It is impossible to follow Mr. Davies in this attribution. Woltmann’s opinion, with which most modern critics are in agreement, that they are genuine works by Holbein in which Lombard influence is more strongly marked than in most of his other Basel paintings, is the correct one. The two panels are unmistakably the product of a northern painter working under some southern influence, and just as unmistakably the work of Holbein himself, as a close comparison with his other work of this period shows very plainly. This Milanese influence was the result of his visit to Lombardy, and is to be traced in a greater or lesser degree in all that he accomplished previously to his first visit to England. “Their warm, transparent technique and the realistic ungracefulness of the draperies,” says Mr. C. J. Holmes, speaking of the Laïs and its companion, “make them characteristic northern works, just as the Raphaelesque folds and cool opaque pigment of Cesare da Sesto in his later paintings—the small Madonna in the Brera, for example—are characteristically southern.”[524] Possibly for once in a way Holbein was making a conscious attempt to imitate the manner of some artist of the North Italian school whose work he had seen and admired, perhaps in Basel itself, so that the Lombard influence is more pronounced than in those pictures and designs in which he was less evidently making an experiment based upon what he had seen in Italy, and in which his own native genius was the predominating force. For the same reason it is very possible that in the Laïs and the Venus, Holbein, instead of following his model closely, gave play to his imagination, and attempted, as the type of face, with downcast eyes, and pensive, almost melancholy charm of expression suggests, to emulate the Leonardesque manner, so that at the best they are merely idealised representations of the notorious Magdalena Offenburg.