In the next year after painting the portraits of Meyer and his wife there is a sudden break in the painter's story which has always puzzled his biographers. After such a brilliant start in Basel it is perplexing to find the young man, instead of proceeding to join the Painters' Guild and take the necessary citizenship, suddenly turn his back on all these encouragements and leave the town for a long absence and remote journeys. As will be seen when we come to consider the story of Holbein's married life, however, I have a theory that the influence which sent him south in such an unexpected fashion was apart from professional affairs. Whether this is a good shot or no, certain it is that he did now go far south,--as distances were in those days; and that, paying his way as he went by his brush, he went first to Lucerne, where the evidence goes to show that he apparently thought of settling instead of at Basel,--and then on beyond it. And it seems highly probable that at this time he pushed on over the Alps and made his way into Italy,--already the Mecca of every artist. Here he could not now, in 1517, have hoped to see either Bramante or Leonardo da Vinci in person. The former had died at Rome two years before; but, without getting even as far as Pavia, Milan could show some splendid monuments to his sojourn within her walls; characteristic examples of that architecture of the closing fifteenth century which Holbein loved as Bramante himself. Leonardo was now in France; but in the refectory of the Santa Maria Monastery was his immortal, though, alas! not imperishable, masterpiece--"The Last Supper." Time had not yet taught Leonardo, much less Holbein, the fleeting nature of mural oil-painting; the only so-called "fresco" painting which the latter ever attempted, so far as is known. But the great Supper was still glowing in all the splendour of its original painting, and would impress itself indelibly on an eye such as Holbein's. In more than one cathedral, too, as he wandered in such a holiday, he would have noted how Mantegna had made its architecture the background for his own individual genius. At any rate each of these, somehow and somewhere, set its own seal upon the reverent heart of Holbein at about this time. Whether through their original works or copies of them,--already familiar to Augsburg as well as Lucerne,--the lad sat humbly at the feet of both Leonardo and Mantegna. By the first, beside many a loftier lesson, he was confirmed and strengthened in his native respect for accurate studies of the living world around him. From the second he learned a still deeper scorn of "pretty" art. Yet though he sat at their feet, it was as no servile disciple. He would fain be taught by them; fain follow them in all humility and frankness. But it was in order to expand his own powers, not to surrender them; to speak his own thoughts the better, not theirs, nor another's.