52 
HOLBEIN IN GERMANY. 
[Nature aud Art, February 1, 18G7. 
reality for either church or banquet-hall ; and when 
Holbein was absent in England, his wife and 
children found a ready friend in Atnerbacli. He 
seems then to have made a clean sweep of the 
studio. His chief prompter was friendship, but it 
acted in accordance with his taste. His house at 
Little Basle (on the right bank of the Rhine) was 
a gallery of art. A few objects were added by his 
son, and the contents were purchased by the Town 
Council in 1661. They consisted of forty-nine 
paintings, and a cabinet with thirty-seven drawers 
full of sketches and engravings, together with coins, 
ivories, and various precious curiosities. Holbein 
was represented by fifteen of the paintings, 104 of 
the drawings, a sketch-book, the illustrated Praise 
of Folly, and duplicate copies of his biblical designs 
and his Dance of Death, besides 1 1 1 of the other 
wood-engravings. One of the paintings, a Last 
Supper, which we described a month ago, was in 
fragments : they are supposed to have been rescued 
by Amerbach from the religious mobs of 1529. 
But we have now to tell of a much greater work, 
which no care could save. It was destroyed by 
damp, an enemy to northern art more fatal than 
even bigotry. 
The 15th of June, 1521, bid fair to open a new 
epoch in historical art. On that day Holbein re- 
ceived a commission to fill the new Town-hall with 
great works in fresco. There were eleven spaces to 
be filled, six of them broad, and five narrow. Two 
of the broadest spaces were left untouched for the 
present. The rest of them were filled before the 
end of 1522. The four great subjects, which were 
then completed, were drawn from classical story. 
Republican virtue was exemplified by Curius 
Dentatus rejecting the Sabine gold. Contrasted 
with him was Sapor the Persian, a type of the 
brutal arrogance of kings, trampling on the neck of 
the Emperor Valerian. 
Obscurer legends of the Greek republics of lower 
Italy furnished the two other subjects : they were 
scenes of self-sacrifice, in stern submission to the 
law. In the five narrow spaces were single figures : 
• — 1. Christ, with a tablet in His hands, charging us 
all to do as we would be done by ; — 2. David, 
harping, with a scroll over his head, exhorting men 
to judge righteously ; — 3. 4. and 5. Justice, Moder- 
ation, and Wisdom. It will be observed that the 
large subjects were all political : and this was not 
altogether owing to the character of the locality. 
At the time when these were designed, the 
Protestants (as they were soon to be denominated) 
had made their way into the town council ; but 
they were by no means supreme there. Indeed, 
the Burgomaster was a rank Papist, no less than 
our old friend Jakob Meyer. The two religious 
parties were imited for the time by political sympa- 
thies. In this year they effected their common 
object. The bishop and the aristocrats were de- 
prived of their last privileges. The town-hall was 
triumphant ; and democracy, pure and simple, was 
depicted upon the walls. The case was altered 
when Holbein supplied the two deficiencies in 
1530-1. Both subjects were then taken from the 
Old Testament ; and one of them was quite after 
the heart of our own Puritans ; it was Saul 
rebuked by Samuel for not hewing Agag in pieces. 
These magnificent frescoes were the wonder of a 
generation ; but before the end of the century they 
were frightfully scarred by damp. Other artists 
tried their colours over those of Holbein ; but at 
last they were all charitably covered with green 
cloth. Out of two or three little bits, and a few 
drawings, and the town-hall account-books, Dr. 
Woltmann constructs a very interesting history. 
But we can only commend it to our German, 
readers, ■ together with the notice of the organ- 
screen of the cathedral. There are other topics 
which more emphatically demand our attention. 
In the summer of 1521, the burghers of Basle 
had plenty of local business upon their hands ; yet 
still they could not fail to be profoundly agitated, 
by hearing of Luther’s triumph at the Diet of 
Worms, and of his mysterious disappearance after 
it. He subsequently reappeared at Wittenberg, 
safe and sound, as all the world knows : but for 
many months even the wise heads were puzzled, and 
the simple ones were driven quite crazy. At first 
the Reformers were aghast; but they soon recovered 
heart, and their energies were only fevered by the 
agitation. At Basle there was a priest, who 
preached openly against the mass, and waylaid 
a procession in the streets, calling the relics “ mere 
dead men’s bones.” The bishop demanded his 
arrest, and his congregation, in their turn, defied 
the bishop. The town council interfered, and 
managed to edge the priest out of the city. But 
another soon took his place ; and at the close of the 
year arrived GEcolampadius, the true apostle of the 
Reformation at Basle. 
Meanwhile a sort of revolution had been effected 
in the town council. Jakob Meyer, though a 
zealous Catholic, had assisted in stripping the 
bishop of the last shadow of civil supremacy. 
He had thus become himself the chief magistrate 
of Basle. But his seat was a shaky one. In the 
October of the same year (1521) he was accused of 
taking bribes from the French king. It was 
common enough for the magistrates of a free city 
to receive a pension from one of the neighbouring 
princes. The members of the lesser council of 
Basle received fifteen crowns apiece ; but Meyer 
had accepted a larger sum. He was compelled to 
disgoi’ge the surplus ; and he was dismissed from 
office. This was a fine stroke for the Reformers, and 
won them the Burgomastership. Meyer struggled 
defiantly against the stream for a few years longer. 
He enlisted troops for the French king, or for the 
Pope, as he had done before ; and he led them 
himself into Italy : he returned to Basle, and we 
hear of him in 1529, the year of the fanatical 
iconoclasm, when he was the spokesman of the 
Catholics. Then all records of him cease. But 
there is a votive picture which will long preserve 
his memory, and spread his fame far wider than he 
could ever have dreamed of. This is Holbeins 
most famous Madonna. To every true German 
heart, says Dr. Woltmann, the Madonna of the 
