panel-painting of the time was
done at Cologne, where we meet with the name of the first painter,
Meister Wilhelm, and where a school was established usually known as
the

SCHOOL OF COLOGNE: This school probably got its sentimental
inclination, shown in slight forms and tender expression, from France,
but derived much of its technic from the Netherlands. Stephen Lochner,
or Meister Stephen, (fl. 1450) leaned toward the Flemish methods, and
in his celebrated picture, the Madonna of the Rose Garden, in the
Cologne Museum, there is an indication of this; but there is also an
individuality showing the growth of German independence in painting.
The figures of his Dombild have little manliness or power, but
considerable grace, pathos, and religious feeling. They are not
abstract types but the spiritualized people of the country in native
costumes, with much gold, jewelry, and armor. Gold was used instead of
a landscape background, and the foreground was spattered with flowers
and leaves. The outlines are rather hard, and none of the aerial
perspective of the Flemings is given. After a time French sentiment
was still further encroached upon by Flemish realism, as shown in the
works of the Master of the Lyversberg Passion (fl. about 1463-1480),
to be seen in the Cologne Museum.

[Illustration: FIG. 88.--WOLGEMUT. CRUCIFIXION. MUNICH.]

BOHEMIAN SCHOOL: It was not on the Lower Rhine alone that German
painting was practised. The Bohemian school, located near Prague,
flourished for a short time in the fourteenth century, under Charles
IV., with Theodorich of Prague (fl. 1348-1378), Wurmser, and Kunz, as
the chief masters. Their art was quite the reverse of the Cologne
painters. It was heavy, clumsy, bony, awkward. If more original it was
less graceful, not so pathetic, not so religious. Sentiment was
slurred through a harsh attempt at realism, and the religious subject
met with something of a check in the romantic mediaeval chivalric
theme, painted quite as often on the castle wall as the scriptural
theme on the church wall. After the close of the fourteenth century
wall-painting began to die out in favor of panel pictures.

NUREMBERG SCHOOL: Half-way between the sentiment of Cologne and the
realism of Prague stood the early school of Nuremberg, with no known
painter at its head. Its chief work, the Imhof altar-piece, shows,
however, that the Nuremberg masters of the early and middle fifteenth
century were between eastern and