The second drawing, in Indian ink, with pen and bistre outlines, in the British Museum (No. 14), is a round composition nearly nine inches in diameter, representing miners at work on the face of a mountain side (Pl. [27]).[[184]] In the foreground is a rocky platform on which two men are driving wedges into the rock with hammers with long pliant handles. Others are working with smaller hammers, and one, with a lantern fastened to his cap, is mounting to the platform by a ladder. Above them another man is ascending in the same way to a higher part of the quarry, while from an opening on the right a miner is pushing a truck full of ore along a wooden bridge, and another, down below, is raking the stone into a tray. Various wooden huts are placed here and there on the ledges. According to Dr. E. His, this drawing was in Basel in the sixteenth century, and was then copied by an unknown artist as an illustration to a manuscript book on mining by Andreas Ryff. It was probably made by Holbein in the neighbourhood of the St. Gotthard Pass, on his way to or from Lombardy.
Vol. I., Plate 26.
THE ARCHANGEL MICHAEL AS WEIGHER OF SOULS
Drawing in Indian ink
Basel Gallery
Vol. I., Plate 27.
MINERS AT WORK
Drawing in Indian ink, pen, and bistre
British Museum
SACRED PICTURES FORMERLY IN LUCERNE
Patin mentions five pictures painted by Holbein which in his day were in the church of the Augustines in Lucerne—a “Nativity,” the “Adoration of the Kings,” “Christ disputing with the Doctors,” a “Sancta Veronica,” and a “Taking down from the Cross,”[[185]] but Hegner could find no traces of them. They probably formed a triptych. M. Gauthiez suggests that these pictures were the result of his study of the paintings of the Lombard masters, the titles alone suggesting a list of works by Luini.[[186]]
The last-named of these pictures, the “Taking down from the Cross”—in which, according to Patin’s description, Christ’s body was on the ground, the head resting on the Virgin’s lap, and surrounded by Mary Magdalene, Saint John, Nicodemus, and other persons, with the two thieves still on the Cross—was still in the church in the middle of the seventeenth century. Two sketches exist, with notes as to the colour, and an inscription stating that they were drawn in Lucerne from Holbein’s altar-piece in the church of the Augustines by C. Meyer in 1648. Dr. Ganz has recently published a copy of this picture,[[187]] which is in Palermo, and draws attention to the fact that it agrees in dimensions with the lost original, which was in the possession of the painter Marquard Wocher in Basel in 1834, at which time it was copied by the painter Hieronymus Hess. Another copy, half the size of the original, was exhibited at the Exhibition of Early German Art at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1906, and a third is still in the sacristy of one of the Lucerne churches. In addition, there is a drawing of the group of the two chief figures, Christ and the Virgin, in the Basel Gallery,[[188]] a free copy of the central group of Christ and the Virgin, signed H. H. W. and H. H. It was done towards the end of the sixteenth century either by Hans Jörg Wannewetsch of Basel, or Hans Heinrich Wegmann of Lucerne.