ealise 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.

Illustration: PLATE 16
DOROTHEA OFFENBURG AS THE GODDESS OF LOVE
_Oils. Basel Museum_

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 LAIS
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.
Lais is far more beautiful, and far more beautifully painted, than
Venus. No emotion has hurried the painter's hand