It is difficult to follow Holbein’s latest English biographer, Mr. G. S. Davies, in his belief that the influence of Gherardt David can be seen in this work, and, in particular, to find, as he does, indications of Holbein’s acquaintance with David’s great picture of the “Madonna with the Saints and Angels,” now in the Rouen Museum, but in Holbein’s day, and for three centuries afterwards, in the Carmelite Church in Bruges, for which it had been painted. “I do not think that any one who thoroughly knew the Darmstadt Holbein can fail,” he says, “as he looks at this masterpiece of the Flemish painter, to be at once reminded by something in the feeling and in the type of Madonna, and even in such details as the choice of crown and robe, in the outspread mantle, in the fashion of the robe, in the wavy golden hair lying along the shoulder, and in the pose of the head as she looks down at the Child, of the greater German master. Holbein’s is a stronger, more intensely sympathetic, more real and convincing vision; but the original type seems to be common to both men.”[511] To render this possible, a visit to Bruges on Holbein’s part becomes necessary, and Mr. Davies considers it to be most probable that he did so either on his way to England in 1526 or on his return in 1528, and he states, but without bringing forward any proofs, that Holbein “spent several months in or about Antwerp” on the former journey, and that he would not be likely to omit a visit to so great a centre of art as Bruges. This theory also necessitates the alteration of the date of the painting of the Meyer Madonna, whereas everything points to its completion before Holbein left Basel for England; nor will he find many to agree with him that in this great picture, so essentially German in feeling, strong traces of Flemish influence are to be seen. Such alien influence as can be traced in it is undoubtedly Italian. For the Meyer Madonna, Holbein’s wife no longer served as the model for the Virgin, as she had done for the Madonna of Solothurn. Her place was taken by that lady of somewhat notorious character in Basel, Magdalena Offenburg. As pointed out in an earlier chapter, she had already twice served Holbein as a model for his costume studies of Basel ladies,[512] and she also sat to him for the two pictures of “Venus” and “Laïs Corinthiaca” in the Basel Gallery, in which the similarity of features to those of the Virgin in the Darmstadt altar-piece is very marked, while all three bear an evident likeness to the model of that one of the costume studies in which the sitter wears a necklace with the recurring initials “M. O.” Her daughter Dorothea, wife of Joachim von Sultz, who at one time was considered to be the lady represented in the “Laïs” and “Venus” pictures,[513] led an equally scandalous life. She was divorced in 1545, and both she and her husband were imprisoned, and afterwards expelled the country. VOL. I., PLATE 73. [Illustration: