Holbein by S.L. Bensusan — Read

If we may accept the balance of evidence, Hans Holbein was born in the last years of the fifteenth century in Augsburg, then a city of great importance. The visitor to Bavaria to-day will find few traces of its vanished prosperity, but in the years when Hans Holbein was a little boy Augsburg held merchant princes by the dozen, and men of distinction by the score, and enjoyed the favour of the Emperor Maximilian, himself no mean patron of the arts.

In such a city at the beginning of the sixteenth century there would have been a certain community of interest between the leaders of state, commerce, and religion, who, keenly conscious of the honour that had come to Italy through the Revival of Learning and the practice of the arts, would do all that in them lay to devote a part of their wealth and leisure to placing their city in an honourable position. Civic pride was rampant throughout the great cities of Europe in the Middle Ages, and Augsburg was no exception to the rule. Holbein's father, whose work may be studied to great advantage in Berlin, was an artist of repute.