HISTORY OF THE DRESDEN VERSION
The first definite information about the Dresden version is that at the beginning of the eighteenth century it was in Venice, in the possession of the Delfino family, from whose representative, Giovanni Delfino, it was purchased by Count Francesco Algarotti on the 4th September 1743, for Augustus III, Elector of Saxony, for one thousand sequins. A previous attempt to buy it had been made by the Duke of Orleans in 1723. It is to be gathered from Algarotti’s correspondence that the picture had been bequeathed to Delfino’s father by the Venetian banker Avogadro, and, according to an old servant of the latter’s, named Griffoni, his master had obtained it in or about the year 1690 in Amsterdam as payment for a debt of 2000 sequins owing to him by the house of Lössert, which had recently become bankrupt. Algarotti was of opinion that it was the very picture mentioned by Sandrart. As, however, the original picture was still in Amsterdam in 1709 (the date of the Cromhout sale), nearly twenty years after Avogadro is said to have received it, the version which went to Venice can only have been a copy, which it is now known to be. It appears, therefore, that at one time Loskart or Lössert possessed two versions of the picture; and it may be conjectured that at the time of the bankruptcy, or perhaps earlier, the original was sold to or taken over by Cromhout, and the early seventeenth-century copy retained, until it was given to Avogadro in lieu of the debt. It is not, however, necessary to suppose that the transaction was an underhand one, and that a copy was knowingly palmed off on the banker as an original, for very possibly by that time both pictures were regarded as genuine works by Holbein.
At the time the Venetian example was purchased for the Elector of Saxony, it was generally regarded as a portrait-group of the More family, owing to the similarity of the names Meyer and More. Horace Walpole, who saw it in Venice, gave it its correct title. He says, when referring to the various examples existing of the More family group: “The fifth[[508]] was in the palace of the Delfino family at Venice, where it was long on sale, the first price set, 1500l. When I saw it there in 1741 they had sunk it to 400l., soon after which the present King of Poland bought it.... The old man is not only unlike all representations of Sir Thomas More, but it is certain that he never had but one son. For the colouring, it is beautiful beyond description, and the carnations have that enamelled bloom so peculiar to Holbein, who touched his works till not a touch remained discernible! A drawing of this picture by Bischop was brought over in 1723, from whence Vertue doubted both of the subject and the painter; but he never saw the original! By the description of the family picture of the Consul Mejer, mentioned above, I have no doubt but this is the very picture—Mejer and More are names not so unlike but that in process of time they may have been confounded, and that of More retained, as much better known.”[[509]]
The cost of the picture was 1000 sequins, or 22,000 livres de Venise—about £458 in English money—and the expenses in connection with its purchase, packing, and forwarding to Dresden, came to some £125 more, including a liberal present to the painter Tiepolo, who helped in the negotiations, and smaller gratuities to various retainers of the Delfino family. The total cost, therefore, was considerably more than three times the price paid for the original painting in the Amsterdam sale.
Although the Meyer Madonna possesses no hidden meaning, and is merely a customary representation of a donor and his family kneeling in adoration before the Virgin and Child, yet a number of fanciful interpretations were given to it in the last century, of which some echoes still remain. It has been suggested that it is a votive picture to commemorate the recovery of a sick child, whom the Virgin has taken into her arms, placing her own child on the ground among the donors. This idea was carried still farther by others, who saw in the infant on the Madonna’s breast the soul of a dead child; while a third theory propounded was to the effect that the little one was merely the soul of the woman kneeling next the Virgin, supposed to be Meyer’s first wife. These are all sentimental refinements of nineteenth-century German criticism, first voiced by such writers as Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel, and in all probability would never have been heard of had the original picture been in Dresden instead of the copy. In the latter the unknown copyist has not been so successful in the figure of the infant Christ as in other portions of the picture. It is far less animated than in the original, and a little sickly and unhappy in expression, and it was this, no doubt, which first suggested these over-refinements of meaning. Ruskin was on the side of the sentimentalists. He says: “The received tradition respecting the Holbein Madonna is beautiful, and I believe the interpretation to be true. A father and mother have prayed to her for the life of their sick child. She appears to them, her own Child in her arms. She puts down her Christ before them, takes their child into her arms instead; it lies down upon her bosom, and stretches its hands to its father and mother, saying farewell.”[[510]] As a matter of fact, there is nothing of death or sickness about the work, which tells its story with the utmost simplicity and mastery of means, without needing such refined subtleties for its proper explanation.
HOLBEIN’S MODEL FOR THE VIRGIN
It is difficult to follow Holbein’s latest English biographer, Mr. G. S. Davies, in his belief that the influence of Gherardt David can be seen in this work, and, in particular, to find, as he does, indications of Holbein’s acquaintance with David’s great picture of the “Madonna with the Saints and Angels,” now in the Rouen Museum, but in Holbein’s day, and for three centuries afterwards, in the Carmelite Church in Bruges, for which it had been painted. “I do not think that any one who thoroughly knew the Darmstadt Holbein can fail,” he says, “as he looks at this masterpiece of the Flemish painter, to be at once reminded by something in the feeling and in the type of Madonna, and even in such details as the choice of crown and robe, in the outspread mantle, in the fashion of the robe, in the wavy golden hair lying along the shoulder, and in the pose of the head as she looks down at the Child, of the greater German master. Holbein’s is a stronger, more intensely sympathetic, more real and convincing vision; but the original type seems to be common to both men.”[[511]] To render this possible, a visit to Bruges on Holbein’s part becomes necessary, and Mr. Davies considers it to be most probable that he did so either on his way to England in 1526 or on his return in 1528, and he states, but without bringing forward any proofs, that Holbein “spent several months in or about Antwerp” on the former journey, and that he would not be likely to omit a visit to so great a centre of art as Bruges. This theory also necessitates the alteration of the date of the painting of the Meyer Madonna, whereas everything points to its completion before Holbein left Basel for England; nor will he find many to agree with him that in this great picture, so essentially German in feeling, strong traces of Flemish influence are to be seen. Such alien influence as can be traced in it is undoubtedly Italian.
For the Meyer Madonna, Holbein’s wife no longer served as the model for the Virgin, as she had done for the Madonna of Solothurn. Her place was taken by that lady of somewhat notorious character in Basel, Magdalena Offenburg. As pointed out in an earlier chapter, she had already twice served Holbein as a model for his costume studies of Basel ladies,[[512]] and she also sat to him for the two pictures of “Venus” and “Laïs Corinthiaca” in the Basel Gallery, in which the similarity of features to those of the Virgin in the Darmstadt altar-piece is very marked, while all three bear an evident likeness to the model of that one of the costume studies in which the sitter wears a necklace with the recurring initials “M. O.” Her daughter Dorothea, wife of Joachim von Sultz, who at one time was considered to be the lady represented in the “Laïs” and “Venus” pictures,[[513]] led an equally scandalous life. She was divorced in 1545, and both she and her husband were imprisoned, and afterwards expelled the country.
Vol. I., Plate 73.
