It has been suggested, too, that the drawings were made by Holbein at the personal request of Erasmus, which is not very probable; and again, that Molitor gave the commission, and selected the passages to be illustrated, which is much more likely, and when finished presented the book to his friend, and that it was for this reason that Amerbach made a point of giving it back to him on the death of Erasmus. The book has also been taken as a proof that Holbein had gained a good knowledge of Latin in his school days, and that he selected his own passages for the pictures; but the few Latin inscriptions on his paintings do not indicate much proficiency in that language. The supposition that Molitor was the prime mover in the matter, and that it was done for him personally, and not as a gift to be presented to Erasmus, is by far the most probable; for, as stated above, he was in Basel at the time, and this would account for Holbein’s apparent knowledge of the language in which the book was written. On the other hand, the pen drawings in more than one instance do not so much illustrate the incidents and sense of the text, as isolated sentences and phrases which appear to have caught the fancy of the artist, and, therefore, are not likely to have been selected for pictorial comment by a learned student of the book. In recent years the drawings have been subjected to a searching examination and comparison, and Dr. Ganz was the first to point out that it is impossible to accept the whole of them as by Hans Holbein.[115] Considerable variations in style are to be noted, and it is now held, and with good reason, that while the more important share of the work was due to Hans, not only did Ambrosius contribute a certain number of the drawings, but that a third artist, some unknown Basel painter of the school of Urs Graf, and possibly even a fourth, also had a hand in it. One of these drawings, which represents Jupiter seizing the naked Ate by the hair, and flinging her across his knees in order to chastise her with his thunderbolts, bears letters which until recently were regarded as the initials of Ambrosius, though not his usual monogram; but this inscription has now been correctly read by Dr. Hes as the word “ATEN,” and refers to the subject, and not to the author of the drawing.[116]