In his father’s studio Holbein obtained a very complete grounding in all the technical processes of his art, and was encouraged to develop that extraordinary gift for portraiture which he had largely inherited. The family seems to have been so frequently hard-pressed for money that the two boys would be obliged, at as early an age as possible, to begin to work seriously for a living, and in this way would gain much useful practical knowledge and facility in the handling of brush and pencil. In other respects Holbein’s art was apparently more strongly influenced by the example of Hans Burgkmair, who was some twenty-five years his senior, than by that of his own father, and more particularly in his ready assimilation of the newer methods and aspirations springing from the Italian Renaissance, which afterwards became so perfectly blended in his painting with those older forms and conceptions of the Germanic school of the fifteenth century, in which he was first trained in the elder Holbein’s workshop. Burgkmair returned from Italy about 1508, full of enthusiasm for the new movement, and his example must have acted as an inspiration to Holbein’s budding genius. Not only in his pictures and wall-paintings, but in his remarkable designs for woodcuts for the two great works in his own honour projected by the Emperor Maximilian—the “Weisskunig,” and the “Triumphal Procession”—Burgkmair exercised an undoubted influence over his younger contemporary. A year or two later in Basel Holbein’s art appears to have been affected to some extent, though indirectly, by that of Hans Baldung Grien and Matthias Grünewald, through the medium of some painter whose name so far has not been traced.[91] Other causes, too, were at work in moulding him for his future career. The city of Augsburg was exceptionally well fitted for providing incentives to a young artist to develop his powers in many directions. The practice of decorating the more important buildings of the city and the mansions of its merchant-princes with wall-paintings both within and without provided work for numerous artists, and in this way, no doubt, Holbein first began to practise a form of art which a few years later he was to carry to so high a pitch of excellence in Lucerne and Basel. Numerous printers, too, were settled in the city, who provided employment for many wood-engravers and designers of book illustrations and ornamentation—the latter a form of art in which Holbein was very busily engaged during the first ten years of his residence in Switzerland. His skill, too, in making designs for workers in gold and silver, in enamels and painted glass, must have received its first encouragement in Augsburg, which was noted for its craftsmen. Every branch of handicraft, indeed, was practised there. Its armourers, headed by the great Kolman family, were celebrated throughout Europe, while the Augsburg goldsmiths were equally famous for the artistic excellence and fine workmanship of their productions.