[Sidenote: EXAGGERATED TYPES] These pictures were painted at some date between 1515 and Holbein’s departure for Lucerne in 1517, and are based largely upon the knowledge obtained in his father’s workshop in Augsburg, before the short visit to Lombardy produced so rapid an awakening of his genius. Dr. Ganz places them in the last-named year, and draws attention to the strong similarity of many of the motives to those of Dürer’s “Little Passion” series of engravings, thus showing that the younger artist must have borrowed from them freely.[107] It is probable that the set was originally a larger one, and that one or two of them are now missing. There is an elaborate pen drawing on a dark grey ground, washed with Indian ink and heightened with white, in the Basel Gallery, which is very closely allied to these canvas pictures of the Passion. It represents the “Bearing of the Cross,” under the weight of which Christ has fallen on his hands and knees.[108] He is in the centre of a body of soldiers and callous onlookers, who have just issued from the gate, the procession deploying along the outer wall of the town with its circular watch-tower. The head of the procession turns at a sharp angle round the corner of the wall. Christ looks up with his face contorted with agony, while one of the leading soldiers strikes at him with a heavy club, and a second pulls violently at the ropes in order to make him rise again. Behind them a third soldier bears the ladder, while a fourth man is carrying huge nails and the various implements to be used in the Crucifixion. The head of Christ is evidently based upon Dürer’s representation in his “Passion” series. In the brutality and grotesqueness of the faces of the soldiery and the lack of expression of those of the accompanying mob, many of whom do not even glance towards the prostrate figure, this drawing closely resembles both the Karlsruhe “Cross-bearing” of 1515, which must have been painted on the journey to or shortly after Holbein’s arrival in Basel, and the Passion series just described. In order to bring home to the spectator the cruelty of the scene depicted, and his detestation of it, he makes use of violent movement and brutal types, and even in the head of our Lord the agonized expression is so pronounced that it becomes painful to look upon. After he had gained wider experience of the art of the great painters of Northern Italy, Holbein gradually rid himself of these cruder and more vehement methods, and depicted the pitiful story by means of more natural and less exaggerated types, helped by a deeper insight into character. During these early years he was often employed in painting subjects from the “Passion,”[109] and the gradual change in his point of view and the maturing of his art can be seen very plainly in them, from the early Karlsruhe panel and the canvas series and the drawing just described to the great altar-piece in eight scenes in the Basel Gallery,