IN addition to his commissions, both public and private, for wall-paintings, Holbein was frequently employed in the preparation of designs for artificers in more than one branch of decorative art. The Amerbach Collection is rich in works of this class, more particularly in designs for glass windows. It must be remembered in studying these “scheibenrisse” that they were intended for painted, and not for stained, glass. The older method of employing translucent glass of various tints, in which the colour is incorporated in the body of the glass itself, so that the window depended for its beauty on its transparency, had already become, in the Switzerland of Holbein’s day, a little-practised and, in some districts, an almost forgotten art, its place being taken by glass, usually white, on which the design was painted in enamel colours and afterwards permanently fixed by refiring. Such glass painting produced the effect of a semi-opaque design on a translucent ground, and, beginning merely with a few brown lines to indicate the features, or the patterns on a dress, it had gradually developed, in Germany and Switzerland, into a method of pictorial representation which imitated as closely as possible a painted picture, and was, therefore, in marked contrast to the older and more beautiful art, in which the great aim of the artist was to produce a lovely effect of transparent colour. In the newer method, which in reality was opposed to the true nature of the medium employed, but which nevertheless became a thing of beauty when designed by a master, small panels, as a rule, were used, which were surrounded by plain white glass, so that they had the appearance of little pictures set in the middle of a window. The panels being small ones, and the subjects on them drawn on a small scale, it was necessary that the panes should be placed near the ground so that they could be properly seen, and this, again, made it essential that the draughtsmanship should be as careful and delicate as possible, design having usurped the place of colour. These glass paintings were usually surrounded by a framework of a decorative nature which divided them sharply from the plain glass around them, and helped still more to produce the effect of a picture. The lines of leadwork, which, in the older method, held the pieces of vari-coloured glass together, were abandoned as much as possible, as they naturally marred the delicate pictorial effect of the work, and were sometimes confined to the boundary lines of the panel. Under such conditions it was natural that the glass-workers should turn to artists for their supply of designs, since accurate draughtsmanship was now all-important.