PORTRAIT OF THE DUCHESS OF MILAN _Collection of the Duke of Norfolk, now lent to the National Gallery_ _Frontispiece_ THE MEYER MADONNA _Darmstadt_ 32 THE AMBASSADORS _National Gallery_ 46 PORTRAIT OF ERASMUS _Collection of the Earl of Radnor, Longford Castle_ 50 PORTRAIT OF GEORG GISZE _Berlin Gallery_ 52 PORTRAIT OF ROBERT CHESEMAN _The Hague Gallery_ 56 MARY MAGDALEN AT THE SEPULCHRE _Hampton Court_ 58 DRAWING OF SIR THOMAS MORE _Windsor Castle_ 60 LIFE OF HANS HOLBEIN EARLY DAYS IN AUGSBURG AND BASLE. Hans Holbein was born, in 1497, at Augsburg, in Swabia, Southern Germany, to which town his grandfather, Michael Holbein, had moved, some time before 1454, from the neighbouring village of Schönenfeld. His father, known to-day as Holbein the elder, to distinguish him from his more celebrated son, was one of the leading painters of Augsburg, and an artist of importance in the history of German art. The elder Holbein was one of the first of German painters strongly influenced by the Italian Renaissance, and a chronological study of his pictures shows very clearly how great a change was gradually taking place north of the Alps both in artistic ideals and technical methods, through an increasing knowledge of what the great painters of the Southern peninsula had accomplished. In his early work he shows himself to be a follower of Rogier van der Weyden and his school, but towards the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century the Gothic qualities of his painting, with its many hardnesses and angularities, begin to disappear, and a closer observation and a more truthful rendering of nature to take their place. He threw off one by one his Rhenish traditions, and replaced them by the methods of the Van Eycks, which reached him indirectly through the mellowing influence of the earlier Venetian painters. He developed, too, a fondness for rich architectural decoration of the Renaissance type for the backgrounds and settings of his pictures, in the use of which his son, later on, became so perfect a master. As a result of certain forged documents and false inscriptions, a number of interesting works, formerly ascribed rightly to the father, were taken from him and given to the son, and hailed as signs of precocious genius. Even the father’s masterpiece, _The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian_ at Munich, did not escape the enthusiasm of the younger artist’s biographers. Modern criticism, however, has restored to the father a series of works which place him among the leading painters of Germany at the dawn of the new movement in art.