The plan Holbein pursued shows a marked advance in his conception of decorative design when compared with the earlier paintings of the Hertenstein house in Lucerne. In the latter large pictures filled practically the whole of the wide spaces between the windows, but he now abandoned this practice to a great extent, and subordinated the pictorial effect to one in which architecture played the leading part, the characters introduced appearing as actual figures occupied in various ways amid this elaborate setting. The main front of the house was very irregular in its features. There were no straight lines, for the windows differed greatly in height and breadth, and those of one storey were in most instances not placed exactly over those in the storey below them. To a painter of lesser mastership than Holbein such a nondescript frontage would have greatly increased the difficulties to be overcome in carrying out a successful decorative scheme; in his case the very difficulties appear to have provided an added spur to his imagination and the fanciful play of his humour, and he seized upon them and turned them to the utmost advantage. According to Dr. Ludwig Iselin, in his notes on Holbein written towards the end of the sixteenth century, the painter regarded his work upon Angelrot’s house with some amount of satisfaction, for when he revisited Basel in the autumn of 1538, and saw his wall-paintings both on the house-fronts and in the Council Chamber rapidly fading away, he proposed to repaint them at his own expense, and in criticising his work found that the “Haus zum Tanz” was “rather good” (“Das Haus zum tantz wär ein wenig gutt”). According to Theodor Zwinger (1577),[262] he received only forty florins (gulden) for the whole of this work, very inadequate payment even for those days, considering the amount of labour which he must have given to it. This reference of Zwinger’s is of great interest, as, with the exception of the wall-paintings in the interior of the Basel Town Hall, it is the only record so far discovered of the prices the artist was in the habit of receiving for such undertakings. [Sidenote: THE HOUSE OF THE DANCE]