gardens and picturesque roofs up towards the statelier buildings of the Maximilianstrasse. The house is not luxurious, but may well have been a house of no small comfort in the days when the Holbeins held it.”[90] It is impossible to point to any work of this period which can be accepted without question as from the hand of the younger Holbein alone. Both he and his brother Ambrosius received a very thorough training in their father’s workshop, and for the last few years before their departure for Basel they must have taken an active though minor share in the completion of the various commissions which fell to the elder painter. Many attempts have been made to separate the work of the father from that of his sons in such pictures as the “St. Catherine” altar-piece panels of 1512, already described, and the more famous “St. Sebastian” altar-piece in Munich; but the critics have never been able to come to any settled agreement as to the particular parts of these pictures, if any, which were the actual work of the younger Hans. It is only possible to say with some certainty that he must have been employed by his father on the less important portions of his altar-pieces, and that such work would be carried out under the personal direction of the elder painter, who alone was responsible for the general design and composition, and the arrangement of the colour-scheme, if not for the actual painting of the figures and the chief passages of the pictures. It is not possible to allow, as some writers have done, that such figures as the St. Elizabeth and St. Barbara on the shutters of the Munich “St. Sebastian” altar-piece were conceived and carried out by the younger Holbein independently of his father, although he may have shared to some small extent in the actual painting of the panels. They display a more advanced technique, and an art in all ways more matured, than is to be found in the earliest independent work of Holbein’s first Basel period. [Sidenote: THE DECORATIVE ARTS IN AUGSBURG]