Durer was akin to Leonardo in the desire for more and yet more knowledge.  Like him he wrote treatises on fortifications, human proportions, geometry, and perspective, and filled his sketchbooks with studies of plants, animals, and natural scenery.  His eager mind employed itself with the whys and wherefores of things, not satisfied with the simple pleasure that sight bestows.  In his engravings, even more than in his pictures, we ponder the hidden meanings; we are not content to look and rejoice in beauty, though there is much to charm the eye.  His problems were the problems of life as well as the problems of art.

The other great artist of Germany, Hans Holbein the younger, was the son of Hans Holbein the elder, a much esteemed painter in Augsburg.  This town was on the principal trade route between Northern Italy and the North Sea, so that Venetians and Milanese were constantly passing through and bringing to it much wealth and news of the luxury of their own southern life.  As a result the citizens of Augsburg dressed more expensively and decorated their houses more lavishly than did the citizens of any other town in Germany.  After a boyhood and youth spent at Augsburg, Holbein removed to Basle.  He was a designer of wood-engravings and goldsmiths work and of architectural decoration, besides being a painter.  In those days of change in South Germany, artists had to be willing to turn their hands to any kind of work they could get to do.  North of the Alps, where the Reformation was upsetting old habits, an artist’s life was far from being easy.  Reformers made bonfires of sacred pictures and sculptured wooden altar-pieces.  Indeed the Reformation was a cruel blow to artists, for it took away Church patronage and made them dependent for employment upon merchants and princes.  Except at courts or in great mercantile towns they fared extremely ill.  Altar-pieces were rarely wanted, and there were no more legends of saints to be painted upon the walls of churches.

The demand for portraiture, on the other hand, was increasing, whilst the growth of printing created a new field for design in the preparation of woodcuts for the illustration of books.  Thus it came to pass that the printer Froben, at Basle, was one of the young Holbein’s chief patrons.  We find him designing a wonderful series of illustrations of The Dance of Death, as well as drawing another set to illustrate The Praise of Folly, written by Erasmus, who was then living in Basle and frequenting the house of Froben.  Erasmus was a typical scholar of the sixteenth century, belonging rather to civilized society as a whole than to any one country.  He moved about Europe from one centre of learning to another, alike at home in educated circles in England, Flanders, and Germany.  He had lived for some time in England and knew that there were men there with wealth who would employ a good painter to paint their portraits if they could find one.  Erasmus himself sat to Holbein, and sent the finished portrait as a present to his friend Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England.