Building began about 1230/40 on the foundations of an earlier church dedicated to St Peter, as a late Romanesque twin-choired pillared basilica. The aisles were widened by 1379, the towers raised in high Gothic and a late Gothic hall choir added at the east end. Sebaldus, the hermit whose bones are in the shrine, is Nuremberg’s patron saint; the church has been Lutheran since 1525 and kept its Catholic furnishings.
The Sebaldusgrab stands in the east choir and is the single most extraordinary object in the city. Inside it is a silver reliquary shrine of the 1390s holding the saint’s bones. Around it, Peter Vischer the Elder and his sons Peter the Younger and Hans cast a bronze cage: three bays of bundled piers and candelabra columns under rib-vaulted canopies, mixing Gothic tracery with Italian Renaissance ornament, the whole thing raised on great bronze snails. Design work goes back to 1488; the casting itself ran from 1508 to 1519. On the lower part of the east side stands the maker: a stocky bearded figure in a leather apron and working cap, chisel in hand, with the date 1508 beside him. The inscription round the base says, in Middle High German, that Peter Vischer, citizen of Nuremberg, made this work with his sons.
Elsewhere in the church: figures and epitaphs by Veit Stoss, and stained glass by the Hirsvogel workshop after designs by Albrecht Dürer and Hans Süss von Kulmbach.
One thing to see costs nothing and is outside. On the outer wall of the east choir, facing Rathausplatz, is the Schreyer-Landauer epitaph: three sandstone Passion reliefs set out like a winged altarpiece, commissioned in 1490 by the church warden Sebald Schreyer and his nephew Matthäus Landauer and finished by Adam Kraft at Easter 1492. It is the piece on which Kraft got the St Lorenz tabernacle commission two years later.
The church was heavily destroyed in the war and rebuilt between 1945 and 1978, reconsecrated in 1957. The shrine and the great fixed works were removed or protected before the raids.
