Historical epoch and antecedents--Special conditions and character of early Christian art--Ideals and influence of the monk--Holbein's relation to mediaeval schools--His father, uncle, and Augsburg home--Probable dates for his birth and his father's death--Troubles and dispersion of the Augsburg household--From Augsburg to Basel--His brother Ambrose--Erasmus and the _Praise of Folly_; some erroneous impressions of both--Erasmus and Holbein no Protestants at heart--Holbein and the Bible--Illustrated vernacular Bibles in circulation before Luther and Holbein were born--Holbein's earliest Basel oil paintings--Direct and indirect education--Historical, geographical, and scientific revolutions of his day--Beginning of his connection with the Burgomaster of Basel--Jacob Meyer zum Hasen--Holbein's woodcuts--His studies from nature--Sudden visit to Lucerne--Italian influence on his art--Work for the Burgomaster of Lucerne. The eighty-three years stretching from 1461 to 1543--between the probable year of the elder Hans Holbein's birth and that in which the younger, the great Holbein, died--constitute one of those periods which rightly deserve the much-abused name of an Epoch. The Christian era of itself had known many: the Yellow-Danger of the fifth century making one hideous smear across Europe; the _Hic Jacet_ with which this same century entombed an Empire three continents could not content; the new impulse which Charlemagne and Alfred had given to Progress in the ninth century; the triumphant establishment of Papal Supremacy, that Napoleonic idea of Gregory VII.--_Sanctus Satanas_, of the eleventh, and grand architect in a vaster Roman Empire which still "humanly contends for glory"; and lastly, at the very threshold of the Holbeins, the invention of movable printing types about 1440, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which combined to drive the prodigies and potencies of Greek genius through the world. Each of these had done its own special work for the advancement of man--as for that matter all things must, whether by help or helplessness. Not less than Elijah did the wretched priests of Baal serve those slow, sure, eternal Purposes, which include an Ahab and all the futile fury of his little life as the sun includes its "spots." But although the stream of History is one, and its every succeeding curve only an expansion of the first, there has probably been no century of our era when this stream has been so suddenly enlarged, or bent so sharply toward fresh constellations as in that of the Holbeins,--when Religion and Art, as well as Science, saw a New World upon its astonished horizon. So that we properly call it a transition period, and its representative men "transitional." Yet we shall never get near to these real men, to their real world, unless we can forget all about the pose of this or the other Zeitgeist--that tale _Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing._