When attention was first called to this work some forty years ago, critics were divided in their opinions as to its authorship. Dr. Woltmann ascribed it to Bartholomäus Bruyn, and several other names in place of Holbein’s have been suggested from time to time. His latest English biographer, Mr. Gerald Davies, assigns it to “a painter of the German school, who had probably seen and been deeply influenced by the grave and earnest works of Holbein at Basel.” “Neither on the grounds of its design nor of its technique,” he says, “do I find myself able to accept it as a work of Holbein,” and he proceeds to draw attention to “the angular and uncouth projection of the forward leg in the figure of our Lord, an exaggeration which is repeated with even more unnatural emphasis in the distant figure of St. Peter as he walks and gesticulates at the side of St. John. The action, moreover, of the hands of the chief figure, intended to be expressive of the “Noli Me Tangere,” is somewhat exaggerated and theatrical.”[218] He calls attention to other details which he thinks prove that the work cannot be from Holbein’s brush. The type of the head, however, and the action of the hands, as well as the position of the feet, very closely resemble more than one of Holbein’s small figures in his designs for woodcuts, more particularly the Christ in one of the little pictures on the frontispiece to Coverdale’s Bible, in which the action is almost identical, while other instances could be given. The picture has suffered in the course of time, and, like the Basel altar-piece, has not escaped repainting in parts, but remains nevertheless an undoubted example of Holbein’s sacred art at, or shortly after, the period when he had just settled down in Basel as a member of the Guild “zum Himmel.” Modern German criticism is agreed as to its authorship. Dr. Ganz places it at the end of Holbein’s first visit to England. [Sidenote: “NOLI ME TANGERE” AT HAMPTON COURT]