Tucher Mansion and Hirsvogel Hall

About this place

A sandstone house built for Lorenz Tucher the second and his wife Katharina between fifteen thirty-three and fifteen forty-four, on the site of a medieval farmstead inside the old city. It was never a permanent residence but a summer retreat for entertaining, and its plan is generally credited to Paulus Beheim working after French Renaissance models; in its day it was fitted out with panelling, glazed windows, costly tapestries, furniture and paintings. The hall attached to it has an entirely separate story. The Hirsvogel Hall was built in fifteen thirty-four for the Hirsvogel family elsewhere in the city, its interior designed by Peter Flötner in an Italian manner Nuremberg had not seen before, and its ceiling covered by a large painting of the Fall of Phaeton executed by Dürer's pupil Georg Pencz across twenty canvases. The hall was destroyed in the bombing of nineteen forty-five and then rebuilt in the garden of the Tucher mansion, finished in the year two thousand. The museum now shows the world of the sixteenth-century Nuremberg merchant families: furniture, textiles, paintings and household goods from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, along with treasures belonging to the Tuchers themselves. The one real difficulty is the timetable. It opens on three days a week only — Monday, Thursday and Sunday, each with different hours — and anyone turning up on a Saturday finds the door shut.