Although the Meyer Madonna possesses no hidden meaning, and is merely a customary representation of a donor and his family kneeling in adoration before the Virgin and Child, yet a number of fanciful interpretations were given to it in the last century, of which some echoes still remain. It has been suggested that it is a votive picture to commemorate the recovery of a sick child, whom the Virgin has taken into her arms, placing her own child on the ground among the donors. This idea was carried still farther by others, who saw in the infant on the Madonna’s breast the soul of a dead child; while a third theory propounded was to the effect that the little one was merely the soul of the woman kneeling next the Virgin, supposed to be Meyer’s first wife. These are all sentimental refinements of nineteenth-century German criticism, first voiced by such writers as Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel, and in all probability would never have been heard of had the original picture been in Dresden instead of the copy. In the latter the unknown copyist has not been so successful in the figure of the infant Christ as in other portions of the picture. It is far less animated than in the original, and a little sickly and unhappy in expression, and it was this, no doubt, which first suggested these over-refinements of meaning. Ruskin was on the side of the sentimentalists. He says: “The received tradition respecting the Holbein Madonna is beautiful, and I believe the interpretation to be true. A father and mother have prayed to her for the life of their sick child. She appears to them, her own Child in her arms. She puts down her Christ before them, takes their child into her arms instead; it lies down upon her bosom, and stretches its hands to its father and mother, saying farewell.”[510] As a matter of fact, there is nothing of death or sickness about the work, which tells its story with the utmost simplicity and mastery of means, without needing such refined subtleties for its proper explanation. [Sidenote: HOLBEIN’S MODEL FOR THE VIRGIN]