In his last years Dürer painted as a legacy to his native town the stately figures of the apostles Paul, Mark, Peter, and John. Already the Protestant movement which he held so dear was breaking up into wrangling sects. Dürer wished to recall men to the founts of Christian wisdom and unity. The apostles wear their grand robes with Roman dignity. The heads are sharply distinguished by temperament. The burning determination of Saint Paul is very unlike the excitability of Saint Mark; the inward serenity of Saint John most unlike the careworn pensiveness of Saint Peter. These are men to move a world. On the 6th of April, 1528, he passed away, only fifty-seven years old, but exhausted by constant effort. The great bankers, merchants, scholars, and craftsmen of Nuremberg knew that a notable citizen had gone. He had known familiarly Melanchthon and Luther. Raphael had been glad to exchange drawings with him. His engravings and woodcuts were admired throughout Europe. After four centuries he remains the finest exemplar in art of the peculiar steadfastness and thoroughness of the German race. Goethe, the greatest of German poets, has written the finest tribute to Germany’s greatest artist: Wholly unsoftened and unquibbled, Naught prettified or vainly scribbled, The very world thou shalt descry As seen by Albrecht Dürer’s eye-- Her sturdy life and manhood strong, Her inward might enduring long. HANS HOLBEIN [Illustration: HOLBEIN’S WIFE AND CHILDREN In Basel Museum.] [Illustration: PORTRAIT OF GEORG GYZE. By Holbein. In the Berlin Gallery.] [Illustration: HOLBEIN, by himself At 25 years of age.] Whoever understands the art of Dürer needs little introduction to that of Holbein (hole´-bine). Hans Holbein was born in 1497, when Dürer was just beginning to be famous, at the imperial city of Augsburg, which was merely a larger Nuremberg. Holbein’s father was a painter, and the lad was early perfected in the craft. By his seventeenth year he was working at Basel, where for some ten years he practised book illustration, designing for metal and glass, religious subjects, wall painting. Such versatility he renounced later for the better paying branch of portraiture. In 1526 some German merchants called him over to London. There he soon became court painter to Henry VIII, and there he remained for the most part until his death by the plague in 1543. He was one of the first of those cosmopolitan portrait painters who follow their market, a homeless man, separated from wife and children, a completely detached person. That he was fitted for the part, the sturdy, confident portrait of himself shows.