Jesus, whose expression was the only interesting feature of the picture, a certain manly gravity that was shown without any disfigurement of the character of childhood, was also round and well-fed, and the scene took place on a lawn strewn with flowers--primroses, violets, and strawberries painted in fine stipple with the touch of a miniaturist.
You might call this picture what you pleased, the execution, smooth and wavy, and cold in spite of the brilliant colours, was a finished piece of work, brilliant, dexterous--but not religious; it betrayed a decadence; the work was laboured, complicated, pretty, but it was in no sense that of an early master.
This common, squat Virgin, fat and pudgy, was simply a good German girl, well-dressed and squarely seated, but she could never have been the ecstatic Mother of God! Then these kneeling and standing men were not in prayer; there was no devotion in this picture; the personages were all thinking of something else, folding their hands and looking round at the painter who was depicting them.

As to the wings, it were better to say nothing about them.

What was to be thought of the Saint Ursula with a prominent forehead like a cupping-glass and a burly stomach, surrounded by other creatures as shapeless as herself, their squab noses poking out of the bladders of lard that did duty for their faces?
And Durtal found the same impression of insensibility to mysticism in the picture gallery.

There he could study Stephan Lochner's precursor, Master Wilhelm--the first early German painter whose name is known--and in this again he found the look of elaborate chubbiness as in the Dombild.

Wilhelm's Virgin was indeed less vulgar than the Virgin of the cathedral; but in feeling she was equally insipid, over-finished, and even more simperingly pretty.