to represent with no less success pleasant legends or the most charming realities. He is the painter of artless youths, aerially veiled, and of sportive and enchanting virgins; and if some antique scene is created by his delicate and original pencil, it seem, to be metamorphosed by a happy facility into something that appears to have the character of a German reminiscence (Fig. 254). [Illustration: Fig. 254.--“Princess Sibylla of Saxony,” by Lucas van Cranach. (Suermondt Collection.)] Between these two masters, so equally endowed with power in their respective lines of art, the great Holbein takes his place, as if embodying the rather abrupt vigour of the one, and the sentimental delicacy of the other. This painter’s artistic career was carried out almost entirely in England, but the character of his genius belongs unquestionably to the country where he left behind him his “Dance of Death,” a piece of tragic raillery justly held to be the most wonderful among all the creations of fancy. Albert Dürer, who died in 1528, and Lucas van Cranach, and Holbein, who died in 1553,[38] were destined to create a race of painters, and a host of successors were soon at work. But the movement, which was impeded by troubles of a religious character, died away in the terrible convulsions of the Thirty Years’ War, and was never again renewed. The era in which German art seemed all at once to decline was that wherein the Italian school flourished in full splendour, and exercised an unrivalled influence over every European country occupied by the Latin races. France yielded all the more readily to this foreign influence, because the Papal court at Avignon had already given an asylum to Giotto in the first place, and afterwards to Simon Memmi; both of whom, and especially the last, have left master-like traces of their presence on French soil. As a matter of fact, although French painting, regarded in the light of a national art, cannot boast of having spontaneously produced, as a thing of home-growth, any of those essays of complete independence of which Germany and Italy are so proud; the memorials of French art at least bear witness that, during the long reign of Byzantine tradition, it never ceased to struggle with some force under the yoke; at a time, indeed, when Italy and Germany themselves seemed, on the contrary, to bear the burden with the most submissive servitude.