Mr. Davies follows Wornum, but goes still farther in suggesting the name of the North Italian artist who painted them. He says: “I may say at once that I am quite unable to see any Netherlandish influence or probable authorship in the pictures. On the other hand, I see the strongest evidence of Lombard influence, and that in so direct a fashion and to such a degree that I believe them to be the work of some Lombard artist who had come under the influence of the later work of Raphael. The name of Cesare da Sesto at once occurs to one, and if it were not for the date 1526 on the Laïs picture, there would be no great difficulty in accepting it as a work by him which had found its way across from Milan—possibly even in the pack of Holbein himself.”[523] He acknowledges the difficulty of the date—Da Sesto was dead in 1526—and also of the red-haired Cupid in the Venus picture, so evidently both German and from Holbein’s own hand, and bearing so close a resemblance to the children in other pictures of his, such as the Meyer Madonna and the Family Group of 1528; but in spite of this, his final opinion is that they are most probably the work of Cesare da Sesto. He further suggests that Holbein, “possessing, or seeing in the possession of Amerbach, these two small examples, very similar in attitude and motive,” sought to give them variety, by inserting the figure of Cupid in the one, and thus giving this Italian lady the character of Venus, and in the other the gold coins and the title of Laïs, “so as to turn a somewhat unmeaning picture of a woman into a quasi-classical personality.” “The Offenburg tradition,” he adds, “I should wholly reject, nor indeed can I persuade myself that these pictures are portraits by Holbein either of that shadowy lady or of any other lady whatever. They appear to me to be pictures, not of some well-marked personality, but merely Lombard school types.” [Sidenote: MILANESE INFLUENCE IN THE LAÏS]