Lais of Corinth

By 1526 the Reformation had reached Basel, and a painter there was watching his livelihood dry up as reformers turned against religious images. That autumn Holbein packed a letter of introduction from Erasmus and left for England. Just before he went, he painted this. Not a saint but Lais of Corinth, the famous courtesan of ancient Greece, one hand open on the table to collect the high fee she was known for. The face belongs to a Basel woman of the Offenburg family, the same model he used for a Venus. The soft modelling and the open-handed gesture come straight from the Italian painting Holbein had studied, and he dated the stone ledge along the bottom, 1526.