Madonna of Burgomaster Meyer (Dresden copy)

In the summer of 1871, months after the German Empire was proclaimed, the Dresden gallery hung two nearly identical Madonnas side by side. This one had been its pride since 1743, when the Italian connoisseur Francesco Algarotti bought it in Venice for 1,000 gold ducats as a Holbein, and Dresden revered it as the German counterpart to Raphael's Sistine Madonna in the same collection. The other, now called the Darmstadt Madonna, had surfaced in 1822. On 5 September 1871, 14 art historians declared that only the Darmstadt panel was Holbein's own. The gallery's director, the painter Julius Hübner, defended his picture with a sonnet, and the young scholar Karl Woermann answered with a sonnet of his own. The psychologist Gustav Fechner left out a questionnaire asking which Madonna was more beautiful. Of 11,842 visitors, 113 replied. The copyist was named only in 1910. In 1633 the Frankfurt-born engraver and dealer Michel Le Blon had brought Holbein's original from Basel to Amsterdam and ordered this copy from the portraitist Bartholomäus Sarburgh, by the museum's account to pass it off as the original. Look above the Virgin's crown. The shell niche stands in a dark arch with far more empty space, because the panel is taller, and the colours run darker, down to a nearly black dress, a salmon-orange sash and a dark-red carpet.