from the side, right across the picture, while the sun is in front.
And there is not the slightest attempt to indicate gradation of light in
the sky, darkness in the forest, or any other positive element of
chiaroscuro.

This is not because Holbein cannot give chiaroscuro if he chooses. He is
twenty times a stronger master of it than Rembrandt; but he, therefore,
knows exactly when and how to use it; and that wood engraving is not the
proper means for it. The quantity of it which is needful for his story,
and will not, by any sensational violence, either divert, or vulgarly
enforce, the attention, he will give; and that with an unrivaled
subtlety. Therefore I must ask you for a moment or two to quit the
subject of technics, and look what these two woodcuts mean.

84. The one I have first shown you is of a plowman plowing at evening.
It is Holbein's object, here, to express the diffused and intense light
of a golden summer sunset, so far as is consistent with grander
purposes. A modern French or English chiaroscurist would have covered
his sky with fleecy clouds, and relieved the plowman's hat and his
horses against it in strong black, and put sparkling touches on the
furrows and grass. Holbein scornfully casts all such tricks aside; and
draws the whole scene in pure white, with simple outlines.

[Illustration: THE TWO PREACHERS.

(Fig. 3) Facsimile from Holbein's woodcut.]

85. And yet, when I put it beside this second vignette, (Fig. 3,) which
is of a preacher preaching in a feebly lighted church, you will feel
that the diffused warmth of the one subject, and diffused twilight in
the other, are complete; and they will finally be to you more impressive
than if they had been wrought out with every superficial means of
effect, on each block.

For it is as a symbol, not as a scenic effect, that in each case the
chiaroscuro is given. Holbein, I said, is at the head of the
painter-reformers, and his Dance of Death is the most energetic and
telling of all the forms given, in this epoch, to the _Rationalist_
spirit of reform, preaching the new Gospel of Death,--"It is no matter
whether you are priest or layman, what you believe, or what you do: here
is the end." You shall see, in the course of our inquiry, that
Botticelli, in like manner, represents the _Faithful_ and _Catholic_
temper of reform.

86. The teaching of Holbein is therefore always melancholy,--for the
most part purely rational; and entirely furious in its