or the death of a
child. This conjecture seems to rest mainly on the fact, that the child
in the Dresden copy (it is said to be otherwise in the Darmstadt
picture) is of an aspect so sickly, as to have given rise to the
impression that it represented an ailing, or even a dead child, and no
glorious child Christ. Critics have gone still farther, and imagined
that the child is a figure of the soul of a dead child (souls were
sometimes painted by the old painters as new-born children), or of the
soul of the elder and somewhat muffled-up woman who might have been
recently dead. Mr Ruskin regards the picture as an offering for the
recovery of a sick child, and thus illustrates it:

'The received tradition respecting the Holbein Madonna is
beautiful, and I believe the interpretation to be true. A father
and a mother have prayed to her for the life of their sick child.
She appears to them, her own child Christ in her arms; she puts
down her child beside them, takes their child into her arms
instead; it lies down upon her bosom, and stretches its hand to
its father and mother, saying farewell.'

Yet another much more prosaic and less attractive interpretation of the
picture has been suggested by Holbein's biographer, that the two
children may represent the same child. The child standing by his brother
may be the boy restored to health, the feeble child in the arms of the
Virgin may indicate the same child in its sickness, while the extended
arm may point to the seat of the disease in an arm broken or injured.
After all, the child may simply be a child Christ, marred in execution.
I have given this dispute at length, because I think it is interesting,
and, so far as I know, unique in reference to such a picture. By an odd
enough mistake this very picture was once said to be the famous More
Family picture.

The idea of the 'Dance of Death' did not originate with Holbein, neither
is he supposed to have done more than touch, if he did touch, the
paintings called the 'Dance of Death,' on the wall of the Dominican
burial-ground, Basle, painted long before Holbein's day, by the order of
the council after the plague visited Basle, and considered to have for
its meaning simply a warning of the universality of death. But Holbein
certainly availed himself of the older painting, to draw from it the
grim satire of his woodcuts. Of these there are thirty-seven designs,
the first, 'The Creation;' the seco