deed, a man of forty when Holbein was
painting this Signboard in 1516. But Copernicus was still interluding
the active duties of Frauenburg's highly successful governor,
tax-collector, judge, and vicar-general,--to say nothing of his
brilliant essays on finance,--with those studies in his watch-tower
which were to revolutionise the astronomical conceptions of twenty
centuries and wheel the Earth around the Sun instead of the Sun around
the Earth. But his system was not actually published until its author
was on his death-bed, in the year of Holbein's own death. So that these
stupendous new ideas were only the unpublished rumours and discussions
of circles like that of Froben and Erasmus, when Holbein first entered
it.

But it is no insignificant sidelight on the history of this circle and
this period to recall that the subversive theories of Copernicus,--far
as even he was from anticipating how a Kepler and a Newton should one
day shatter the "Crystalline Spheres," and relegate to the dustheap of
antiquity the "Epicycles," to which he still clung,--had their only
generous hearing from influential churchmen of Rome. Luther recoiled
from them as the blasphemies of "an arrogant fool"; and even Melanchthon
urged that they should be "suppressed by the secular arm." Nor let it be
forgotten that these matters were never a far cry from those Basel
printing-presses where the greatest master-printers were themselves
thorough and eager scholars; "Men of Letters," in the noblest sense of
the word. And the discussion of all these high concerns of history and
letters was as much a part of the daily life surging around their
printing-presses as the roar of the Rhine was in the air of Basel.

Illustration: PLATE 4
JACOB MEYER (ZUM HASEN)
_Oils. Basel Museum_

Illustration: PLATE 5
DOROTHEA MEYER (_nee_ KANNEGIESSER)
_Oils. Basel Museum_

As has been said, the sister of that Hans Baer for whom Holbein painted
the "St. Nobody" table had been the first wife, Magdalena Baer--a widow
with one daughter, when she married him--of Jacob Meyer,[2] "of the
Hare" (_zum Hasen_). Magdalena died in 1511, and about 1512 Meyer zum
Hasen married Dorothea Kannegiesser. And now in 1516, a memorable year
to Holbein on account of this influential patron, the young stranger was
commissioned to paint the portraits of Meyer (Plate 4) and his second
wife, Dorothea (Plate 5). These oil paintings, and the drawings for
them, are now in the Basel