and the shrine with a relief of Christ's passion in the chapel of the Czartoryski family on the Wawel. The son differs from the father by the quiet, phlegmatic temper he exhibits. His figures are short, broad-shouldered, sometimes correctly modelled, but wanting the buoyancy proper to the father's work. In the proceedings of the law courts and the city records we find quite a number of names of sculptors and wood-carvers, of whom we only know that they remain professional sculptors to the end of their lives; the names are mostly German, but it is impossible to positively connect them with any works extant. It is most
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40. HEAD OF ST. PETER.
(Detail from the high altar in St. Mary's Church, Cracow.)
(Vitus Stoss.)
probable, however, that all these carvings came from the Cracow workshops. Thus, e.g., the folding altar-piece, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, in the Holy Cross Chapel of the cathedral, exhibiting all the characteristic features of North German Gothicism, is usually assigned to the carver Laurence of Magdeburg, who lived at Cracow. The altar of St. John in St. Florian's Church, of 1518, differs from all the carvings hitherto described; it is evidently the work of an artist more modern in spirit, and desirous to strike out in a new direction: the elegant attitudes of the bodies, the picturesque grouping, the noble lines of the drapery, all usher in a new period. This altar originally stood in the Boner family chapel in St. Mary's Church.
Next to Vitus Stoss another great name of Nuremberg appears in the annals of Cracow art, viz., that of Peter Vischer. This famous brassfounder never indeed visited Poland himself, yet there is hardly any other foreign artist of whose work so much is to be found in this country. Down to the middle of the fifteenth century Flanders only supplied brasses to Poland. This
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