rest
imagination with realism. What would one not give to see the lost work
these wings covered?

Illustration: PLATE 8
THE NATIVITY
_Oils. University Chapel, Freiburg Cathedral_

In the left wing, the Nativity (Plate 8), Holbein has remarkably
anticipated the lighting of Correggio's famous masterpiece, not finished
until years after this must have been painted, by the conditions of
Oberriedt's history and Basel's as well. The Light that is to light the
world lights up the scene with an exquisite enchanting softness,--yet
so brilliantly that the very lights of heaven seem dimmed in comparison.
The moon, in Holbein's deliberate audacity, seems but a disc as she bows
her face, too, in worship. Shining by some compulsion of purest Nature,
the divine radiance glows on the ecstatic Mother; and away above and
beyond her--"How far that little candle shines," and shines, and shines
again amid the shadows! It illumines the beautiful face of the Virgin,
touches the reverent awe of St. Joseph, plays over marble arch and
pillar, discovers the wondering shepherd peering from behind the pillar
on the left, and irradiates the angel in the distance, hastening to
carry the "glad tidings." The happy cherubs behind the Child rejoice
in it; and as they spring forward one notices how Holbein has boldly
discarded the conventional, and attached their pinions as if these were
a natural development of the arm instead of a separate member.

The same union of unfettered fancy symbolism and realism displays itself
throughout the right wing,--where the Virgin is enthroned in front of
crumbling palaces. The sun's rays form a great star, of such dazzling
light that one of the attendants shades his eyes to look upward, and
an old man with a noble head, wearing an ermine cape, presents his
offering as the chief of the three kings; while a Moorish sovereign,
dressed in white, makes a splendid figure as he waits to kneel with
his gift, and his greyhound stands beside him. The colouring of both
paintings must have had an extraordinary beauty when the painter laid
down his brush.

To carp at such conceptions because their architecture is as imaginative
and as deeply symbolical as the action, is to demand that Holbein shall
be someone else. These pictures, beyond the portraits below them, are
the farthest possible from aiming at what we demand of Realism, though
their own realism is astonishing. Holbein all too seldom sounds them,
but when he doe