And a renowned triumph the painter made of it; a triumph such as, perhaps, no other artist north of Italy could then have equalled. It is idle now to dwell upon the religious subjects of one room, the genre paintings in another, the battle scenes of a third, and so on through those five famous rooms which were still in existence and fair preservation so late as 1824, but are now for ever lost; to say nothing of the painted Renaissance architecture and the historic legends which looked like solid realities when the facade was studied. But "Mizraim is become merchandise"; and all that is now left of what should have been a treasured and priceless heirloom is but a monument to the shame of that citizen, a banker, who could condemn such a thing to destruction as indifferently as if it had been a cowshed, and to the shame of the municipality which, at any cost, did not prevent it. Some hasty sketches--due to individual enterprise and a sense of the dignity of Holbein's fame--an original drawing for one of the facade-paintings, and a few fragments of the interior paintings, which still show themselves, by chance, in the banker's _stable wall_--these are all that remain to speak of what must have been the enthusiastic labour of the greater part of Holbein's twenty-first year! CHAPTER II HOLBEIN BASILIENSIS 1519-1526 _Holbein Basiliensis_--Enters the Painters' Guild--Bonifacius Amerbach and his portrait--The Last Supper and its Judas--The so-called "Fountain of Life" at Lisbon--Genius for design and symbolism in architecture--Versatility, humour, fighting scenes--Holbein becomes a citizen and marries--Basel in 1519--Froben's circle--Tremendous events and issues of the time--Holbein's religious works--The Nativity and Adoration at Freiburg--Hans Oberriedt--The Basel Passion in eight panels--Passion Drawings--Christ in the tomb--Christ and Mary Magdalen at the door of the sepulchre--Rathaus wall-paintings--Birth of Holbein's eldest child--The Solothurn Madonna: its discovery and rescue--Holbein's wife and her portraits--Suggested solutions of some biographical enigmas--Title pages--Portraits of Erasmus--Journey to France, probably to Lyons and Avignon--Publishers and pictures of the so-called "Dance of Death"--Dorothea Offenburg as Venus and Lais Corinthiaca--Triumph of the Protestant party--Holbein decides to leave Basel for a time--The Meyer-Madonna of Darmstadt and Dresden, and its portraits.