were ceremonious and

luxurious in all classes; festivities might last for a week or two;

the purchase of a husband was as expensive as the upkeep of a wife.

The authority of the male was theoretically absolute, but was more

real in deeds than in words; we note that Frau Durer had much to say

to her husband. The women of Nuremberg were undaunted enough to pull

the half-naked Emperor Maximilian from bed, throw a wrap around him,

and lead him in a merry nocturnal dance in the street. `061531

According to a hoary legend, some men of the upper classes in

fourteenth-century Germany, when leaving for extended absences from

home, locked an iron "chastity belt" around the waist and thighs of

their wives, and took the key with them. `061532 Traces of the

custom are found in medieval Venice and sixteenth-century France;

but in the rare cases that seem authentic the belt was voluntarily

donned by wife or mistress, and the key was given to husband or lover,

as a guarantee of fidelity in marriage or sin. `061533

Family life flourished. An Erfurt chronicle reckons eight or ten

offspring per couple as normal; households of fifteen children were

not uncommon. These numbers included bastards, for illegitimate

children, who abounded, were usually taken into the father's home

after his marriage. Family names came into use in the fifteenth

century, often indicating ancestral occupation or place of origin, but

now and then congealing a moment's jest into the rigor of time.

Discipline was firm at home and school; even the future Emperor Max

received many a spanking, and no harm seems to have come from it

except to parent or teacher. German homes were now (c. 1500) the

most comfortable in Europe, with wide staircases, sturdy

balustrades, massive furniture, cushioned seats, carved chests,

windows of colored glass, canopied beds, tapestried walls, carpeted

floors, bulging stoves, shelves crowded with books or flowers or

musical instruments or silver plate, and kitchens gleaming with all

the utensils for a German feast.

Externally the houses were mostly of wood, and fires were

frequent. Overhanging eaves and windowed balconies shaded the streets.

Only a few avenues in the larger towns were paved. Street lighting was

unknown except on festival evenings; life was unsafe outdoors at

night. Petty criminals were as numerous as the pigs and cows that

strayed in the street. There was no organized police; severe

punishments were relied upon to deter crime. The penalty for robbery

was death, or, in mild theft, cutting off the ears. Blasphemers had

their tongues torn out; exiles illegally returning to Nuremberg had

their eyes gouged out. Women who had murdered their husbands were

buried alive, or were tortured with red-hot tongs and then

hanged. `061534 Among the mechanisms of torture formerly exhibited

in the Schloss or Castle of Nuremberg were chests filled with sharp

stones, against which the victim was crushed; racks for stretching his

limbs; braziers to apply fire to the soles of his feet; sharp iron

frames to dissuade him from sitting, lying, or sleeping; and die

verfluchte Jungfer, or Cursed Maiden of iron, who received the

condemned with arms of steel, enclosed him in a spiked embrace, and

then, relaxing, let him fall, pierced and bloody and broken, to a slow

death in a pit of revolving knives and pointed bars. `061535

Political morality accorded with the general moral laxity. Bribery

was widespread, and worst at the top. Adulteration of goods was

common, despite the live burial of two men at Nuremberg for

adulterating wine (1456). Commercialism- the sacrifice of morals to

money- was as intense as in any age; money, not man, was the measure

of all things. Yet these same hustling burghers gave large sums to

charity. "In papal times," Luther wrote, "men gave with both hands,

joyfully and with great devotion. It snowed alms, foundations, and

legacies. Our forefathers, lords and kings, princes and other folk,

gave richly and compassionately- yes, to overflowing- to churches,

parishes, burses [scholarships], hospitals." `061536 It was a sign

of a secularizing age that many charitable bequests were left not to

ecclesiastical bodies but to town councils, for distribution to the

poor.

Manners became coarser- in France and England as well as in Germany-

when the plutocracy of money superseded the aristocracy of birth in

controlling the economy. Drunkenness was the national vice; both

Luther and Hutten denounced it, though Hutten preferred it to "the

deceit of the Italians, the thievery of the Spaniards, the pride of

the French." `061537 Some of the drinking may have been due to the

sharp spices used in preparing meals. Table manners were rough and

ready. Forks had come to Germany in the fourteenth century, but men

and women still liked to eat with their fingers; even in the sixteenth

century a preacher condemned forks as contrary to the will of God, Who

"would not have given us fingers if He had wanted us to use

forks." `061538

Dress was grandiose. Workmen were content with cap or felt hat,

short blouse, and trousers overlapping- or tucked into- boots or

high shoes. The middle classes added a vest, and an open coat lined

and/or bordered with fur. But the possessors of pedigree competed

feverishly with the collectors of guilders in the glory of their garb.

In both these classes the hats of the men were spacious involutions of

costly cloth, sometimes trimmed with feathers, ribbons, pearls, or

gold. Shirts were often of silk. Outer garments, brightly colored,

were lined with fur, and might be threaded with silver. Rich women

wore crowns of gold, or gold-embroidered hoods, and braided gold

thread into their hair; but modest maidens covered their heads with

muslin handkerchiefs tied under the chin. Geiler von Kaisersberg

alleged that smart women had wardrobes costing as much as 4,000

florins ($100,000?). `061539 Men wore their chins shaved but their

hair long; male curls were carefully fostered; note Durer's proud

ringlets, and Maximilian's fancy locks. Finger rings were a sign or

pretense of class, as now. Conradus Celtes remarked that fashions in

clothing changed more rapidly in Germany than elsewhere, and as

often for men as for women. On festive occasions the men might

outshine the women in magnificence.

Festivals were numerous, continuing the medieval spirit of

make-believe and gay display, with a happy moratorium on labor and the

Commandments. Christmas was still Christian, despite its pagan

vestiges; the Christmas tree was to be a seventeenth-century

innovation. Every town celebrated a Kermis (Dutch kerk, church,

and mis, Mass) or feast of its patron saint; men and women would

then dance together in the streets, merriment would be de rigueur,

and no saint or preacher could abate the revel's rough hilarity.

Dancing sometimes became an epidemic mania, as in Metz, Cologne, and

Aix in 1374, or at Strasbourg in 1412. In some such cases sufferers

from St. Vitus's dance would seek relief from what they thought to

be demoniacal possession, by dancing themselves to exhaustion, as some

young maniacs do today. Men found other outlets for their instincts in

hunting, or in the dying sport of the joust. Thousands of men and

women traveled, often using a distant shrine as an excuse. They

moved in painful delight on horses or mules or in coaches or sedan

chairs, bearing the discomforts of unpaved roads and unwashed inns.

Sensible persons, when they could, journeyed by boat along the

Rhine, the Danube, or the other majestic streams of Central Europe. By

1500 a postal service, open to all, united the major towns.

All in all the picture is one of a people too vigorous and

prosperous to tolerate any longer the manacles of feudalism or the

exactions of Rome. A proud sense of German nationality survived all

political fragmentation, and checked supernational emperors as well as

supernatural popes; the Reformation would defeat the Holy Roman Empire

as well as the papacy. In the 1,500-year war between Teuton and

Roman victory was once more, as in the fifth century, inclining toward

Germany.

IV. THE MATURING OF GERMAN ART

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This coming of age first manifested itself in art. We may find it

hard to believe, but it is true, that at the very height of the

Italian Renaissance- from the birth of Leonardo (1452) to the death of

Raphael (1520)- German artists were in demand throughout Europe for

their excellence in every craft in wood, iron, copper, bronze, silver,

gold, engraving, painting, sculpture, architecture. Perhaps with

more patriotism than impartiality, Felig Fabri of Ulm wrote in 1484:

"When anyone wishes to have a first-rate piece of workmanship in

bronze, stone, or wood, he employs a German craftsman. I have seen

German jewelers, goldsmiths, stonecutters, and carriage makers do

wonderful things among the Saracens; they surpassed even the Greeks

and Italians in art." `061540 Some fifty years later an Italian

found this still true: "The Germans," wrote Paolo Giovio, "are

carrying everything before them in art, and we, sluggish Italians,

must needs send to Germany for good workmen." `061541 German

architects were engaged by Florence, Assisi, Orvieto, Siena,

Barcelona, and Burgos, and were called upon to complete the duomo at

Milan. Veit Stoss captivated Cracow, Durer received honors in

Venice, and Holbein the Younger took England by storm.

In ecclesiastical architecture, of course, the zenith had passed

with the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. None the less a single

generation of Munich citizens raised in Late Gothic their Frauenkirche

(1468-88) or Church of Our Lady, and the Altes Rathaus (1470-88) or

Old Town Hall; in the first two decades of the sixteenth century

Freiburg in Saxony completed its choir, Augsburg built the Fugger

Chapel, Strasbourg Cathedral finished its Lawrence Chapel, and a

lovely Chorlein, or oriel window, was added to the parsonage of the

Sebalduskirche in Nuremberg. Domestic architecture in this period

built charming cottages, with red tiled roofs, timbered upper stories,

flower-decked balconies, and spacious eaves to protect the windows

from sun or snow; so in Mittenwald's arduous climate the

undiscourageable Germans countered the sublimity of the Bavarian

Alps with the simple and cherished beauty of their homes.

Sculpture was the glory of the age. Minor carvers abounded who would

have shone as major stars in a less brilliant galaxy: Nicolaus

Gerhart, Simon Leinberger, Tilman Riemenschneider, Hans

Backoffen.... Nuremberg alone in one generation produced a trio of

masters hardly surpassed in equal time by any town in Italy. The

career of Veit Stoss was a tale of two cities Nurtured in Nuremberg,

and acquiring fame as engineer, bridge-builder, architect, engraver,

sculptor, and painter, he went to Cracow at thirty, and did his best

work there in a flamboyant Late Gothic style that well expressed

both the piety and the excitability of the Poles. He returned to

Nuremberg (1496) with sufficient funds to buy a new house and marry

a second wife, who bore him five children to add to her

predecessor's eight. At the height of his abundance Veit was

arrested for having shared, perhaps unwittingly, in a forgery; he

was branded by burning through both cheeks, and was forbidden ever

to leave Nuremberg again. The Emperor Maximilian pardoned him and

restored his civic rights (1506), but Stoss remained an outcast to the

end of his painfully long life. In 1517 he carved a large group

representing the Annunciation or Angelical Salutation; he enclosed the

two figures- among the most nearly perfect in all the range of wood

sculpture- in a garland of roses, surrounded this with a rosary,

attached seven medallions picturing the joys of the Virgin, and

crowned the whole- all in linden wood- with an unprepossessing

portrayal of God the Father. The fragile composition was suspended

from the vault of the choir in the Lorenzkirche, where it still

hangs as a treasured relic of the great city's halcyon days. For the

Sebalduskirche, Stoss carved in wood a Crucifixion never surpassed

in its kind (1520). In that year his son Andreas, as prior of the

Nuremberg Carmelites, procured for Stoss a commission to design an

altar for a church in Bamberg. While the artist labored on this

assignment the Reformation captured Nuremberg; Andreas was replaced as

prior because he remained a Catholic; Veit himself clung to the

colorful faith that had inspired his art; payments on the altar

commission were stopped, and the work remained incomplete. Stoss spent

his final ten years in blindness, solitude, and desolation,

predeceased by his wives, abandoned by his children, and rejected by

an age too absorbed in theology to recognize that it was losing, at

ninety-three (1533), the greatest wood carver in history. `061542

A bronze worker equally supreme in his line lived in the same city

and time, but led a quieter and happier life. Peter Vischer the

Elder portrayed himself in a niche of his most famous product as an

earnest, simple laborer, short, stocky, full-bearded, with a leather

apron around his waist, and hammer and chisel in his hands. He and his

five sons gave eleven years (1508-19) to their chef-d'oeuvre, the

Sebaldusgrab or Tomb of Sebald, Nuremberg's patron saint. The

enterprise was costly; funds ran out, and the work lay unfinished when

Anton Tucher roused the citizens to contribute the 800 guilders

($20,000?) still required. This masterpiece is not impressive at first

sight; it does not seem to rival Orcagna's Tabernacle (1348) at

Florence; and the snails and dolphins on whose backs the structure

rests are not the likeliest carriers of so immense a weight. But a

closer inspection reveals an astonishing perfection in the parts.

The central sarcophagus of silver is adorned with four reliefs

representing the miracles of the saint. Around it rise the bronze

pillars of a Gothic canopy, delicately carved with Renaissance

ornament, and joined in lovely metal lacery at the top. On the

pillars, around the base, in the socles, in the niches of the crowning

baldachin, the artists deposited a veritable population of pagan,

Hebrew, or Christian figures- Tritons, Centaurs, Nereids, Sirens,

Muses, Fauns, Hercules, Theseus, Samson, the Prophets, Jesus, the

Apostles, and angels playing music or sporting with lions or dogs.

Some of these effigies are still crude, many are finished with the

precision of a Donatello or a Ghiberti; all contribute vividly to a

varied realization of life. The statues of Peter, Paul, Matthew, and

John rival the Four Apostles that Durer painted some seven years

later in this same Nuremberg.

No prince or potentate, we are told, came to Nuremberg in these

first decades of the sixteenth century without visiting Peter

Vischer's foundry, and many solicited his art. A score of churches

displayed his products, from the great brass candelabra in the

Lorenzkirche to the tomb of Maximilian I at Innsbruck. His five sons

followed him in sculpture, but two preceded him in death. Hermann

Vischer the Younger, who died at thirty-one (1517), cast a handsome

bronze relief for the tomb of Cardinal Casimir in the cathedral of

Cracow.

As the Vischers excelled in bronze, and Veit Stoss in wood, so

Adam Kraft led all his contemporaries in the sculpture of stone.

German chroniclers pictured him, and Peter Vischer the Elder, and

Sebastian Lindenast (who designed the obsequious electors on the

Frauenkirche clock) as devoted artists and friends. "They were like

brothers. Every Friday, even in their old age, they met and studied

together like apprentices, as the designs that they executed at

their meetings prove. Then they separated, having quite forgotten to

eat or drink." `061543 Born probably in the same year as Peter

(1460?), Adam resembled him in simplicity, honesty, piety, and

fondness for self-portraiture. In 1492 he carved for the

Sebalduskirche the tomb of Sebaldus Schreyer, with reliefs of the

Passion and Resurrection. Moved by their excellence, Hans Imhoff, a

merchant prince, commissioned Kraft to design a ciborium to hold the

bread and wine of the Eucharist in the Lorenzkirche. Adam made this

Sakramenthaus a tall and slender tabernacle in Late Gothic style,

a miracle of stone filigree rising stage by stage to a height of

sixty-four feet, and tapering to a graceful crosier-head curve; the

pillars alive with saints, the doors of the "House" guarded by angels,

the square surfaces cut in relief with scenes from the life of Christ,

and the whole airy edifice resting anomalously on three crouching

figures- Adam Kraft and two of his aides. There are no compliments

in the self-portrait: the clothes are worn and torn with toil, the

hands are rough, the beard is unkempt, the broad, uplifted face is

intent upon the conception and execution of the work. When this

absorbing masterpiece was finished Kraft returned to his favorite

subject by carving seven sandstone pillars with scenes from the

Passion; six of these are now in the Germanisches Museum: one of them,

The Entombment, is typical of Teutonic art- a courageous realism

that does not need idealization to convey a sincere piety and faith.

-

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++++++++++

The minor arts continued the same medieval moods and themes.

Miniaturists were still in sufficient demand to maintain prosperous

guilds. Major artists like Durer and Holbein drew designs for

stained glass; this art, declining in France and England, now

reached its apex in Germany; the Lorenzkirche, the cathedrals of Ulm

and Cologne, received world-famous windows in this period. Not only

churches but guildhalls, castles, even private homes had some

windows of stained glass. Cities like Nuremberg, Augsburg, Regensburg,

Cologne, and Mainz were proud of their craftsmen-artists: metalworkers

who glorified torches, chandeliers, basins, ewers, locks, trays;

goldsmiths whose products, from spoons to altars, were treasured

throughout Europe; textile workers who wove fine carpets,

tapestries, ecclesiastical vestments, and the ornate garb of the

patrician class; devout women who wore out their fingers and eyes to

cover altars and priests with embroideries and silk. Woodcutters

were never better. Michael Wolgemut, besides painting two

magnificent windows for the Lorenzkirche, cut in wood a dozen

altar-masterpieces, and then taught Durer to surpass him.

Engraving by cutting a design into wood or copper developed in the

fifteenth century into a mature art, respected on a par with painting.

The greatest painters cultivated it. Martin Schongauer carried it to

completion; some of his engravings- The Scourging of Christ, Carrying

the Cross, St. John on Patmos, The Temptation of St. Anthony - are

among the greatest of all time. `061544 Book illustration by

engravings became convenient and popular, and rapidly replaced

illumination. The most famous paintings of the period were

multiplied in engravings that sold readily at book stalls, fairs,

and festivals. Lucas van Leyden showed an astonishing precocity in

this field, engraving his Mohammed at fourteen, his Ecce Homo at

sixteen (1510), and nearing perfection in his copper engraving of

Maximilian. `061545 Dry point engraving, by a pointed instrument

throwing up a burr or ridge of excised metal along the lines of the

design, was used by the anonymous "Master of the House Book" toward

1480. Etching by covering a metal surface with wax, cutting a design

in the wax, and letting an acid eat (German atzen ) into the

exposed lines, grew from the decoration of armor into the incision

of metal plates from which etchings could be printed; Daniel Hopfer,

an armorer, seems to have made the first recorded etching in 1504.

Burgkmair and Durer practiced the new art imperfectly; Lucas van

Leyden probably learned it from Durer, but soon went beyond him to

mastery.

In painting this was Germany's greatest age. Influenced by both

Dutch and Italian schools, and by their own expatriated Memling,

German painters in the second half of the fifteenth century

graduated from Gothic intensity and ungainliness into a more

graceful line, and figures that moved with ease in natural scenes

reflecting the domestic life of the triumphant bourgeoisie. Subjects

remained predominantly sacred, but secular topics advanced;

altarpieces gave way to panel pictures, and rich donors, no longer

satisfied to kneel in the corner of a religious group, demanded

portraits in which they would be all in all. Painters themselves

emerged from medieval anonymity into distinct individualities, signing

their work with their names as a grasp at immortality, Still anonymous

is the "Master of the Life of the Virgin, " who worked at Cologne

toward 1470, and left a Virgin and St. Bernard with a very German

Virgin squeezing milk from her breast for the Child, before a devout

monk who hardly suggests the hound of heaven that pursued Abelard.

Michael Pacher is one of the first who transmitted his name as well as

his work. The Parish Church of St. Wolfgang in Salzkammergut still

shows the massive altarpiece, thirty-six feet long, that he carved and

painted for it in 1479-81; the study of perspective in these panels

shared in the education of German art. Martin Schongauer brought

into his painting the finesse of an accomplished engraver, and the

delicate sentiment of Rogier van der Weyden. Born at Augsburg (c.

1445), Schongauer settled in Colmar, and developed there a school of

engraving and painting that played a major role in bringing the arts

to fulfillment in Durer and Holbein.

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Year by year the thriving cities of the south stole the leadership

of German art from Cologne and the north. At Augsburg, the center of

the trade with Italy, Hans Burgkmair brought Italian decorative

touches into his pictures, and Hans Holbein the Elder combined Italian

ornament with the high seriousness of the Gothic style. Hans passed

his art down to his sons Ambrose and Hans, whom he fondly portrayed in

his paintings. Ambrose faded from history, but Hans Jr. became one

of the glories of Germany, Switzerland, and England.

The greatest of Durer's predecessors was Matthias Gothardt Neihardt,

who by a scholar's error became known to posterity as Matthias

Grunewald. In the immemorial social heredity of art he learned the

painter's magic from Schongauer at Colmar, added his own hunger for

fame and perfection, practiced patiently at Ghent, Speyer, and

Frankfurt, and chose Strasbourg as his home (1479). Probably there

he painted his first master product, a double portrait of Philip II of

Hanau-Lichtenberg and his wife; Durer himself would never excel this

in depth of penetration and grace of execution. `061546 Wandering

anew, Grunewald worked for a while with Durer at Basel- where he

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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