By 1526 Holbein was back in Basel; but two works of this year would go to show that he was little less separated from his wife in Basel than when away. The first of these, about one-third life-size, is a portrait of a woman with a child beside her who grasps an arrow to suggest the Goddess of Love attended by a wingless Cupid ([Plate 16]). The little red-haired child does not do much to realise the ideal; but the woman, though not an ideal Venus, might nevertheless well pose as a man's goddess. A "fair" woman in more senses than her colouring. Her dark-red velvet dress slashed with white; wide sleeves of dusky gold-coloured silk; her close-fitting black head-dress embroidered with gold; the soft seduction of her look; the welcoming gesture of that pretty palm flung outward as if to embrace; these are all in keeping.

PLATE 16.
DOROTHEA OFFENBURG AS THE GODDESS OF LOVE
Oils. Basel Museum
Click to [ENLARGE]

This was a lady whose past career might have warned a lover that whatever she might prove as a goddess, she could play but a fallen angel's part. The annals of Basel knew her only too well. This was Dorothea, the daughter of a knight of good old lineage,—Hans von Offenburg. But the knight died while she was quite young, and her mother, better famed for looks than conduct, married the girl to a debauched young aristocrat,—Joachim von Sultz. His own record is hardly less shameless than Dorothea's soon became,—though the latter is chiefly in archives of the "unspeakable" sort. At the time when this picture was painted she must have been about two-and-twenty.

Unhappy Holbein, indeed! The temper of Xantippe herself, if she be but the decent mother of one's children, might work less havoc with a life than this embroidered cestus. But "the German Apelles" was no Greek voluptuary, ambitious in heathen vices, such as that other Apelles whose painting of Venus was said to be his masterpiece. And when Holbein inscribed his second portrait of Dorothea with the words Laïs Corinthiaca, the midsummer madness must have been already a matter of scorn and wonder to himself. His whole life and the works of his life are the negation of the groves of Corinth.

The paint was not long dry on the Goddess of Love—at any rate, her dress was not worn out—before he had seen her in her true colours; "the daughter of the horse-leech, crying Give, Give."

And so he painted her in 1526 ([Plate 17]); to scourge himself, surely, since she was too notoriously infamous to be affected by it. As if in stern scorn of every beauty, every allure, he set himself to record them in detail: something in the spirit with which Macaulay set himself, "by the blessing of God," to do "full justice" to the poems of Montgomery. Laïs is far more beautiful, and far more beautifully painted, than Venus. No emotion has hurried the painter's hand or confused his eye this time. In vain she wears such sadness in her eyes, such pensive dignity of attitude, such a wistful smile on her lips. He knows them, now, for false lights on the wrecker's coast. No faltering; no turning back. He can even fit a new head-dress on the lovely hair, and add the puffed sleeves below the short ones. He is a painter now; not a lover. And lest there should be one doubt as to his purpose, he flings a heap of gold where "Cupid's" little hand would now seem desecrated, and inscribes beneath it the name that fits her beauty and his contempt. The plague was raging in Basel all through that spring and summer, but I doubt if Holbein shuddered at its contact as at the loveliness he painted. The brand he placed upon it is proof of that—Laïs Corinthiaca, the infamous mistress of the Greek Apelles.

PLATE 17.
DOROTHEA OFFENBURG AS LAÏS CORINTHIACA
Oils. Basel Museum
Click to [ENLARGE]

But in 1526 men sat among the ashes of far goodlier palaces and larger interests than personal ones. The party in power was not friendlier to Art than to the Church of Rome. In January the Painters' Guild had presented a petition to the Council,—humbly praying that its members, "who had wives and children depending on their work," might be allowed to pursue it in Basel! And so hard was Holbein himself hit by the fanatical excitement of the time that the Council's account-books show the paltry wage he was glad to earn for painting a few shields on some official building "in the borough of Waldenburg."

Small wonder that an artist such as Holbein should feel his heart grow sick within him, and should turn his thoughts with increasing determination to some fresh field. Even without the bitterness that now must have edged the tongue of a wronged wife, or the bitterer taste of Dead Sea fruit in his own mouth,—he must have been driven to try his luck elsewhere. And of all the invitations urged upon him, the chances which Erasmus's introductions could give him in England would probably offer the greatest promise.

But before he set out with these letters, in the late summer of 1526, he executed yet one more great commission for his old friend, Jacob Meyer zum Hasen, now leader of the Catholic party in opposition. This was the work known now to all the civilised world as "The Meyer Madonna." For centuries the beautiful picture which bears this name in the Dresden Gallery has been cited by every expert authority and critic as this work. But since the mysterious appearance of the Darmstadt painting, which suddenly turned up in a Paris art collector's possession, from no one knows where in 1822, the tide of belief has slowly receded from the Dresden painting. Until now there are only a few judges who do not hold—especially since the public comparison of the two works at Dresden in 1871—that the Dresden picture is "a copy by an inferior hand."