Holbein was a master in all crafts, and Erasmus’ description of him in his letter to Peter Ægidius,[612] not as painter, or sculptor, but simply as a fine workman (_insignis artifex_), was a true one. His great technical powers in every department of decorative design, his practical knowledge of the various processes employed in the different branches of art workmanship for which he supplied the craftsmen with patterns and working drawings, show him to have been a real master of arts in every sense of the word. Footnote 612: See Vol. i. p. 255. “The artistic quality he possessed in the highest degree,” says Mr. M. Digby Wyatt, “was, I consider, the intensity with which he realised ‘form.’ Able master as he was of delineation, what gives the stamp of enduring truth to his work is the feeling of assurance his delineation conveys to the mind of the spectator, that what he has drawn from life was the _vera effigies_ of what he saw—that what he designed could never be executed with equal propriety in any other way than as his drawing defined it. There is never any uncertainty as to his intention or meaning—what he says was, was—what he says should be, should be. In this precise conception of pure form and power of conveying his own sense of it to others, he stood upon the same platform as the great men to whose universal genius I have already alluded—Albert Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci. The artist who possesses in a high degree any such power as that I have attempted to define, must of necessity have the requisite aptitude for success in either painting, architecture, or sculpture, or all three; since the power in question lies at the root of and is indispensable to the satisfactory practice of either or all. Architects will do well to look earnestly at such reliques as time has spared of the genius of Dürer, Da Vinci, and especially of Hans Holbein, since, so far as I know, they were the best makers of working drawings who ever lived. Of whatever they drew they gave every characteristic, and their slightest sketches never fail to mark essentials and to omit secondaries of form and expression.”[613] Footnote 613: M. Digby Wyatt, “Foreign Artists employed in England,” &c., _Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects_, 1868, p. 229.