Hans Holbein: The Artist in a Changing World (Renaissance Lives) 9781789142112, 1789142113

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hans holbein

 Books in the renaissance

lives series explore and illustrate the life histories and achievements of significant artists, intellectuals and scientists in the early modern world. They delve into literature, philosophy, the history of art, science and natural history and cover narratives of exploration, statecraft and technology. Series Editor: François Quiviger Already published Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe Mary D. Garrard Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason ‚Mary Ann Caws Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity ‚Troy Thomas Donatello and the Dawn of Renaissance Art ‚A. Victor Coonin Hans Holbein: The Artist in a Changing World ‚Jeanne Nuechterlein Hieronymus Bosch: Visions and Nightmares ‚Nils Büttner Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy ‚Niccolò Guicciardini John Evelyn: A Life of Domesticity ‚John Dixon Hunt Leonardo da Vinci: Self, Art and Nature ‚François Quiviger Michelangelo and the Viewer in His Time ‚Bernadine Barnes Paracelsus: An Alchemical Life ‚Bruce T. Moran Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer ‚Christopher S. Celenza Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature ‚Elizabeth Alice Honig Raphael and the Antique ‚Claudia La Malfa Rembrandt’s Holland ‚Larry Silver Titian’s Touch: Art, Magic and Philosophy ‚Maria H. Loh Tycho Brahe and the Measure of the Heavens ‚John Robert Christianson

HANS HOL B E I N The Artist in a Changing World jeanne nuechterlein

R E A K T ION B O OK S

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2020 Copyright © Jeanne Nuechterlein 2020 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 211 2

cover: Hans Holbein the Younger, Self-portrait, c. 1540–43, pastel on paper. Photo © Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images.

contents

Introduction 7 1 Techniques, Materials, Skill 16 2 Education, Knowledge, Styles 59 3 Religion, Reformation, Politics 95 4 Science, Observation, Manipulation 139 5 Patrons, Status, Court 181 Conclusion: The Individual and the Type 226 chronology 239 References 242 selected reading 269 Photo Acknowledgements 272 Index 274

Introduction

C

hange was a constant feature of Holbein’s life. That paradoxical assertion carries greater weight if we compare him to his father, Hans Holbein the Elder, who was born around 1465 and spent most of his adult life creating large altarpieces, devotional panels and portraits in a late Gothic style for religious institutions and prosperous families in southern Germany. In the last years of his life the elder Holbein adapted to new Renaissance styles, but his fundamental essence as an artist remained essentially constant. In contrast, his son – Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497/8–1543) – was born just before the turn of the sixteenth century, at a time when multiple aspects of European life were on the verge of major upheaval. During his 45 years of life he encountered profound transformations in religion, education, scientific knowledge and social structures, changes that affected most people living at that point in European history, but especially so for Holbein in that his own travels and career choices propelled him into new environments. His twice-over move from Basel in Switzerland to London in England (first in 1526, then again in 1532) entailed various changes beyond the physical environment itself: from a representative city government in a federation of republican 1 Hans Holbein the Younger, Thomas Howard, Third Duke of Norfolk (1473–1554), c. 1539, oil on panel.

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cantons to a royal realm, with all the societal distinctions that entailed; from a city where popular opinion drove through a fairly extreme version of the Reformation, to a country where the king’s personal decision ultimately governed national religious life – still firmly Catholic in 1526, but shifting towards a moderate form of Protestantism by 1532/3 when the break from papal power suited Henry viii’s desire for a new wife. For Holbein’s art, the move from Basel to London also entailed a shift in emphasis from book designs and religious images towards portraiture and fine metalwork design. As to what motivated Holbein to move, the most logical inference from the various strands of evidence is that the increasingly Protestant (and largely middle-class) Basel had become too precarious a context to sustain his career, whereas a royal court, even if led by someone as capricious as Henry viii, offered more attractive opportunities for professional advancement. Personal motivations could have also played a role – Holbein eventually chose to separate permanently from his family in Basel – although here we are inevitably led more by conjecture than evidence. In many respects Holbein is an odd subject for a series about Renaissance Lives, given how little we really know about his life. His movements can be roughly traced from his youth in Augsburg (illus. 2) to his professional years in Switzerland and England, but much remains uncertain, even such basic questions as to whether he ever visited Italy. It is hardly unusual for an artist of his time and place to leave few personal records behind, although the contrast with the prolific written output of his older contemporary Albrecht Dürer makes it particularly frustrating that no writings by

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Introduction

Holbein have survived, other than jotted notes on drawings and a couple of cases of reported speech.1 As a consequence, any attempt to reconstruct his identity as a singular human being – his personality, his opinions, his processes of decision-making – are necessarily entirely conjectural, based on interpretations of his surviving artworks, considered against what is known about his environment and the people he worked with. Of course, any inference about other human beings must always be partly conjectural, even when they directly tell us what they think, since people are not always fully reliable sources of information (and especially interpretation) about themselves. People’s public statements often project a desired impression rather than straightforwardly express inner intent (think social media). Moreover, people constantly change over time – they are never quite the same person at age forty 2 Hans Holbein the Elder, Ambrosius and Hans, the Sons of the Artist, 1511, metalpoint on white prepared paper with pen and ink.

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as they were at age twenty, let alone ten – and they often have conflicting opinions about matters at any given moment. Neurobiology has revealed that one of the functions of the human brain’s complex neuronal network is to create a subjective impression of singular identity: we each experience ourselves as a unified being, taking in information from the outside world and generating thoughts and feelings about it from within, but that experience is a construct of extremely complex biological processes.2 Nevertheless, we feel compelled to try to reconstruct the personas of historical individuals in biographical studies such as this. Given Holbein’s particular elusiveness as a human character, it seems appropriate in this book to interrogate the methods through which we construct interpretations of long-dead people from the past, acknowledging the inevitable limitations of the available methods. While Holbein did of course exist in the world as a real human being from sometime in late 1497 or early 1498 until October or November 1543, most of the direct evidence about his life has long since vanished, and I suspect he would have been a difficult person to pin down in any case. No doubt different people he knew had varying opinions about him. This book will tackle head-on the ways in which we interpret Holbein’s surviving work, both as material products of physical making, and as signs of authorial intent that we use to construct a historical persona. The goal is not to discard the aim of better understanding Holbein and his art, but to recognize the inevitable distance between whatever understanding we can arrive at today given the limited information, and whatever understanding any of us might have had of Holbein had we known

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Introduction

him during his lifetime, not to mention the limitations in how much any human being can ever be truly known. In that context, the changes in Holbein’s art are particularly significant, since changes in production are often signs of change in experience, thinking and/or intention. If artists work the same way year after year without much variation, it is difficult to know how much those processes are self-conscious or directly meaningful at any given moment, whereas shifting from one way of doing things to another signals some kind of decision or reaction, potentially a fully self-conscious one. Over the course of Holbein’s lifetime we see his works employ varying techniques and materials (Chapter One); incorporate new humanistic themes and forms of representation (Chapter Two); revise their approach to religious subject matter as the Protestant Reformation expanded (Chapter Three); address new forms of knowledge (Chapter Four); and adapt to varying patrons (Chapter Five). Such changes are typically the points where we draw conclusions about Holbein’s intentions. We infer that he changed a technique because he wanted to achieve a particular visual effect not possible with the previous materials; we surmise that he adapted his approach to religious themes either because Protestant theology led him personally to question the validity of previous art forms, and/or (more likely) because he needed to adapt to changing religious views among his patrons. Whether these are the correct interpretations or not, an innovation implies that, for whatever reason, the status quo was no longer perceived as adequate. We can never be absolutely certain about the motivations behind changes, but they provide critical points for investigation and analysis.

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In focusing on changes, this book will necessarily address encounters and processes as much as fixed entities. While Holbein’s extant artworks testify in some ways to their moment of making, they do so by pointing indirectly to multiple contingent factors shaping their final appearance, and our process of interpreting them generates additional layers of potential meaning. Thus, instead of trying to recover Holbein as a fixed personality, this book aims to illuminate the complexity of his world and the images he generated. While his images refer to a range of visual (and conceptual) sources, they can never do so straightforwardly: individual ideas or motifs are transformed in the process of being combined with others. And in turn, Holbein’s works themselves have to serve as the primary sources on which our conceptions of Holbein are based. There is thus an inevitable circularity: we infer something about Holbein’s attitudes and intentions by interpreting the works, then use those inferences about Holbein to provide an authorial explanation for the images. Holbein’s portrait of the Lutheran theologian Philip Melanchthon (illus. 3) exemplifies the challenges of interpretation.3 The object is undated, but on the basis of stylistic comparisons to other dated works, as well as considering the political context of the time, it is generally thought to have been made around 1535–6, at a moment when King Henry viii in England was in dialogue with Protestant princes in Germany, attempting to secure an agreement that would strengthen Henry’s position in relation to both the Holy Roman Emperor Charles v (who adamantly opposed the Reformation and its adoption by German rulers) and the French king Francis i (who largely opposed the Reformation

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Introduction

but, like Henry, was willing to use it as a political pawn). 4 Melanchthon acted as a critical intermediary in these discussions. He had begun shaping Martin Luther’s emerging ideas into a comprehensive theology with his Loci communes in 1521, and he was one of the main authors of the Augsburg Confession, the statement of belief presented by the German Protestant princes to Charles v (and rejected by him) in 1530.5 Holbein’s small roundel portrait of Melanchthon (9 centimetres in diameter) shares some features with his larger independent paintings, although its small scale enhances its intimacy. Melanchthon’s head and shoulders are silhouetted against an abstract blue background, and light coming from the right delineates his features through highlights and subtle shading. He appears to be attentively gazing at something beyond the field of view, a slight smile playing upon his lips. This is as much an object as a painting, since its moulded frame is fitted to a lid, painted in grisaille with two satyrs crouching in the midst of floral and vegetal decorative motifs, in a distinctively Renaissance style closely connected at the time with classical learning. The prominent Latin inscription painted on the inner surface of the lid would translate (in its correct form, with the first word ‘Quae’ rather than ‘Qui’) as something like ‘The all-but-living face of Melanchthon you are looking at, Holbein has rendered with exquisite skill’; this was one of at least two variations written by the English poet and antiquarian John Leland.6 While Holbein did not compose the verse, his employment of it signals his ability to work within a highly educated milieu, even while the mistake in the first word implies his less-than-perfect personal grasp of the Latin

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language. In its overall conception, the roundel highlights Holbein’s skills at decorative design, as well as his ability to capture the features of an individual with great vividness, a claim advanced in inscriptions on several of his other portraits and in short celebratory poems written about his work by Leland and the French poet Nicolas Bourbon.7 In this particular case, however, such claims are purely fictional insofar as Holbein appears never to have actually encountered Melanchthon in person. His portrait is based on other intermediate images, whether known ones of a more stylized nature by Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer, or some other now-vanished source(s), assimilated by Holbein into his own seemingly naturalistic style.8 He had accomplished a similar result in a portrait drawing of the English scholar and educator John Colet, which looks to be the product of a firstperson sitting but is in fact based on a sculptural bust (Colet had died several years before Holbein moved to England). So too Holbein’s drawings of the fifteenth-century Duke and Duchess of Berry turn statues into vivid impressions.9 The 3 Hans Holbein the Younger, Philip Melanchthon, c. 1535–6, oil on oak with ornamental lid.

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claim that portraits rendered the appearance of their sitters with remarkable vividness was a popular trope among humanist writers, often (though not in this case) accompanied by an acknowledgement that only the sitter’s writings could fully convey their spirit. With the Melanchthon roundel, we are assured that Holbein’s rendition is highly skilful and remarkably lifelike, but there is no means of knowing to what extent this depiction accorded with the real man. The inscription conveniently ignores any possibility of a disconnection. We can take this object – the roundel portrait with its painted lid – as a metaphor for Holbein himself: immensely skilful, inventive, proficient in varied formats and content, connected to educated circles without perhaps fully belonging to them. But it is a created, and creative, object, with only partial bearing on the individual it purports to reproduce. By studying Holbein’s works, we imagine that we gain a lifelike sense of him as a historical individual, although in reality, when it comes to reconstructing his ‘life’, we can only evaluate the vividness of the images we ourselves create.

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Techniques, Materials, Skill

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hile the ensuing chapters will investigate a range of Holbein’s paintings, examining their content and style in relation to their historical and cultural context, we will begin by concentrating on his graphic techniques, which show great versatility at employing varying materials and methods of application. Holbein’s drawings served a range of purposes: to capture visual ideas quickly, to render specific details of people and objects as potential models for paintings, and as designs for artworks to be executed by other craftsmen in glass, metalwork or other materials. Only a small proportion of Holbein’s drawings survive and the great majority are highly finished preparatory works, which during his lifetime probably served as templates that could potentially be reused. Only a handful of sketchier drawings hint at what must have originally been the largest proportion of his drawn images, quick sketches and the varied stages of preliminary work leading up to more finished drawings. Nevertheless, by comparing the materials of Holbein’s extant works with those of his father, and by dating as precisely as possible his earliest uses of new materials, we can deduce which techniques he must have learned growing up in his father’s workshop, as opposed to those that he took up

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Techniques, Materials, Skill

at a later date, and from there assess why he might have found new techniques advantageous. We know almost nothing about Holbein’s upbringing in Augsburg, although three direct sources situate him as a child together with his older brother, Ambrosius, in their father’s workshop: the portraits made by the elder Holbein in a painting of 1504 and a drawing of 1511 (see illus. 32 and 2), plus an inscription of their names in diminutive form (‘Hensly’ and ‘Brosi’) on the back of an undated workshop drawing now at University College London.1 Everything else is speculation, since no surviving independent works can be attributed to Holbein the Younger from this period (that is, any drawings or the like from his training), nor are there any other documentary records about him before he arrived in Basel by the end of 1515. He might well have contributed as an apprentice to some of his father’s works, although his hand cannot be securely identified. However, we can guess that he might have found Augsburg a stimulating environment: it was a large and dynamic city, a major centre of political, economic and cultural activity.2 On a few occasions (including in 1500, when Holbein was still a toddler) Augsburg hosted meetings of the Imperial Diet, the peripatetic legislative body of the Holy Roman Empire. As an Imperial Free City, it benefited from civic self-governance with no immediate ruler other than the Holy Roman Emperor himself, in those years Maximilian i, who frequently visited Augsburg and was sketched riding on horseback by Holbein the Elder at some point in the early 1510s.3 Augsburg was the centre of the Fugger banking network and a hub in European trade, particularly textiles. With a vibrant commercial market that readily imported new ideas

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and products, the city fostered innovations in book publishing and print-making. For all of these reasons, many important people lived in Augsburg and many more passed through it. Hans Holbein the Elder, born around 1465, had settled in Augsburg by 1494, although he made artworks for clients across southern Germany and as far north as Frankfurt. 4 He painted individual portraits (illus. 4) and designed objects in other media such as metalwork, prints and stained glass, although he is best known for his religious paintings, from small devotional panels (see illus. 33) to epitaphs, votive pictures (see illus. 32) and altarpiece wings. A key point to emphasize here is that the large size of many of these artworks required workshop assistants and collaboration, so that young Hans during his childhood would have encountered a range of artists who worked in different media, and seen how large-scale art-making was a highly collaborative process. For instance, the elder Holbein’s younger brother Sigmund (see illus. 5) and the painter Leonhard Beck worked as his assistants from 1497 until at least 1501.5 A coordinated group of panels made for the nuns of Augsburg’s Dominican convent of St Katherine (illus. 32) were painted by Holbein the Elder, Hans Burgkmair the Elder and another painter known only by the initials L. F., and whether these painters worked in direct collaboration or not, they must at least have studied each other’s panels to ensure sufficient coherence across the series (as well as emphasizing their individual innovations). Holbein the Elder’s large painted altarpiece wings completed in 1502 for the Cistercian monastery in Kaisheim, about 50 kilometres (30 mi.) north of Augsburg, opened to reveal a sculpted central subject by Gregor Erhart, within a casing

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made by the joiner Adolf Daucher; a few years later the same group, plus the gilder Ulrich Apt, worked on another large altarpiece for the Augsburg collegiate church of St Moritz.6 Holbein the Elder’s final payment for this work in March 1509 included five gulden for his wife and one for his son, 4 Hans Holbein the Elder, Philipp Adler, 1513, oil on wood (limewood?).

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most likely Ambrosius, who would have been about fifteen years old at the time and thus old enough to have started working as an apprentice. It is striking that the younger Holbein never specialized in large-scale cross-media works as his father did. Although Holbein must have had some assistants at points in his career, and some high-quality copies of his drawings indicate that other artists were in a position to study his artworks closely,7 the great majority of his extant images are small enough, and few enough in number, to have been carried out individually. But Holbein probably learned through his early training how to adapt his drawings for different kinds of practitioners, particularly how drawings made as designs for artists working in different media might employ specific techniques and materials chosen to suit their purpose. He probably began learning such techniques directly from his father, who likewise made at least a few drawings as designs for other media,8 though the changes in the younger Holbein’s materials and styles across the years imply that direct experience led him to adjust these techniques. No documentation confirms the elder Holbein’s training of his sons, but technically and conceptually their earliest work shows close affiliation with his. Moreover, it seems natural to infer from the two sets of early portraits the father’s pride in (and affection for) his sons. In 1504, when the boys were about ages five and eight, the elder Holbein inserted a self-portrait together with the two of them as witnesses to the baptism of St Paul in the lower left scene of one of the paintings made for the Dominican convent’s panel cycle (see illus. 32). Each painting in the series was paid for by one of the wealthy nuns,

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so the financier of this panel, the prioress Veronica Welser, must have approved the artist’s intrusion into the scene.9 Strikingly, the attention among the small family group focuses on young Hans on the left: the father rests one hand on the boy’s head and appears to point to him, rather than across to St Paul, while gazing out at the painting’s viewers. Older brother Ambrosius protectively embraces his younger sibling, while little Hans gazes at the baptism scene with one hand on his chest and a stick of some kind (a youthful pilgrimage staff?) in his dominant left hand. The composition encourages speculation. Had the boy recently survived a life-threatening illness? Were his precocious artistic talents already in evidence? The absence of the boys’ mother, presumably still alive when this painting was completed in 1504, unless the wife documented in 1509 was a later remarriage, suggests a focus here on male professional identity. The elder Holbein may have already recognized that both boys, especially the younger one, had inherited the talent to eventually follow in his footsteps as successful artists. It is possible that knowledge of the boys’ later careers encourages mis- or over-reading of the portraits’ significance here, although surely the insertion of these figures into a professional commission implies a strong sense of familial identity on the part of the elder Holbein. Holbein the Elder recorded his sons seven years later (see illus. 2) in a metalpoint drawing dated 1511 at the top and listing the ages of the boys as fourteen for ‘Hanns’ at the right and perhaps seventeen – the number is damaged – for ‘prosy’ at left.10 (This inscription, together with a self-portrait at the end of Holbein the Younger’s life giving his age as 45 and the year 1543, leads to the conclusion that he was born in late

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1497 or early 1498.) Some of the lines of Hans’s features are strengthened with black ink (the slightly darker lines seen at his lips, nose and eyes) and the numbers ‘99’ and ‘100’ at the bottom are later additions, but the main technique is metalpoint, where a stylus (usually predominantly of silver 5 Hans Holbein the Elder, Sigmund Holbein, 1512, silverpoint with black and red chalk, heightened with white bodycolour, on white prepared paper.

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or copper) leaves a line through friction with the paper or vellum surface that has been pre-treated with a coating of bone ash or chalk.11 The father focused on each boy’s face and used a combination of outline and modelling strokes to highlight the parallels as well as differences in their physiognomies and hairstyles. The inscription of their names, joined at the centre to ‘Holbain’, emphasizes his interest in recording vivid likenesses of members of his immediate family. Metalpoint was the elder Holbein’s favoured technique for taking sketches of people (and occasionally objects) from real life. Several of his extant drawings of individuals are identified by inscriptions, while others are anonymous, evidently taken out of personal interest or as potential models to insert within depictions of crowd scenes. Although metalpoint was a demanding technique, insofar as lines could not easily be erased once made, the prepared materials were quick to use, non-messy and easily transportable. Artists of this era therefore often carried metalpoint-prepared paper bound in small notebooks to take sketches while travelling, as Albrecht Dürer did when he visited the Netherlands in 1520–21 (in addition to making drawings in other media).12 In his 1512 drawing of Sigmund Holbein, identified as the artist’s brother in the inscription at the top, Holbein the Elder expertly varied the density and quality of lines to create an impression of the varying textures of Sigmund’s hair and beard, with the light on the top of his head contrasting with the shading of the ends of his curls (illus. 5).13 The edges of the features are reinforced by precise ink lines, and further added touches of red chalk on the lips and cheek enhance the contrast of skin against the light background.

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Holbein the Younger’s earliest extant portrait drawings likewise employ metalpoint enhanced with red chalk (illus. 7).14 Soon after moving to Basel, the eighteen-year-old Holbein painted a portrait diptych of the mayor of the city, Jacob Meyer zum Hasen, with his wife Dorothea Kannengiesser (illus. 6), signed with the initials ‘h h’ and dated 1516 in the cartouche above Jacob’s head. The overall aesthetic of the composition is broadly reminiscent of some of Holbein the Elder’s portraits, like the 1513 rendition of the prosperous merchant Philipp Adler (illus. 4), which sets the sitter against an abstract blue background framed by a classically profiled architrave and frieze supported by pilasters. Holbein the Younger’s portrait similarly features a blank blue background and a classical archway, here spread across the two panels of the diptych, but he took inspiration from a portrait woodcut by Hans Burgkmair the Elder to set the archway at an angle, creating a more dynamic arrangement (it would 6 Hans Holbein the Younger, Jacob Meyer and Dorothea Kannengiesser, 1516, diptych, oil on limewood.

7 Hans Holbein the Younger, Dorothea Kannengiesser, c. 1516, metalpoint on white prepared paper with red chalk and traces of black crayon.

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also have been difficult to design a classically proportioned archway spread face-on across the two panels).15 The rather fancifully decorated architectural setting is obviously purely imaginative (not to mention difficult to make real sense of spatially), but the two sitters were planned through careful drawings, which established in advance how they would be arranged in the final painting. The metalpoint primarily emphasizes the major outlines of the head and shoulders and the specific shapes of the facial features. Holbein also paid close attention to the contingent draping of Dorothea’s two necklaces (pearls and a chain), while the upper part of her clothing is more quickly sketched in, to be worked up more fully later. Though very delicately applied, the red highlights of the face emphasize the shape and texture of the skin surface, which the painting follows very closely, although Jacob Meyer’s nose was a little reduced between drawing and painting.16 While these very early works, among the earliest datable images Holbein created, employ materials he must have studied with his father, he soon began experimenting with other techniques for taking portrait likenesses. From the early 1520s Holbein began creating his portrait drawings with chalks in various colours, an innovation typically inferred to have been inspired by his documented trip to France in 1524, where he would have had an opportunity to see this technique in use by French artists and followers of Leonardo da Vinci (who had died in France in 1519), although the direct connection is subject to debate.17 Whatever the immediate source of inspiration, Holbein must have found the chalk technique more effective for what he wanted to achieve visually, given

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that he stopped using silverpoint as the central medium of his portrait drawings. Chalk is more versatile in the width and precision of line, as evident for instance in his portrait drawing made about 1525 of the young scholar and lawyer Bonifacius Amerbach (illus. 8): much of it consists of broad strokes roughly sketched in, while in other places Holbein used a sharper point to delineate more precise lines, for instance the individual dark hairs drawn in over a lighter brown base.18 Compared to the drawing of Dorothea Kannengiesser, the Amerbach portrait creates a livelier impression, despite the 8 Hans Holbein the Younger, Bonifacius Amerbach, c. 1525, black and coloured chalk with metalpoint.

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wear to parts of the surface. Where Kannengiesser’s features are precisely outlined, the Amerbach drawing uses contextual modelling to establish the boundaries of the features, and the broad black hat plays a critical visual role on the left side in enabling the face to emerge as if in relief against it. Arguably the far eye merges slightly too much into the darkness (this 9 Hans Holbein the Younger, Margaret, Lady Elyot, c. 1532–4, black and coloured chalks, white bodycolour, and pen and ink on pale pink prepared paper.

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might be an effect of wear rather than the drawing’s original appearance), but the rest of the face appears all the more legible owing to the darker tones that surround it. Amerbach’s lips are slightly parted, and his face appears caught in mid-expression rather than posing dutifully for the artist, lively effects that the subtle modelling of chalk enhanced. The change in materials indicates that, once exposed to the possibilities of chalk (not exploited by his father, as far as is known, except as a supplement to metalpoint), Holbein perceived silverpoint as insufficient competition. In the Amerbach drawing, in particular, he sought a more ‘painterly’ effect that better conveyed colour and lighting, almost impossible to capture with silverpoint line alone. Holbein continued to use coloured chalks for portraits throughout his career, but the drawings made after he moved permanently to London in the year 1532 show two more refinements to the technique, as seen in the later drawing of Margaret, Lady Elyot, stylistically usually dated to about 1532–4 (illus. 9).19 One refinement was the use of coloured paper as the ground, in varying shades of pink, which served as a mid-tone that conveyed a much better impression of flesh.20 With the added touches of red chalk and white highlights, the surface of the skin appears more precisely defined, even when only very delicate traces of the colours have survived. The other introduction was the use of black ink to delineate the main facial features, recalling Holbein the Elder’s occasional use of black ink to reinforce his silverpoint drawings (see illus. 2). Here, however, Holbein applied them more consistently, and the boldness of the refined black lines against the subtle colours of the paper and chalks creates

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a strikingly vivid effect. Compared to the more impressionistic rendition of Amerbach’s face, the ink lines make Lady Elyot’s features appear as if perfectly delineated. These materials thus achieve the best of all worlds, simultaneously defining the facial features with great precision, while conveying their three-dimensional forms and colouring with a lively effect. Holbein’s portrait drawings continued to experiment with different head positions, compositions and degrees of finish (see illus. 69), but in terms of materials he had found his optimal combination. Holbein the Elder also used silverpoint for other life sketches, for instance studies of objects or hands, whether as models for particular paintings (as with an extant set used for a painting of St Sebastian), or seemingly independent works, as in a drawing now in Berlin (illus. 10).21 Like his portrait sketches, this combines outline with hatched shading to capture the contingent shapes of the hands and sleeves as seen from a specific viewpoint. Although the two hands on this sheet appear conjoined, they must have been drawn separately, since their relative positioning cannot be achieved by a single individual at one time; it is unclear whether they were designed together or simply ended up running into each other on the page. A few extra faint lines around the edges of some of the fingers indicate that Holbein the Elder tried out some initial strokes before finding the precise shapes he wanted. Very few of Holbein the Younger’s such studies survive, but those that do show that here again he turned away from silverpoint, as in his hand studies for the 1523 portrait of Erasmus now in London (illus. 11).22 Although some silverpoint has been used to establish the outlines of the top and

10 Hans Holbein the Elder, studies of hands, c. 1496–1510, metalpoint on light brown prepared paper.

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bottom hands, they are primarily defined through extensive red chalk modelling. Holbein likely started with the hand at the top, outlining the four main fingers and beginning to shade them in, before deciding against the shape – perhaps dissatisfied in particular with the little and/or index fingers – and, turning the sheet around, started again at the other 11 Hans Holbein the Younger, Studies of hands, c. 1523, metalpoint, black crayon and red chalk on paper, grey primed on one side.

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edge. This time he worked up all four fingers and a glimpse of the thumb, rendering the specific placement and consequent lighting of each part in a much more defined structure than his father’s somewhat rubbery drawn hands. This served as a model for the left hand in the painted portrait of Erasmus that was probably sent as a gift to Erasmus’s patron William Warham (see illus. 61), though with the little finger pulled slightly further apart and the sleeve covering more of the hand. In contrast to this welldefined study, the lively sketch in the middle of the sheet uses a quick application of black chalk to convey the action of writing. Here Holbein did not aim to delineate each part of the hand exactly: for instance, the outline of the fingers at the upper left is extremely irregular, and the diagonal lines of shading at the base of the thumb to the right do not convey exactly where the surface of the skin lies. Instead the sketch captures an impression of the hand’s motion and the energy expended at various points of the fingers when holding a reed pen. Holbein depicted Erasmus grasping a pen similarly in another portrait, though seen from a different angle, so we can conclude that this sketch was one of a set of drawings in which he contemplated various possibilities before deciding on the final positions for different portrait compositions.23 Unfortunately, very few of Holbein’s quick drawings of this type survive, and this one might have escaped destruction only by being on the same page as the hand that served as a painting model. Metalpoint was only one drawing technique employed by the elder Holbein: when making composition drawings for figural groups or designs for entire images, he typically used

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ink and wash as the primary materials,24 a technique also used by his son. Whether Holbein the Younger ever used this medium in preparation for panel paintings is unknown, but some examples survive related to his large-scale wall paintings (see illus. 20), as well as designs for other media like stained glass. Stained-glass panels were particularly popular in southern Germany and the Swiss cantons, where individuals and institutions frequently commissioned panels destined for a variety of religious and secular locations, some depicting saints or religious narratives, others focusing on coats of arms and other secular motifs.25 A number of Holbein’s extant drawings, including several that have been identified as copies or variations after lost originals, indicate that glass designs constituted a significant part of his early work, and that other artists in the region drew inspiration from his distinctive style.26 The use of wash in Holbein’s drawings implies his awareness of the visual properties of the final medium, since wash creates visual effects that are closely analogous to glass, although the proficiency of Holbein’s technique evolved over the first decade of his career.27 During this time he mostly worked in Basel, other than a period between 1517 and 1519 when he lived and worked in another Swiss city, Lucerne. One of his earliest extant stained-glass designs is dated 1517 in an inscription at the bottom that also identifies the patron as Hans Fleckenstein of Lucerne, about whom not a great deal is known, though he was possibly the landlord of an inn, and the panel might have been made for an archers’ chamber in the city (illus. 12).28 Two elaborately dressed mercenary soldiers stand before a triumphal arch flanked at architrave level by small figures of saints

12 Hans Holbein the Younger, Design for a Stained-glass Window for Hans Fleckenstein, 1517, black pen and ink, grey wash over preliminary drawing in black crayon.

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Barbara and Sebastian. All of the main outlines are clearly defined with bold black lines, while deep shading in ink wash sets out their three-dimensional forms. The space behind the arch has been left entirely blank, and in the final glass (which does not survive) this was probably left as undifferentiated 13 Hans Holbein the Younger, Stained-glass Passion Series: Crucifixion, c. 1528, black pen and ink over preliminary chalk drawing with grey wash.

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coloured glass, perhaps blue, while other parts of the panel would more likely be made of clear glass, partially overpainted with black lines, semi-translucent washes and yellow stain to reproduce Holbein’s design. The mercenaries hold up a coat of arms that appears flatly planar in contrast to their own three-dimensional forms; as the visual marker of the patron’s identity, it needed to be extremely legible to best serve its intended function. The glass painter would have needed to find out the correct colours for the coat of arms, and Holbein also left it to him (professional glass painters were typically men) to determine which colours to use in the rest of the image, as well as where to insert any lead lines needed to make the final glass panel structurally stable.29 The use of wash shading, however, was ideal for conveying the light-and-shade relationships that the glass painter would use his materials to reproduce. This can be better appreciated by considering one of Holbein’s later stained-glass designs alongside an example 14 Unidentified artist after Hans Holbein the Younger, Crucifixion (detail), c. 1600, pot-metal, flashed and clear glass, vitreous paint, yellow stain, and sanguine.

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of that same design translated into glass. The glass series made in the early sixteenth century no longer survives, but later panels based on Holbein’s designs still convey an excellent sense of how glass painters worked.30 The Crucifixion drawing (illus. 13) was one of a series of at least ten images depicting different episodes of Christ’s suffering and death. Elaborately decorated columns supporting an architrave, differently designed for each panel, frame the central narratives: here Christ on the cross is flanked by the good and bad thieves, with Roman soldiers and St John and the Virgin Mary standing at the foot of the cross. Stylistically and technically this appears to be significantly later than the Fleckenstein panel, although the exact dating is uncertain and depends on stylistic analysis. Each figure is composed in an elegant yet precise form that was characteristic of Holbein’s more mature style of representation, and where the simpler Fleckenstein panel uses strong light-and-dark contrasts, the Crucifixion commands a more subtle and sophisticated handling of wash shading to visually communicate its complex figural narrative. Holbein used an unusual perspective both to increase visual interest and to enhance certain forms. The angled view onto the central cross creates a brightly lit side face and a dark frontal face of the structure against which Christ’s body hangs, whereas the thief to the right faces the light, and the other thief is only partially seen at the left edge, his cross boldly lit from the back while the edge of his body is immersed in shadow. A less carefully controlled use of shading would have left the scene merely visually confusing. As with the earlier Fleckenstein panel, Holbein gave no indication of potential colours, although it seems likely that it

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was always intended to be constructed largely of uncoloured glass, as seen in one of the later glass panels made after this design (illus. 14), in which coloured glass and leading were used only in the surrounding architectural frame.31 The main composition is created from enamel paint applied onto transparent glass, enhanced by a few touches of yellow stain. The glass painter used subtle colouring to reinforce the contrast between different parts of the composition, such as the subtle pinks in the flesh tones juxtaposed against the lit and shaded planes of the wooden cross and ladder. Most of the panel’s mid-tone shading and modelling were created by applying thin strokes of wash paint onto the glass and then brushing or wiping parts of it away to create highlights, for instance on Christ’s loincloth, and the bright section of sky just to the right of his torso. The glass would then have been fired to seal the paint onto the glass surface. Holbein’s design used materials that conveyed a general sense of the effects to be achieved, while entrusting the expertise of the glass-maker to effectively translate the concept into the painted glass medium. An analogous approach to designing for another medium can be inferred for Holbein’s designs for book publishers, a central component of his work during the first part of his career. Basel’s thriving publishing industry may have been one of the major reasons why the two Holbein brothers moved there. Where their father appears to have designed only a small handful of prints, both of the Holbein brothers began working in 1516 for Johann Froben, one of northern Europe’s most important humanist publishers.32 After producing a number of print designs Ambrosius evidently died while still in his mid-twenties, since all trace of him vanishes after 1518,

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but when Hans returned to Basel from Lucerne (perhaps as a consequence of his brother’s death?), he resumed working with Froben and other Basel publishers for several more years. Printers of that era added visual imagery to their publications using woodblocks or metal blocks, which were cut in relief to produce the image. The process can be better understood by studying a series of partially cut, but mostly unfinished, woodblocks, the designs of which have been attributed to Albrecht Dürer when he was about age 21 (illus. 15, 16 and 17). The father of Bonifacius Amerbach, Johann Amerbach – an older colleague and former business partner of Froben – had intended to publish an illustrated edition of the comedies of the ancient Roman writer Terence, and Dürer (or another artist with experience of Nuremberg woodcuts) probably completed the designs for the play The Self-tormenter around 1492, while he was working as a journeyman in Basel.33 To design a printed image, artists could either draw the subject separately on paper, which the cutter then copied onto

15 Albrecht Dürer (?), Terence’s The Self-tormenter (Heauton Timouroumenos): Syrus, Clitipho and Chremes, c. 1492, uncut woodblock.

16 Albrecht Dürer (?, design) and unidentified cutter, Terence’s The Selftormenter (Heauton Timouroumenos): Clitipho, Menedemus, Chremes and Syrus, c. 1492, partially cut woodblock.

17 Albrecht Dürer (?, design) and unidentified cutter, Terence’s The Self Tormenter (Heauton Timouroumenos): Clitipho, Menedemus, Chremes and Syrus, c. 1492, printed in the 19th century, woodcut.

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the block, or the designer might draw directly on the surface of the block itself. This image necessarily vanishes in the course of making the final print, but since most of the Terence woodblocks were never completed, the design drawings are still visible on the blocks (illus. 15). An outbreak of plague in the winter of 1492/3 in Basel might have halted production,34 although another critical factor must be that a rival publisher in Lyon, Johann Trechsel, published another edition in 1493.35 Amerbach might therefore have lost confidence that another version of the same material would be a commercial success, in which case he would have paid Dürer and other contributors for their work so far and cut his losses there. But he kept the woodblocks in case the project was revived at a later date, as happened, for example, with Holbein’s Dance of Death and Icones series (see illus. 71 and 19), leaving them as extremely rare material exemplars of how print designs were made. Even if the attribution of the designs to Dürer is correct,36 it remains unclear which, if any, of the drawings might be Dürer’s or the cutter’s copy. To complete the carved woodblock, as seen in one of the few woodblocks of the series that was mostly, but not fully, cut (illus. 16), the carver used a knife to gouge out the top layer of the un-drawn parts of the block’s surface, leaving behind in relief the lines that would be printed black in the final image. To print, thick ink would be rolled across the surface of the block, and then a slightly dampened sheet of paper would be applied to it within a press, using high pressure to ensure even printing.37 The printed image appears in reverse of what is seen on the block itself, as can be seen in some nineteenth-century imprints made from the partially completed woodblocks (illus. 17), where the wide

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black sections print the surface where the block had not yet been cut. The character Syrus with a feather in his cap appears at the left of the woodblock facing right, whereas in the final printed image he appears at the right side facing left. Dürer would have taken that into account when designing the image: a print designer always had to draw in reverse of what the final printed image was meant to look like, unless he left it to the cutter to reverse the design on the block. Stylistically the final prints appear somewhat different from the woodblock drawings, which are closer to Dürer’s typical style. Where a pen could produce extremely fine and expressive lines, the cutter – who had the challenging task of cutting out all of the white spaces around them – made the lines simpler and more straightforward: many of them are significantly straightened, while the curved ones tend to be more rigid and predictable than in the drawings. Thus the prints have a somewhat more mechanical quality than the original drawings. In the following years Dürer developed the woodcut technique, often cutting blocks himself and using his exceptional technical skill to imbue the lines with a much livelier style, thus challenging the previous limitations in what could be achieved visually with woodcut.38 But the Terence woodblocks show how a cutter who executed someone else’s designs might not always fully capture the original artist’s style. This is an essential consideration in the prints whose design is attributed to Holbein, given that he never executed prints himself, and none of the designs survive independently. A further complication is that several different professional cutters made Holbein’s prints across his lifetime, with styles of their own and varying degrees of skill. Yet another complicating

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factor is that a couple of Holbein’s cutters typically executed his prints not in woodcut but as metalcuts – that is, carving in relief into a metal block, typically copper (which is more commonly used for intaglio printmaking, where the lines to be printed are engraved into the surface of a copper plate). Metalcuts have an advantage over woodblocks in that the cutting can be finer, and the block is more durable, but the quality of the line is also harder to control, plus transferring a drawing onto a metal plate seems to have been more challenging than transferring it onto a wooden block.39 All of these factors affect the process of attribution and interpretation: given that most prints from this period are not signed – and when so, usually only with the initials of the cutter – scholars have to ‘look through’ the printed medium to some extent to decide which images were probably Holbein’s designs. It is also possible that he did not draw his designs with the exact lines he expected the designer to cut; similarly to the stained-glass designs, the images could have left significant leeway for the cutter to decide exactly how to construct individual lines to create the intended effect.40 As a result, the quality and style of the woodcuts and metalcuts attributed to Holbein vary considerably. Holbein’s print designs were always made to accompany texts. Printing with moveable type follows exactly the same principle as relief-image printing: the individual letters of printed type are made up of small metal rods with an individual reversed letter in relief at one end, and a series of these letters are arranged next to each other in a matrix to form written text backwards (which then prints forwards). Where Dürer’s Terence woodblocks illustrated a particular text, and thus could only be used for that work, the great

18 Hans Holbein the Younger (design) and unidentified cutter, title border design with children’s triumph, c. 1517, woodcut, printed in Erasmus, In hoc libello continentur Querela pacis (1518).

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majority of Holbein’s images for Basel publishers consisted of decorative alphabet initials (see illus. 29–31, 70) and title page borders that depicted generic subject matter and episodes from ancient history or mythology. This kind of imagery had a greater commercial flexibility because it could be applied interchangeably to many different texts with a generally humanist character. For instance, in 1517 Holbein designed a title page border with a playful procession of naked boys across the bottom, more putti climbing up foliage along the sides, and a decorative frieze with sphinxes at the top (illus. 18). The woodblock was first used for a Latin text by Michele Ricci on the histories of European kings, then re-used for several other books, including the 1518 edition shown here of various works by Erasmus, starting with Querela pacis (Complaint of Peace) on the futility of war. 41 The putti and foliage designs have nothing directly to do with any of these texts; they primarily signal a general affinity to classical subjects, given the prevalence of putti within classical imagery and the popularity of Renaissance-style foliage designs among humanist audiences. The composition appears very crowded, and the modelling lines as well as some outlines of major forms, such as some of the putti faces, lack the delicacy we would expect from Holbein’s own hand. It thus seems likely that the unidentified cutter was not able to fully replicate the quality of what Holbein drew, although the overall style is taken to be close enough to Holbein’s work to attribute the design to him. Several of Holbein’s later cutters, most of whom specialized in woodcuts, possessed greater technical skill, resulting in much more impressive imagery that leads us to think we see

19 Hans Holbein the Younger (design) and Veit Specklin (cutting), Sacrifice of King Achaz, design c. 1525–6 or c. 1528–9, woodcut, printed in Historiarum veteris Instrumenti icones ad vivum expressae (1538).

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in them more of Holbein’s original design, although we may equally be witnessing the cutters’ own talents. That is particularly evident in two print series, the so-called Dance of Death and the Icones or Old Testament Bible images, which Holbein designed sometime around the mid-1520s, although they were not completed and printed until 1538, when Melchior and Gaspar Trechsel, sons of the Johann Trechsel who published the Terence edition of 1493, finally published them in Lyon.42 Most of the Dance of Death images (see illus. 71) were cut by the supremely talented Hans Lützelburger, whereas the slightly later Icones (illus. 19) were cut by a small team including Veit Specklin.43 Each image in the sequence encapsulates an episode or chapter from the Old Testament, and the Trechsels initially published them not within a full Bible but individually with short captions (and poems in some editions) summarizing the key themes of the biblical chapter or narrative. For example, the summary and illustration to 4 Kings, chapter 16 (in the modern biblical nomenclature equivalent to 2 Kings 16) both distil a text that in the original Latin Vulgate is about 450 words long, describing how the idolatrous Achaz, king of Judah, conducted inappropriate sacrifices and rituals, sought military help from the king of the Assyrians when he was besieged by the kings of Syria and Israel, and imitated the Assyrians’ pagan altar. The woodcut does not recount each individual detail of the chapter but focuses in the foreground on the king offering a sacrifice on an altar, while the crowd of people outside the city gate in the background, some evidently carrying lances, conveys a general impression of the military conflicts with which he

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was engaged. Foregrounding Achaz’s sacrifice would have held a particular resonance by the mid-1520s, when religious reformers insisted that a great deal of traditional religious practice, including the ‘sacrifice’ of the Mass conducted on an altar, had descended into idolatry. In comparison with the earlier title page, this small woodcut – measuring only 6.1 by 8.7 centimetres – shows great delicacy and elegance, for instance in the lines of the fire sweeping up from the altar in the foreground. The juxtaposition of foreground figures against a far distant background, a recurring motif in many of these images, creates an expansive impression, a visual sensation that a great narrative encompassing significant time and space has been compressed down to essentials. Although we cannot now fully recover how much of the image is due to Holbein and how much to the cutter, it is clear that in this case the cutter had the technical skill to bring a powerful artistic vision to fruition; equally, it seems a logical inference that by this time Holbein had acquired sufficient experience to be able to design the most effective composition achievable in the medium. Holbein’s lost print designs would have precisely matched the size of the final intended image. Indeed, most of his extant preparatory and design drawings were made on the same (or very similar) scale as any final works they relate to. On a few occasions, however, he painted entire walls of buildings, the planning of which entailed a more complex process of moving from much smaller-scale designs to full-scale painting. Unfortunately none of the wall paintings survive in their entirety, which makes it particularly challenging to reconstruct these working processes, including how far he might have

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used assistants for the final execution. The first known of these works, the Hertenstein House facade made in 1518 in Lucerne, arranged a series of historical scenes across the surface of the wall, divided by decorative architectural bands, according to two preparatory drawings from Holbein’s own hand and early nineteenth-century watercolour copies of the full facade, by then heavily repainted, made shortly before the building was torn down. The house was commissioned by its owner, Jacob van Hertenstein, a wealthy merchant of noble origins and at the time the head of the government in Lucerne. 44 A couple of years later the goldsmith Balthasar Angelroth hired Holbein to paint the Haus zum Tanz or House of the Dance in Basel, which was located on a street corner with two adjoining walls both visible to passers-by. Although this building too was torn down in the nineteenth century, the design is known from detailed drawings, apparently of the final design, by Holbein and his followers, and a drawing also survives of the left-hand wall at an earlier stage of the process, while Holbein was still working out the visual structure (illus. 20).45 These drawings indicate that Holbein took advantage of the two adjacent walls to create a more ambitious design than the Hertenstein House, spreading a complex architectural construction across the two surfaces. In the study for the left wall, the blank forms in dark grey represent the location of windows and doors in the building, around which in the upper storeys Holbein sketched figures and architecture that break down the flat surface of the wall into an illusory fantasia, extending back in multiple layers. Holbein had to estimate how this design, drawn onto a relatively small sheet of paper, might look once painted in full

20 Hans Holbein the Younger, design for Haus zum Tanz facade on Eisengasse, c. 1520, black pen and ink over preliminary chalk drawing with grey wash.

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size onto the actual building, so in this preliminary drawing his concern was not to draw each line with exact precision, or to work out the colouring of the various details (which were added at a later stage), but to create a general impression of the spatial setting and how the representation of light and shadow would help generate the perspectival illusion. He did not use a mathematical single-point perspective here or in the final design; instead the lines recede in an approximate manner towards the lower right, which would suit a general point of view from the ground and towards the right side of the building, without focusing an ideal viewing experience on a single position. This was the general view that people would have experienced when they crossed the Rhine bridge from Kleinbasel heading south into Basel proper, emerging from the tower at the end of the bridge onto the Eisengasse street, on which the House of the Dance was located. The highly finished drawings indicate that Holbein adjusted the final composition significantly; for instance, he repositioned the archway at the upper level to the left, so that it stood in between the two windows rather than framing the right one. Presumably he judged that on the real building, the obvious front-surface position of the actual windows would have interfered with the illusion of depth, so he repositioned the architectural surrounds so that the two windows both appeared on a forward frontal plane, framing the archway that extended back between them. It is unknown how Holbein went about scaling up the design, but perhaps he used cartoons – full-scale drawings on paper of segments of the design – to transfer the composition onto the walls, as he did some two decades later when he created for Whitehall

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Palace a large-scale interior wall painting of Henry viii with his parents and third wife Jane Seymour (see illus. 65). In addition to designing two-dimensional images, Holbein also made designs for other kinds of objects, work that seems to have expanded greatly after he moved to England and became connected with the royal court of Henry viii. Holbein was appointed as painter to the king by 1536 at the latest, and in addition to producing designs for the king himself, he was probably in demand from other noble patrons to design metalwork, jewellery and the like. This deduction follows from the existence of well over 250 drawings of this kind, mostly in pen and ink, though none are signed, and their current attribution to Holbein (as well as the dating of most of them towards the later part of his career) depends on stylistic analysis as well as historical attributions and provenance.46 In very few cases is it known precisely when or for whom the designs were made, although given their format, most of them must have been produced as models for goldsmiths or other relevant craftsmen to execute as real objects, while a handful of others might simply record existing pieces. 47 Holbein could have learned some of the techniques for metalwork design from his father, but he also spent much of his life in close contact with goldsmiths, both in Basel and in London, and his two sons Philip and Jacob both became goldsmiths, indicating the close connection in that era between the professions.48 Virtually nothing is known about how Holbein’s metalwork designs were produced and executed, for instance whether clients would have approached Holbein directly or commissioned the objects through the goldsmith. In any case, the quality of most of these drawings leads us to think that

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Holbein’s obvious talents must have generated demand for this kind of work; and like the stained-glass designs, they suggest an astute understanding of what was essential to their final medium. One of the designs for a belt buckle (illus. 21), for instance, uses a black ground – solid at the top, though rendered lower down with closely spaced horizontal lines – to set off the parts that would presumably be made in silver. 49 On either side of the projecting belt tab Holbein designed flat interlacing forms that are broadly vegetal, though not identifiable as any specific plant type, in a style sometimes referred to as ‘Moorish’ or moresque.50 The leaf-like forms flow along in parts that curl repeatedly in opposing directions, creating a pleasingly elegant impression as they cross paths with delicate curlicued stems. The natural feel of the curved shapes is counteracted by the bilateral symmetry of the pattern, giving a simultaneous impression of order and abundant flowering. This carefully rendered design must have been preceded by sketchier drawings in which Holbein worked out the idea, although the loss of such material means that we are unable to trace how he arrived at the final concept. The forms are on the one hand finely drawn – at a quick glance looking extremely precise – but at the same time they avoid the kind of 21 Hans Holbein the Younger, design for a belt, c. 1532–43, pen and black ink with grey and black wash.

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mechanical exactitude that would render them hard and lifeless; they retain a hand-crafted sensibility conveying a lively impression. The balance is much like the relationship in Holbein’s portrait drawings between the precision of the ink lines and the contingent subtle modelling of the coloured chalks. Another of Holbein’s metalwork designs, a pen-and-ink study for a cup commissioned by Henry viii for Jane Seymour (see illus. 22), provides a little more insight into the design process. The drawing now in the British Museum represents a late, but not quite final, stage of design. Careful study of the drawn lines indicates that Holbein used the offset technique to partially replicate the forms symmetrically across the central vertical axis: he first drew some of the key lines of the design on the left side, then folded the paper across the middle while the ink was still wet to mirror-copy them onto the right side. However, he continued to work up the details on each side of the drawing, with some variations between the two halves.51 In some places the cup itself was not entirely symmetrical, for instance in the different heads of the four round medallions set around the middle (one seen here face-on and two others in profile); similarly, in the band immediately below that, the initials h and i (for Henry and Jane) appear as a series of interlaces between set jewels, while Jane Seymour’s motto ‘Bound to obey and serve’ is inscribed around the cup towards the top and again further down. Some of the other left-to-right differences appear to be areas where Holbein was considering alternatives in the final design, such as the specific format of the floral decoration in between the medallions (whose sketchy and imprecise quality has led some

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viewers to question their execution by Holbein).52 The shield at the top has been left blank in the drawing, but a later inventory description of the actual cup states that it showed Jane’s personal and royal coats of arms. Another Seymour cup drawing in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, whose slightly more mechanical style has led to the suggestion that the whole drawing was executed by an assistant rather than Holbein himself,53 appears to represent the final design. Here all the elements are now more fully worked out across the entire image, for instance choosing the right-hand alternative for the between-medallion floral design, and showing the pattern more precisely. This drawing includes coloured washes to make the design easier to interpret, for example colouring in sections of the floral band just above the medallions to show where niello forms should be offset against the metal, which makes the pattern far easier to understand visually. Like the belt design and the earlier cup design, the Ashmolean drawing creates an initial impression of exact symmetry, but with slight variations revealed on close inspection. This final drawing could have served two different functions: possibly shown to the king for his final approval, then given to the goldsmith as a model for the object. Essential to the latter function is the fact that these drawings are not made in single-point perspective: we do not see the object from a single eye level, which would require parts above or below that to be shown as if seen slightly from above or below; instead, the depiction is an elevation, with each element of the cup seen exactly face-on, which would give the goldsmith a precisely scaled design from which to work. At the same time, the washes in the Oxford drawing

22 Hans Holbein the Younger, design for a cup for Jane Seymour, c. 1536–7, pen and brush in black ink.

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might have been added for the benefit of the king or other viewers, since by showing how light would hit the cup as a three-dimensional form, they enhance its legibility as a material object. But this impression of three-dimensionality could also have aided the goldsmith, for instance by confirming the relative slope of the surface of each horizontal band. Even so, as with Holbein’s stained-glass and print designs, the goldsmith still would have needed to draw upon his own expertise and mastery of his materials to translate the drawing into the finished product. In all of these works, careful analysis of their material techniques leads to inferences about Holbein’s working methods. Over the course of his life he adapted new ways of representing suitable for different purposes and types of image. Initially he worked in close affinity with what he must have learned in his childhood, but he quickly moved beyond inherited techniques to experiment with new materials, at the same time as his representational style also evolved. In the next chapter we will see how this capacity to adapt and to incorporate new ideas was particularly critical for humanist subject matter, which was to become central to his work.

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Education, Knowledge, Styles

W

e now turn to another form of knowledge that would have been essential for Holbein’s professional advancement: his engagement with new humanist learning. In the early sixteenth century in Germany, two different visual styles coexisted: the Deutsch or German style, employing Gothic features that would have been long familiar in native imagery, and the newer Welsch (Italianate) style that borrowed and reinterpreted classical elements inspired by recent art in Italy, which in turn looked back to (though did not always strictly imitate) ancient, especially Roman, art.1 The distinctions between these two styles not only concerned decorative motifs and architectural structures, since each was also associated with different subject matter and cultural context: the Deutsch increasingly evoked conceptions of German national identity, while the Welsch evoked the new forms of classical learning promoted within humanism. While Holbein the Elder was a thoroughly Deutsch artist for most of his career, until he began adopting Welsch elements in his later years (as in his portrait of Philipp Adler, see illus. 4), the Welsch style was just gaining currency during the younger Holbein’s childhood, and as he grew up he would have experienced it as that which was cutting edge. No wonder

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then that throughout his own work, this new Renaissance style predominated. An important monument in Augsburg to the development and spread of the new style was the construction of the first Renaissance-style architecture in northern Europe, the Fugger chapel in the church of St Anna (illus. 23), a Carmelite monastery that later became a Lutheran parish church. In 1509 the three brothers Ulrich, Georg and Jakob Fugger contracted with the monastery to construct a new burial chapel for themselves and their families, built as an extension onto the west end of the nave. The main part of the building work lasted until 1512, and the remainder of the construction – the carved relief epitaphs, the organ, the railings and so on – was carried out until the chapel’s dedication in 1518.2 Holbein left for Basel before the chapel was completed, but he was around eleven years old when the work began, and no doubt he would have eagerly watched progress on it over the next few years, the formative years of his own education. Whereas many privately founded chapels are effectively closed off by walls or gates, here the chapel opens out onto the nave and occupies the full height of the church, so that it appears more like an integral component of the church itself. At the time of construction, the articulation of the chapel architecture differed from that of the rest of the church, although this was altered in an eighteenth-century renovation.3 The height of the space underneath the main upper-level architrave is divided into two, marked at midlevel by another smaller architrave in light grey, held up by pilasters supported in turn by articulated bases. These elements are decorated with marbled squares, rectangles and

23 Fugger Chapel, 1509–18, St Anna, Augsburg.

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roundels, like the decorative architecture depicted in Holbein the Elder’s portrait of Philipp Adler (illus. 4), which was painted soon after the architecture of the Fugger chapel had been completed and likely reflects the patron’s (as much as the artist’s) appreciation of the new style. The pilasters running along the back wall, each projecting forward slightly, frame four rounded-arch openings, whose stonework is marked by capitals at the line where the arches spring. Inside the arches are the most important part of the chapel’s furnishings, relief panels probably designed by Albrecht Dürer and Hans Burgkmair the Elder, which commemorate the three Fugger brothers who paid for the chapel construction and were buried underneath it. Various other artists carried out the relief carving and the other elements of the chapel: the low balustrade marking the chapel’s boundary with the nave; the central carved grouping of Christ held up by angels (probably by Hans Daucher); the highly decorated organ constructed by Jan van Dobraw, with wings painted by Jörg Breu; the carved wooden choir-stalls at the right and left (now mostly gone); the floor, tiled with an elaborate geometric pattern.4 Holbein could have learned a number of important principles from the Fugger chapel, although his own work did not follow its lessons very assiduously. The key feature of the chapel concerns balance. The mathematical proportions of the architecture, particularly the structure of the rounded arches and their architraves, constituted the starting point from which the rest of the chapel design followed. All of the artists involved, while contributing their own expertise, subjected themselves to this unifying conception, in which a

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sense of geometric proportion was paramount. The chapel’s marbled panels and surrounding grey stonework divide the walls into sub-units whose particular size and shape was carefully planned to create an experience of aesthetic harmony. The decoration is relatively restrained throughout the chapel, if somewhat more exuberant on the painted and gilded organ, which was carefully designed to perfectly frame the circular window and link the vaulted clerestory space to the chapel below it. Aspects of the chapel’s classical style appear in Holbein’s later work, but his classical-style depictions tend to be far more decorative and exuberant, focusing more on imaginative re-combination of classical elements rather than an underlying rational system. For example, although his drawing for the Haus zum Tanz wall painting (see illus. 20) includes many individual features of classical architecture – roundels, architraves, rounded archways, pilasters and columns on bases, each individually well balanced – the overall structure is deliberately highly imaginative and makes very little sense as a three-dimensional space, particularly the elements projecting forward and above. It can far more easily be depicted in painting than it could be built in real life, and this departure from reality seems to be an essential part of Holbein’s aim. Similarly, while the setting of the Fleckenstein stained-glass panel (see illus. 12) shows a solid grasp of classical architectural principles, the architectural framing of the later Crucifixion panel (see illus. 13) displays extremely odd shapes and proportions, elaborating imaginative motifs from the Welsch style without putting them together in a truly classical manner. What Holbein encountered growing up in Augsburg, then, were

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not simply models to follow, but systems of design with which to experiment. Classical concepts could easily be applied to religious subject matter: most of the imagery throughout the Fugger chapel conveys well-known Christian iconographies, from the sculptural group of Christ and the angels, to the epitaph reliefs depicting saints and Christ’s burial and resurrection, to the organ wings’ depictions of the ascensions of Christ and the Virgin Mary, which are heavily inspired by Italian models.5 Only the small lower shutters of the organ depart from familiar precedent in depicting subjects related to the discovery and dissemination of music, itself considered at that time to be governed by mathematical proportions.6 But while the great majority of the works by the contemporaries of Holbein the Elder dealt with familiar religious subjects, artists of his son’s generation had to expand into new fields, since interest in the Welsch style went hand in hand with a renewed interest in ancient history and mythology, central subjects within the new humanist education just coming into Germany and competing with older modes of teaching.7 Originating in Italy, humanism centred on appreciation of the cultural achievements of the ancient world, seeking to recover some of the specific formats of ancient sources (both literary and visual), understanding its cultural references, and adapting the underlying principles for use in the present day. In northern Europe the most important exemplar of the humanist outlook was the Dutch scholar Erasmus, who published works on an extremely wide range of topics, encompassing classical texts as well as their potential application to contemporary Christian life, such as recovering the original language of the Bible and integrating

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classical ethics with religious precepts.8 A central feature for Holbein’s career, then, was that his images needed to demonstrate a facility with classical subject matter that competed on the same intellectual level as texts, serving as effective pictorial counterparts to humanist writing. Erasmus was working closely with the Basel publisher Johann Froben at the time that the young Holbein brothers moved there. How much they would have already encountered his or similar works back in Augsburg can only be a matter of speculation, but Augsburg was itself a major publishing centre (including of humanist texts), and it seems extremely likely that the Holbeins would have well understood the growing importance of the new learning, and the potential for artists to contribute to it with designs for books, since this immediately became a central focus of their work when they moved to Basel. Nevertheless, they almost certainly would not have received the kind of humanist education that included advanced Latin. The specific content of Augsburg education in this period is not well documented, but all of the organized schools (as opposed to individual tutoring) were run by religious institutions. Boys from prominent families destined for an advanced professional career, such as in the Church, law or medicine, would typically study in one of the five higher-level schools run by the city’s monasteries and collegiate churches, where boys would learn to read and write in Latin as well as their vernacular German, plus some rudiments of the four mathematical arts (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy).9 However, as sons of a craftsman, the Holbein brothers would surely have attended one of the second-tier parish schools in Augsburg, where they might

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have learned a bit of Latin, but the emphasis would lie on vernacular literacy and numeracy. Boys from merchant families were sometimes sent to schools in Italy that focused on the mathematics essential for business (practical arithmetic and problem solving),10 although the Holbeins most likely learned their business skills in the workshop: negotiating contracts, essential accounting, employment of apprentices and assistants. Despite their probable lack of a full humanist education, the Holbein brothers demonstrated knowledge of classical subjects in their first surviving artworks, a set of drawings made in the margins of a printed copy of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. The text, Moriae encomium in Latin, is an entertaining but highly learned satire in which the female personification of Folly gives a speech praising herself and her many human followers: thus the title refers both to folly being praised, and Folly doing the praising. Erasmus used the text to critique various aspects of contemporary society, ranging from the everyday foolishness of ordinary people to the misguided thinking of theologians and the dangerous behaviour of political leaders, although voicing the text through Folly enabled him to deflect complete identification with her stated opinions (the text incited some controversy, particularly for its theological critiques).11 In pinpointing the stupidity of people’s actions and attitudes, Folly paradoxically reveals herself as more wise than most, particularly in the last section of the text where she points out how forms of behaviour that are authentically Christian, such as helping others and shunning wealth and status to focus on God, might be seen as a kind of foolishness.

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The copy to which the Holbeins added their drawings was owned by Oswald Myconius, a young Latin teacher in Basel, who wrote an inscription at the front noting that the drawings had been done over a period of ten days at the end of 1515, and that Erasmus himself had enjoyed seeing them. Myconius also recounted on another page that on 29 December, when the drawing opposite (Hans’s depiction of a hunt) was being completed, a group of hoodlums forced their way into the school at his house and broke some windows, upsetting his wife and young son; he himself returned home shortly afterwards and, after confronting the ruffians, ended up with a sword wound to his right hand.12 Further evidence about the sequence of work comes from the use of materials. Throughout his copy Myconius wrote marginal inscriptions in Latin that agreed or argued with ideas, recounted relevant anecdotes, or highlighted important references. Most of these were written in a brown/black ink, with other notations and underlinings in red.13 Most of Holbein’s drawings, particularly on the earlier pages, appear to have been made with the same kind of ink, which has faded slightly to brown (illus. 24 and 25). Many of these also use a comparatively wide nib and have a highly ‘sketchy’ quality, while others are somewhat more careful. The drawings towards the latter part of the text, plus a few added to earlier pages, are in a different black ink and made with a fine nib, enabling more refined detail. Only the first and last of these later pages include red underlining by Myconius, and they also have many fewer of his marginal notations. From all of this evidence we can surmise that the Holbein brothers, or at least Hans (who did most of the drawings,

24 Hans Holbein the Younger, Praise of Folly: Quintus Sertorius’ Analogy of the Horse Tail, and The People, pen and ink, in Erasmus, Moriae encomium (1515).

25 Hans Holbein the Younger, Praise of Folly: Apollo and Niobe, pen and ink, in Erasmus, Moriae encomium (1515).

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with just a couple added by Ambrosius), worked through the text with Myconius’s help, in two distinct phases. Myconius made most of his own notations during the first phase, while Holbein continued working through the second phase, and was inspired to make a few additions to earlier pages after he had read through later sections.14 The Holbein brothers would have needed some help in reading Erasmus’s book since its use of the Latin language is extremely sophisticated, as is its deployment of humanist knowledge: scattered throughout are casual in-joke references to mythological figures and tropes, knowledge of which is essential to fully grasp the text’s meaning. This particular edition, published earlier in the year by Johann Froben, included a Latin commentary written by the scholar Gerhard Lister (with additions by Erasmus himself ), which explained some of the classical tropes and in other ways sought to clarify the meaning.15 Lister’s commentary is printed in a small font surrounding the main text in a larger font, of greatly varying length on different pages. The edition also highlighted particular ideas or motifs by placing relevant words and phrases at the edge of the text in the margin. Holbein’s drawings, some of which he had to squeeze between previous written annotations by Myconius, serve an analogous function to the annotations: most of them highlight brief references to a character or anecdote with a full visualization of the subject, sometimes in a way that aligns with the text’s intentions, in other cases acting as a counterpoint or visual commentary. They demonstrate advanced intellectual engagement with Erasmus’s text, even though there is little evidence throughout Holbein’s career that he had a truly advanced knowledge of Latin, the kind only acquired

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by several years of intensive study.16 He evidently knew it enough to be able to work with it (albeit sometimes with errors, as on the Melanchthon roundel, see illus. 3), but, in contrast for instance to Albrecht Dürer, he was not a correspondent among humanist scholarly circles, even though he came to know many of them through artistic commissions. Possibly the drawings were a form of payment for Myconius’s help with the text, though they also served the very practical purpose of advertising what the newcomers to Basel were capable of. The first and last drawings in the book depict the metascenario of the text: both show Folly addressing an enraptured audience from a pulpit, and thus they step outside of Folly’s first-person speech to imagine the context in which the oration occurs (which Erasmus did not describe in any way). The rest of the drawings depict subjects recounted within Folly’s oration. For instance, at the bottom of one page Holbein illustrated a strongman at the right ineffectively tugging at a horse’s tail, whereas a weaker man at the left pulls out another horse’s tail one hair at a time (illus. 24, left). This illustrates one of Folly’s extremely fleeting references – ‘the one told by Sertorius about pulling the hairs out of a horse’s tail’17 – which, as Lister’s commentary explains, refers to an analogy made by the Roman general Quintus Sertorius to how a seemingly weak but persistent enemy must be recognized as a potential threat.18 Myconius underlined the first part of the relevant Lister commentary in red and wrote ‘Sertorius’ next to it in the margin, which he repeated lower down next to Holbein’s drawing. The drawing does not make explicit the moral meaning of the image, any more than Folly did herself:

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she only mentioned it, among a string of others, to highlight how orators use illustrative tales to make their speeches more effective. Holbein brought the reference to life by depicting the two horse-tail-pulling men as modern contemporaries, set in a lightly sketched-in landscape. He returned to the subject a few years later when he painted moralizing historical subjects on the walls of the Basel town hall, although in that case he placed the subject in an ancient Roman context, with the two horse-pulling men standing in front of Sertorius himself.19 On the opposite page, Holbein drew a figure of the beast of the common people (belua, populus), which, according to Folly, is kept in check by the tales and flattery of its leaders.20 Lister’s extensive commentary on this phrase, which begins on the lower part of the page next to Myconius’s inscription ‘Sophistas’, and continues well onto the next one, notes (on the following page) that Horace described the people as a multi-headed beast. Holbein drew this concept next to the relevant section of the main text rather than the commentary, taking care to draw around the word ‘Minos’, which Myconius had already written in red (in reference to another allusion in the text).21 Holbein’s convincing depiction of a single male body with at least ten heads draws upon the iconography of Fortune (Fortuna), who typically stands on a globe to signal her instability; so too the People, though seemingly strong, stand on an unreliable surface, seemingly on not only a globe but one that floats on water. Although Myconius clearly enjoyed Holbein’s drawings, he critiqued the one of Apollo and Niobe by writing ‘incorrect depiction’ (perpera[m] pictu[m]) underneath it (illus. 25).22

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Like the Sertorius story, Holbein here illustrated another of Folly’s fleeting references, which arose after she had been describing an old theologian’s pointless dissection of the letter structure of the word ‘Jesus’, which supposedly symbolized various aspects of Christ’s nature. This parodied a form of scholastic theology that Erasmus particularly disliked, obsessing over clever but irrelevant semantic details, in this case referencing the abstruse symbolism of Christian Kabbalah.23 Folly sarcastically noted that ‘This novel introduction left his audience open-mouthed in admiration, especially the theologians present, who very nearly suffered the same fate as Niobe.’24 The commentary explains that this refers to book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Apollo and Diana punished Niobe’s excessive pride in her motherhood by killing all of her children with arrows, leaving her frozen as into stone by grief. Holbein’s drawing omits Diana, the goddess of the hunt, and focuses instead on Apollo, with whom he might have already been familiar as the god of the arts. (Years later, when working in London, he designed a tableau vivant of Apollo with the Muses on Mount Parnassus for Anne Boleyn’s coronation procession in June 1533.25) Lister’s commentary did not recount the full story, so Holbein would have had to look up Ovid’s text or have Myconius explain to him that Niobe had earned her retribution when she refused to give offerings to the goddess Latona, recklessly boasting of her seven sons and seven daughters in contrast to Latona’s mere two offspring, Apollo and Diana. Although vividly rendered, Holbein’s depiction departs from Ovid’s narrative on various fronts, by omitting not only Diana but the full cohort of fourteen children, as well as in depicting two toddlers,

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whereas it is clear from Ovid’s text that Niobe’s children were all much older. It seems evident, then, that Holbein did not at the time have full access to the original source text, and it is tempting to speculate that Myconius’s subsequent critical notation prompted him on future occasions to make sure he fully knew his subjects before starting to compose them. If Myconius showed the drawings to Erasmus, they must have also been seen by Erasmus’s friend and publisher, Johann Froben, and other members of Froben’s team such as Beatus Rhenanus, who a decade later would describe Holbein as one of the greatest artists of the present day.26 It was not long before Holbein and his brother both began designing prints for Froben’s humanist publications, including the title page border discussed in Chapter One (see illus. 18). While many of these borders depicted fairly generic classical imagery, there were a few cases where Holbein drew upon his growing skills in representing classical subject matter from particular textual sources. Among the most striking examples are his four page borders with the so-called ‘Cebes Tablet’ (illus. 26 and 27), representing a Greek text probably written in the first or second century ce, though presumed in the sixteenth century to be much earlier (‘Cebes’ refers to the supposed author, a speaker in one of Plato’s dialogues).27 The Cebes text consists of a dialogue in which an old man explains to a younger traveller the meaning behind a puzzling image set up before a temple. Drawing heavily upon ancient Stoic philosophy, which advocated self-control and the pursuit of virtue, the old man explains the tablet’s figural imagery as an allegory representing the individual’s journey through life, in which he is beset by various temptations and distractions and only finds true

26 Hans Holbein the Younger (design) and Jacob Faber (cutting), Cebes Tablet ‘A’ title border, 1521, metalcut, printed in Erasmus, In novum testamentum annotationes (1521); with Hans Holbein the Younger (design), Jacob Faber (cutting), alphabet with Hercules scenes: E, 1520, metalcut.

27 Hans Holbein the Younger (design) and Hans Herman (cutting [?]), Cebes Tablet ‘D’ title border, c. 1521–2, woodcut, printed in Aldus Manutius, Quae hocce libro contenta Lexicon Graecum (1522).

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happiness by following the correct (difficult) path.28 The depictions of this subject, like the original text, envisage this pilgrim through life as male, with women assuming roles as virtues or vices that help or hinder his advance. The four versions of the border, all roughly the same size, shed important light on how artists and publishers approached the challenge of conveying a complex textual narrative in visual form, and they also illuminate the difficulty of deciphering the relative roles of designers and cutters. The Greek text was published in a Latin translation in Frankfurt in 1507, illustrated (for the first time) by a large woodcut placed on the title page (illus. 28).29 This image and a closely related one made in Vienna in 1519 served as starting points for Holbein’s depictions, although where those other versions were published to accompany editions of the Cebes text itself, Holbein’s borders were designed to be printed with other humanist works. Thus these borders served as an independent allegory of the pursuit of virtue, accompanying ancient histories, patristic texts, Greek dictionaries and biblical commentaries. Holbein had a particularly challenging task in that he included far more of the textual details than the previous images did, so he depicted the subject on a much smaller scale, but at the same time he had to leave a hole in the middle of the scene, since the publishers wanted it to surround printed text. The four different versions of the border negotiate this problem, with varying degrees of success, by depicting the path as zigzagging across the page from bottom to top. Two versions were published by Johann Froben as metalcuts, executed by Jacob Faber; the first one in print (called version A in the literature), and typically considered the first

28 Unknown designer and cutter, Cebes Tablet title page, c. 1507, woodcut, printed in Johannes Rhagius Aesticampianus, ed., Tabula Cebetis philosophi socratici (1507).

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made (illus. 26), is large in overall dimensions (26 by 18 centimetres) but restricted to relatively narrow strips surrounding an extensive text page (as in the edition shown in the illustration, Erasmus’s commentary on the New Testament printed in 1521). There are some significant problems with this rendition, not least the awkward joins where four distinct strips were separately cut and then printed together: for instance, the architecture at the top does not link together very well, which seems likely to have been the fault of the cutter rather than Holbein’s design.30 The second metalcut produced by Faber and printed by Froben in 1522 (version C), which increased the height of the lower border considerably, might have been made as a correction to the most obvious flaws of the previous one. Two other versions of the page border are woodcuts, one evidently a pastiche of the others, cut (and signed) by Hans Hermann and first printed by Andreas Cratander in September 1521 (version B). Finally, a fourth version, D (illus. 27), sometimes but not unanimously also attributed to Hans Hermann as cutter, was the third to appear in print but artistically the most effective; it allowed much less space for text in order to more fully develop the pictorial narrative. This version was first published by yet another Basel humanist printer, Valentin Curio, in March 1522, for an updated version of a Greek-language dictionary first published by Aldus Manutius in Venice some years previously. Considering the overall page design, the relative scale of D’s wide borders against the small interior text creates a rather awkward effect (A is more attractive proportionally as a page border), although D is unquestionably the best version of the image itself.

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The multiple versions raise important, though not fully resolvable, questions about Holbein’s role as designer, particularly whether he drew just one design, or more. The fact that three different publishers were involved suggests a process either of collaboration or of competitive copying, and the fact that all three publishers printed other examples of Holbein’s work in these years indicates that he could have been in direct contact with any or all of them. Version D appears much closer than the others to Holbein’s natural style, its quality enhanced by the larger overall size of the figures, as well as the greater subtlety of the woodcut medium; thus it seems likely to reflect most closely whatever Holbein originally designed.31 One possible explanation is that Holbein drew one design that did not leave much room for text in the middle, with version D representing the most successful translation of this concept into print – even though it was published later than the others – whereas the other versions were adapted by the cutters to leave more room for text. The specific details of the subject matter hint at how Holbein went about adapting a text to visual imagery. The full meaning of the scenes is only truly decipherable through knowledge of their textual source, which might be taken as a flaw in Holbein’s work, or alternatively reflect the fact that the image was aimed at erudite audiences who could be expected to recognize it. At the bottom, a group of naked individuals representing individual souls (adults in the earlier versions, illus. 28, and children in Holbein’s) enter life through a gate, welcomed by the figure of ‘Genius’, who gives them wise advice about the journey ahead, especially not to become too concerned as to what sorts of gifts they receive from Fortune

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(Fortuna), who stands on her unstable globe to the left in version A, to the right in version D. The original text describes Fortune as blind,32 dutifully followed in the 1507 woodcut by depicting her at the left edge with a blindfold (and fully clothed), but Holbein followed the more common contemporary depiction of Fortuna as nude and fully aware of what surrounds her. The newcomers unfortunately all drink from the vessel held out by Deceit, the woman seated next to the gate (identified as such in the text though not in the images), causing them to forget what they have just learned from Genius and to be easily misled by Persuasions (Suadela) and Opinions (Opiniones), attractive-looking women who will lead them into the next enclosure, Luxury (Luxuria, a term also applied in this period to lust), where they are driven by vices including Greed (Avaritia) and Incontinence (Incontinentia). In version A, an embracing couple at the right margin are mislabelled as Avaritia, which is better placed in version D above a group of people dining at a table, who could not be accommodated in version A (one of the details that suggest D better reflects Holbein’s original design). After spending some time thus ensnared, the travellers will eventually be led through the next gate to the wailing women Grief (Tristitia) and Distress (Dolor), but if they are able there to find Repentence (Penitentia), she will lead them on to the next gate (across at the left margin) to be welcomed by False Education (Falsa Disciplina). In her enclosure, which continues at the right, they will find philosophers, poets, orators, musicians, mathematicians, astronomers: those who study the liberal arts and other forms of human knowledge. Holbein’s D version includes an astronomer holding an armillary sphere

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(tucked in next to the label Tristitia for the figure below) and a geometrician seated above Dolor, as well as musicians and others engaged in discussion or study, among whom another astronomer holds up a quadrant – all details that indicate Holbein’s engagement with contemporary scientific investigation. As the old man explains in the original text, this kind of knowledge does no harm and helps some to find the path to True Education (Vera Disciplina) more quickly, although it is not actually necessary.33 The main path continues past another archway up the right side, leading to a steep climb up rocky cliffs helped by two women identified in the text as Self-control and Endurance, who pull the travellers up with gifts of strength (Fortitudo) and courage (Audacia). Having finally reached open ground next to a wall, they cross back to the left to True Education, who allows them into the final enclosure of the Virtues (Virtutes) and the final destination of Happiness (Felicitas). To modern viewers and readers this kind of abstract allegory can seem rather dry, overly detailed and uninspiring. But such moralizing allegories were of great interest to sixteenthcentury readers, who appreciated both the symbolic nature of the subject, which could be interpreted in relation to virtually any real-life situation, and the intricate nature of the narrative, replicated here in visual form through the complex winding nature of the image, which cannot be easily taken in at a single glance, instead requiring close observation and thought to decipher. This particular subject could also be easily integrated into a Christian outlook, representing an ideal combination of religious and humanist values. Thus it was a highly appropriate image to use with Erasmus’s New

29 Hans Holbein the Younger (design, all images). Top row: Unidentified cutter, alphabet with putti: ‘Q’, 1516, metalcut; unknown cutter, copy of alphabet with putti: ‘Q’, c. 1520, metalcut. Middle row: Jacob Faber (cutting), alphabet with animals: ‘A’, 1520, metalcut; Jacob Faber (cutting), alphabet with floral designs: ‘T’, 1523, metalcut; Master cv (cutting), alphabet with putti and genre scenes: ‘T’, 1525, metalcut. Bottom row: unidentified cutter, Greek alphabet with classical and biblical subjects: delta, c. 1525, woodcut; Hans Lützelburger (cutting), alphabet with dancing peasants: ‘B’, c. 1524–5, woodcut.

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Testament commentary in 1521 (illus. 26), the text of which, written in Latin, analyses the meaning of the words used in the original Greek language of the Gospels. After a brief prefatory paragraph, which is gracefully centred at the top of the page, the main text begins with one of Holbein’s decorative alphabet letters, taken from a set that depicted various scenes related to Hercules, the ancient mythological demigod of prodigious strength, who was sometimes taken as an analogy for Christ.34 Here in the ‘E’ (beginning Evangelium secundum Matthaeum, ‘The Gospel according to Matthew’), Hercules carries out his twelfth and final labour, defeating the multiheaded dog-beast Cerberus who guarded the underworld. So too were Erasmus’s efforts in translation and commentary often compared to the great labours of Hercules, as directly indicated within Holbein’s portrait of him painted a couple years later (see illus. 61).35 Arguably the initial does not successfully convey the difficulty of the challenge – Hercules looks more to be struggling with a misbehaving pet – but the series was repeatedly reused, as were virtually all of Holbein’s alphabets. These metalcuts or woodcuts depicted figurative or decorative imagery set behind individual letters of the alphabet, usually conceived and made in sets, and then kept in reserve by the printer for individual letters to be inserted into publications whenever needed. They were made in various sizes, since the required size on any particular occasion depended both on the overall dimensions of the page being printed, and on the level of importance of the text division thus marked.36 The Hercules ‘E’ measures 4.3 × 4.3 cm, among Holbein’s largest alphabets, appropriate for the opening section of a book printed

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in folio, where it displaces ten full lines of the text. The earliest alphabet series attributed to Holbein, likewise designed for Froben, was slightly larger (each 4.6 × 4.6 cm) and depicted male children or putti in various postures and situations (illus. 29, top left), similar to the putti title border (see illus. 18). In the ‘Q’ here three of them fight each other rather vigorously, although the covering up of each of their faces might have been intended as a visual joke suggesting the blindness of their actions. The series was reused numerous times in various publications over the years, and it was also copied around 1520 by someone working for the publisher Andreas Cratander (illus. 29, top right), with some variations and schematizing of the figures (particularly the boy at the left, whose anatomy the unknown copyist seems not to have fully grasped). Such instances indicate both the lack of copyright laws and the ease with which ideas could be borrowed or imitated, at some remove from the original designer (as may also be the case with some of the Cebes Tablet borders). The imagery in Holbein’s alphabets varies widely between mythological subjects, biblical scenes, putti, animals, floral designs and genre scenes. Although only some of them depict specifically classical subject matter, the initials attributed to Holbein always convey a ‘Renaissance’ sensibility in their approach to figural composition and decorative design. Particularly as his style matured, they render varied human and animal poses both convincingly and expressively, while vegetal decoration combines plausible plant biology with pleasing arrangement across the surface. The amount of detail in these tiny images depended on several factors, including the overall

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size of the letter, the medium, the skill of the cutter and the desires of the publisher who commissioned them. The majority of Holbein’s alphabets were metalcuts, which as noted earlier were more durable but sometimes less subtle than woodcuts, although the more skilled cutters could achieve good results: Holbein’s early putti series are comparatively crude, especially given their overall size, whereas a greater control of form is seen in many of the alphabets cut by Jacob Faber, including the animal alphabet for Froben in 1520 (illus. 29, middle row left) and the floral alphabet for Andreas Cratander in 1523 (middle row centre). The cutter known only as the Master cv showed even greater refinement, as in the metalcut genre-scene alphabet made for Cratander in 1525 (middle row right).37 Most of Holbein’s alphabets were majuscule Roman letters and appeared in Latin texts, though he also produced a small number of Greek alphabets, including a particularly elegant woodcut group whose design is stylistically dated to the mid-1520s but first used, as far as is known, in 1538, in the third to fifth volumes of a five-volume Greek edition of the works of Galen, an ancient medical theorist.38 As was so often the case, these initials’ subjects have little to do with the text: they depict the Old Testament subject Samson and the New Testament’s Prodigal Son, a putto steering a boat, and in the triangular letter delta (illus. 29, lower left) the drunken Silenus, god of wine, given more to drink by an energetic follower. With all of Holbein’s initials, the particular subject matter seems to have been less important than their diversity, elegance, refinement and inventiveness, qualities that made them appropriate images to accompany various erudite texts.

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Most impressive among all of Holbein’s alphabet designs are three remarkable series made between about 1523 and 1525 by the master woodcutter Hans Lützelburger. All are particularly small in size but exceptionally refined and detailed: a Dance of Death alphabet, each letter 2.4 × 2.4 cm, closely related to the larger-scale woodcut series (see illus. 70 and 71); children at play, each 1.8 × 1.8 cm; and a peasant series, each 1.9 × 1.9 cm (illus. 29, lower right, and illus. 30), where rustic figures dance, play and mildly misbehave. Proof copies of these three sets survive in Basel,39 but they were rarely used in publications, perhaps in part because they were owned by the Froben firm, which was cutting back in these years on its use of decorative imagery in publications.40 The children series seems never to have been used, and one of the few publications where the peasant series appeared (illus. 30) is the first part of Erasmus’s two-part Hyperaspistes (a word meaning protector or shield-bearer), his final contribution to a series of published debates with Martin Luther as to whether human beings have free will. 41 The letter ‘P’ appears at the beginning of Erasmus’s short prefatory letter to the reader, where it displaces five lines of text, whereas the main text begins on the next folio with another reuse of the much larger putti ‘Q’ (see illus. 29, top left), whose size (displacing eleven lines) signals the main text’s greater importance. Perhaps the argumentative character of Erasmus’s book, as well as its central theme that human beings are free to make their own choices whether good or bad, made the peasant series with its depictions of unfettered behaviour seem an appropriate opening, followed by the fighting putti. Such decisions were not Holbein’s, however: he merely supplied

30 Hans Holbein the Younger (design) and Hans Lützelburger (cutting), alphabet with dancing peasants: ‘P’, c. 1524–5, woodcut, printed in Erasmus, Hyperaspistes diatribae adversus Servum Arbitrium Martini Lutheri (1526).

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designs, presumably with some guidance from the publisher as to what was desired, and it was then up to the printers to decide what to do with the completed letters, often for years to come. The style and content of Holbein’s designs did, however, enable them to be more or less readily used for different purposes, and the settings where they were finally printed provides some insight (if indirectly) into the market he aimed towards. The designs of the letter forms were just as important as their surrounding decoration. Humanist printers across Europe introduced new letter fonts from the late fifteenth century onwards, ones that are still widely recognizable and used today, such as Bembo, Garamond and Aldine italics. A typeface’s attractiveness and legibility are determined by the mathematical balance of its parts, including the width of each part of the line strokes and the precise shape and length of serifs (the small hanging or extending forms at the end of strokes). 42 The most admired humanist typefaces designed these elements with great precision, so leading publishers wanted their magnified alphabet letters to be designed with equal care. Albrecht Dürer published a treatise on measurement in 1525 that included a section on the geometry of Latin letter forms, 43 and many of Holbein’s Latin letters are very similar to Dürer’s: for instance the letter ‘A’ (illus. 29, middle row left) matches Dürer’s in the narrowness of the left downstroke and crossbar relative to the right downstroke, the vertical positioning of the crossbar, and the length and shape of the serifs at the bottom. Such mathematical considerations were also applied to the Greek alphabets, for instance in the design of the varying widths of the three strokes of the

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delta (see illus. 29, lower left): its overall form is perfectly centred horizontally, but it is slightly taller than it is wide, and vertically positioned just slightly above centre, whereas the inner triangle left in reserve is equilateral (three equal sides and angles) and positioned slightly left of centre. This arrangement of symmetries and counterbalanced asymmetries creates a highly satisfying impression, and Holbein might also have deliberately set the narrower left stroke against the fleshiness of Silenus, whereas the much wider right stroke stands out against the more shadowed forms behind it. Holbein (and/or the cutters) needed time and experience to develop such proficiency: in the early putto alphabet (illus. 29, top left) the swelling lines of the ‘Q’ are imperfectly handled, and the downstroke runs awkwardly into the frame, visually rather lost against the background (in isolation the letter could easily be mistaken for an ‘O’). The later copy (illus. 29, top right) hardly improves the legibility and does a poor job with the overall letter shape, entirely missing the point of the tapering of the rounded form at top and bottom. Holbein’s later letters are usually more precisely delineated and framed within the space, although the hand-drawn red strokes in the copy of Erasmus’s Hyperaspistes (illus. 30) suggests that one of its owners thought the letter ‘P’ needed more visual emphasis against the drinking peasants behind it. In this and other cases the letters were outlined and left purely blank, while in other alphabets they include an internal edge, as if the form might be carved in relief: this is done rather awkwardly with the 1516 ‘Q’, much more elegantly and convincingly in the 1525 ‘T’ (illus. 29, middle row right), while in the 1520 Hercules alphabet (see illus. 26) parts of

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the ‘E’ are slightly shaded to enhance the impression of the letter projecting forward against the background subject. These elegant Latin and Greek forms marked a deliberate contrast with Gothic-style lettering, which was still widely used in this era for German-language publications. Dürer’s 31 Hans Holbein the Younger (design) and unidentified cutter, Texturastyle alphabet: ‘A’, c. 1521, woodcut, printed in Graduale speciale noviter impressum (1521).

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1525 treatise included a section on the construction of textura letters, 44 showing that the fundamental principle here lay in sequencing small squares, diamonds and triangles, very different from the approach to Latin capitals, each of which was set within a square and constructed through geometric forms. Only one of Holbein’s extant alphabets was made in a Gothic style, a set of strapwork initials first printed in a 1521 gradual, a collection of the musical elements of a church Mass (illus. 31).45 The book is large both in absolute measurements and in scale, enabling the musical lines and text to be read at a distance or by more than one cleric while conducting the Mass. The book is printed in two different inks, a technical challenge to produce since each page had to be printed twice with perfect alignment: the musical notes in black needed to align correctly with the musical stave printed in red. Red is also used for headings and directions to the priest, as well as for the initials marking off new sections of music. The opening page begins with Holbein’s elaborate strapwork ‘A’ juxtaposed against singing putti, a large rectangular (not square) woodcut measuring 6.7 × 5.4 cm. The letter’s elegantly twisting forms and the diamond-shaped serif at the lower right visually integrate with the gradual’s printed textura font, the large black initials and the musical notation itself. A few more letters appear later in the gradual, and in a missal printed at the same time (carrying the textual parts of the Mass), with each initial proving their designer’s command of Gothic-style letter forms. These comparatively rare initials suggest that Holbein’s predominant focus on classical images was not necessarily driven by personal inclination or ability: he was equally adept

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at a more Deutsch style when it was in demand. His textura alphabet was almost certainly designed for the gradual, given the particular suitability of the opening initial with its singing putti. Holbein also designed a title border specifically for this edition, as well as another for the missal, both employing classical sensibility in their overall format, though they depict religious subject matter.46 The printer of both works, Thomas Wolff, specialized in religious texts more than humanist works, and he commissioned a number of religious prints from Holbein in the early 1520s. Had history turned out differently, this might have become a much more prominent component of Holbein’s work, but over the next few years Holbein found far more demand for his classical imagery, not only because of the strength of Basel’s humanist market, but because of the rapidly changing religious context.

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H

olbein’s date of birth placed him at a critical moment in the history of Christianity. He was about twenty years old when the Augustinian friar Martin Luther began challenging some of the fundamental tenets of the Church.1 As a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, one of Luther’s primary duties was to lecture on the contents of the Bible, and his readings of the biblical texts, particularly the New Testament letters of St Paul, made him increasingly convinced that the Church establishment, most of all its central hierarchy in the city of Rome, had become corrupted in its theology as well as its practices. In 1517 Luther began writing his objections to Church teaching, initially in Latin and directed at the Church itself, but when ecclesiastics proved unwilling to respond to his critiques, he began writing in his vernacular German for ordinary people. The subsequent adoption of Luther’s ideas in some parts of Europe led to the internal division of the Christian faith into the old Church (Catholicism) and new forms of faith (Protestantism), with the latter itself dividing into multiple sub-groups as the decades progressed. The Reformation had a significant impact on artists, given that religious imagery had always been a dominant component

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of the visual arts. Religious imagery was absolutely central to the career of Holbein’s father, Hans Holbein the Elder: although he did paint some portraits and other secular images, the great majority of his work consisted of altarpieces, devotional panels and other forms of religious imagery like epitaphs and votive paintings. That changed dramatically in the career of his son. While a significant proportion of Holbein the Younger’s earliest works are religious in character and fulfil many of the same roles as the paintings made by his father, the swift advance of Protestantism in Basel during the 1520s disrupted that form of artistic patronage. Those who became Protestant, particularly those who were more extreme than Luther, tended to reject religious images altogether, while those who remained faithful to the Catholic Church became wary for a while of commissioning major new works, given the enormous controversy that they could generate. Before investigating the impact of the Reformation on Holbein’s career, it will be worthwhile to first examine how traditional religious images operated, both in the work of his father and in his own early works. While religious images could serve a range of secular functions, such as providing aesthetic pleasure or advertising the patron’s social status, they aimed most centrally to link the human world to the divine. Just how they could and should do so had long been contested. In some circumstances the sacrality of religious images was taken to be literal and immediate: sacred power directly infused those images that performed miracles.2 Images could also be conduits through which indulgences were earned, when specified prayers were spoken before them. Indulgences

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granted a defined amount of grace from the sufferings of Purgatory, believed by most people to be the fate after death of souls who were deserving of eventual entry into heaven but only after a period of penance for unremitted sins. In the later Middle Ages, there was something of an inflationary market in the amount of time promised off Purgatory for good deeds like saying prayers and pilgrimage to holy places.3 Images could also mark off the sacred spaces of churches and shrines. Many religious images, however, operated on a more emotional and internal level: they brought the human soul into connection with the sacred through bringing the viewer’s focus onto things beyond. In most cases they did so by combining abstract elements with realistic details, creating potent imagery that was simultaneously immediate and not fully of this world. These goals are well encapsulated in Holbein the Elder’s San Paolo fuori le mura (illus. 32), in which young Hans and his brother appear as children with their father. It was one of a series of six panels commissioned by the Dominican convent of St Katherine to enable a mental or spiritual pilgrimage to seven churches in Rome, each of which had been built early in Christianity’s history and dedicated to one of its early saints. Visiting all seven churches could earn indulgences and act as compensation for sins, but since the nuns were expected (in theory at least) to spend most of their lives within the walls of their Augsburg convent, they received papal approval in 1487 for a painted alternative: if the nuns prayed before the depicted churches placed in three specific locations in their convent, they would receive the same indulgences as did visitors to the actual churches in Rome. In the event the panels were

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only completed between 1499 and 1504, each paid for by an individual nun. 4 The panel by the master L. F. depicted two churches, San Lorenzo and San Sebastiano, while the other five each depicted one church; three of these were completed by Hans Burgkmair the Elder, the other two by Holbein the Elder (he had painted the first panel, Santa Maria Maggiore, in 1499). Each panel depicted its church in the centre with events from the relevant saint’s life ranged around it: in the case of St Paul, he is converted to Christianity and baptized at the left; in the centre he preaches in the background and is martyred by beheading in the foreground; and his head is rejoined to his body in the right section. A portrait of the nun who paid for the panel, Veronica Welser, originally appeared in the lower right corner (at some point this was cut off and 32 Hans Holbein the Elder, San Paolo fuori le mura, 1504, oil on fir.

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retained as an independent picture).5 Each panel also depicted a scene from Christ’s life at the top, here his crowning with thorns by Roman soldiers, prior to the crucifixion. The physical experience of moving between the six panels in the convent became analogous to travelling between the actual churches and partaking of their sacred power. Each panel was also visually designed to augment the sensation of vicarious travel, by presenting narrative scenes related to each church in the lower register of the panel, while showing scenes from Christ’s Passion in the section above, which themselves also formed a sequence. Viewers’ eyes thus had to travel extensively across each panel in order to decipher and reflect upon each episode, and to note the sequence of Passion imagery. The panels experimented with different ways of dividing and connecting the scenes; Holbein the Elder’s first panel was relatively static, with just a couple of episodes taking place in a very shallow space in the foreground – the Nativity and the martyrdom of St Dorothy flanking a depiction of the church below, with the Coronation of the Virgin above – strictly divided up by depicted tracery. By the time he painted San Paolo five years later, he had found a more dynamic solution: a more asymmetrical and elaborate form of Gothic tracery (rendered with real gold leaf ) separates the two registers and divides the major episodes of St Paul’s life, while the continuous landscape behind also links them together into a unified narrative. A deep blue suggests sky, yet has the artificiality of a backdrop, and indeed the piecemeal nature of each episode – parts of buildings and figural groupings spliced together – seems more like a theatrical tableau than a fully naturalistic representation. By depicting the architectural tracery as if

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congruent with the surface of the panel, the painting also creates a visual threshold that the viewer crosses to enter into the represented scenes. The pilgrimage series worked to elicit viewers’ remorseful emotions by highlighting the bodily suffering of Christ and martyr saints. San Paolo also included a narrative detail that spoke directly to the nuns of the convent: a single figure of a woman – Thecla, one of St Paul’s followers – sits with her back to us in the middle of the central panel, listening to Paul’s sermon but also acting as a pivot from his preaching to his martyrdom. The painting thus appealed to its audience of nuns by showing that women were from the beginning central to the reception of Paul’s teaching. Religious panels often included secular details that identified the people who paid for them, such as portraits or coats of arms. The arms in the upper corners of one of Holbein the Elder’s small panels depicting the Virgin and Child (illus. 33) identify the patrons as a patrician couple from Augsburg, Georg Gossenbrot zu Hohenfreyberg and Radegundis Eggenberger.6 The Virgin and Child appear here in a wholly abstract space, an architectural niche with elaborate intersecting tracery, reminiscent of contemporary church vaulting. The background is made with gold leaf, subtly overpainted with semi-transparent red stippling to create a gently shimmering effect. A few objects in the space are detailed and highly naturalistic: the bird (possibly a nightingale) perched on the throne, the goldfinch (a common symbol of the Passion) offered by the right angel, the patterned textile draped along the Virgin’s seat, the ceramic vase and white lilies (a common motif in Annunciation scenes, representing the Virgin’s

33 Hans Holbein the Elder, Virgin and Child, 1499, oil on limewood.

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purity); but in other respects the scene appears heavenly and timeless. In contrast to images that emphasize the suffering of Christ and the saints, this idyllic scene evokes a timeless realm beyond worldly pain, and it plays on viewers’ parental sympathies in its emphasis on the emotional bond between the Virgin and the delicate Christ Child. There is no way of knowing exactly how the panel was used by the couple who paid for it, although there is no reason to think that it would have been considered miracle-working or directly sacral in itself. It would have been experienced in a more intimate way than the large basilica paintings, possibly held in the hands, inviting the user to escape into an alternative realm. Holbein the Younger would have grown up seeing religious images such as these being created and used. Among his own early works are a number of analogous images, although from the beginning his own work was far more mixed: we have seen how his earliest images in Basel concentrated on classical-style imagery produced for humanist publishers, and this type of material continued to be central to many of his major works, such as the Haus zum Tanz facade (see illus. 20), which in its final form included a few identifiable figures from classical history, and a series of moralizing paintings made in 1521–2 for the large assembly room of the city council in Basel’s town hall, which alternated between allegorical figures and episodes from ancient history.7 But Holbein also produced several religious works in these years. There is no way of knowing to what extent he personally shared the type of religious outlook they express, or merely complied with what his patrons wanted. His father’s self-portrait with his two young sons witnessing St Paul’s baptism in the San Paolo

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panel, as well as a 1516 self-portrait with what might be a portrait of the younger Hans, rendered as supplicants of St Elizabeth of Hungary in his St Sebastian Altarpiece,8 suggest a deeply felt personal religiosity in parallel with the commissioning of the images. None of Holbein the Younger’s extant religious paintings include such a self-portrait or any other direct sign of personal connection to the subject matter; his only self-portrait is secular and dates from the very end of his life, an independent drawing now rather heavily overworked (its composition is imitated in a couple of miniatures, though these are not by Holbein himself ).9 Holbein the Younger’s eight Passion scenes arranged across four panels (illus. 34) perhaps lie closest to the work of his father in tone and function, although the style has been updated to Renaissance architecture and figural types.10 Its original frame and context have not survived, but the panels are now thought to be the outer painted wings of a carved triptych altarpiece, commissioned by a widow from a patrician family in Basel, Maria Zscheckenbürlin, the daughter of a wealthy banker. She originally commissioned the work in her testament drawn up at the end of 1514, to be set up in the cloister of Basel’s cathedral (known as the Münster) next to her family’s burial place. The wings originally would have opened up to reveal carved relief scenes on their reverse side – in a few places the reliefs were pierced to enable a glimpse through to patches of bright blue paint on the backs of Holbein’s panels – and a sculpted figure of the Virgin Mary appeared in the centre. While the carved parts of the altarpiece were already in use by the later 1510s, they were not yet painted, nor were Holbein’s wings added until 1524

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or later, although they were finished by the time of Maria’s death in 1526.11 With the altarpiece as a whole dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the outer images focused on Christ’s adult life on the exterior (with Mary appearing in the Crucifixion and Burial scenes at the lower right), while other scenes, possibly an infancy cycle, appeared in the relief carvings of the interior wings. 34 Hans Holbein the Younger, Passion of Christ, c. 1522–5, oil on limewood.

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Despite the up-to-date style, conceptually these panels are indebted to the work of Holbein’s father, particularly his wings for the Kaisheim Altarpiece completed in 1502, which was also dedicated to the Virgin Mary and depicted scenes from Christ’s Passion on the exterior, with painted scenes from his infancy on the interior wings and a sculptured figure of the Virgin in the centre. There are also conceptual links to the San Paolo panel: while the Passion scenes are not set in a strictly continuous landscape, Holbein thought carefully about the visual links horizontally from one scene to the next, arranging the lighting, setting and composition of crowds so that viewers could move in a relatively smooth sequence through the events of the Passion, perceiving each one as following on from the last. The commissioner of this painting, like most of the individuals we can identify from among Holbein’s patrons of his early religious works, came from a relatively conservative family with long-standing ties to the Church, who remained Catholic when the Reformation came. Maria Zscheckenbürlin’s cousin Amalie was depicted posthumously in another of Holbein’s early religious paintings: her husband Hans Oberried commissioned from Holbein two large altarpiece wings depicting the Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi, which included portraits of himself and Amalie together with their children, even though Amalie had already died in 1518.12 Oberried remained faithful to the Catholic Church after Basel officially converted to Protestantism in 1529 (in fact he moved to Freiburg to continue practising his faith), and Maria Zscheckenbürlin probably would have also refused to attend Protestant services had she still been alive. Although the nature of some of her donations to Basel

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churches changed in the mid-1520s to reflect Erasmus’s arguments that marriage was just as valid a form of Christian life as becoming a monk or nun,13 the fact that she was still paying for the completion of her altarpiece in the mid-1520s testifies to her steadfast religious faith, since while her commission would not have been at all unusual in 1514, a decade later the situation had changed entirely. Another of Holbein’s early religious paintings, a diptych with Christ and the Virgin (illus. 35), served a devotional purpose analogous to that of his father’s Virgin and Child panel, though in this case placing emphasis on the saints’ emotional suffering.14 Christ and Mary appear in adjacent panels, surrounded by highly imaginative (and implausible) classical-style architecture, which invites a great deal of attention. Christ sits on a plinth that is more or less frontal, though seen somewhat from the right and from below, whereas the architectural canopy above him is turned at a 45-degree angle. Behind him, a wall blocks off a further section of architecture with a ribbed vault culminating in an oculus. This structure continues onto the Virgin’s panel, although here the arches of the vault rest not on a wall but on pilasters; the one above her head joins with another to support a further vaulted space, this one curved in profile though with a flat low wall below it supporting a short column, surmounted by a balcony. It is extremely difficult to make sense of this setting in three dimensions: nothing appears in its full form – each element is only partially seen, with many of the supports partially hidden – and the profound asymmetry of what is visible, plus the rather wilful contrasts of straight and curved elements, has nothing to do with classical concepts of balance and structure. The

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effect, then, is highly artificial and imaginative, and potentially unstable, although in purely visual terms (that is, the arrangements of light and dark across the surface) the composition is very well balanced. Both panels are painted in a highly reduced brunaille palette; only the blue sky stands out vibrantly, and rather artificially, and the swags above Christ’s head were once a brighter green (the pigment has chemically discoloured and darkened).15 It is not clear whether we should feel encouraged to read the setting in a narrative sense: Christ has been given the crown of thorns (as in the scene at the top of Holbein the Elder’s San Paolo), but he does not yet have the nail wounds of the crucifixion, so he is evidently situated sometime between those events; thus he is not quite a Man of Sorrows, although the effects of Holbein’s image are analogous to that genre.16 35 Holbein, Christ at Rest and the Virgin Mary, c. 1518/20, diptych, oil on limewood.

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A viewer might imagine the setting as Pilate’s palace, with Christ anticipating his impending sacrifice, and the Virgin gesturally expressing her sorrow. But clearly the image isolates the figures from a readable narrative: where Holbein the Elder’s San Paolo vividly rendered the main episodes of Paul’s life, this painting invites the viewer to focus intently on the emotional experience of Christ and his mother, in another realm of existence. It has been suggested, quite plausibly, that the left panel was originally designed and painted independently, then the owner(s), whoever s/he or they might have been, could have asked for the Virgin’s panel to be added, perhaps as a further or alternative focus for the viewer’s identification.17 Although the architecture connects between the panels, the lighting in the left panel comes from the right, with bright white highlights across the image, whereas in the right panel it comes from the left, a change that works better visually (otherwise most of the architectural surfaces and the Virgin’s face would have been shaded). Such contradictions in lighting tend not to be noticed by viewers, although Holbein might have toned down the highlighting on the right panel to lessen the disparity. Possibly it was at this time also that he changed the angle of the brightly lit side face of the plinth at Christ’s lower right, to reduce the apparent steepness of the angle of viewing. Whether the panels folded against each other or were held in a fixed frame is unknown, but their relatively small size suggests they were designed for private devotion. Like the gold background in the small Virgin and Child panel, the reduced palette makes the image more abstract and otherworldly, and perhaps the intent was to act as a visual analogy to the often

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reduced colour palette on the exteriors of altarpieces, which contrasted with the bright colours once opened.18 In a way, however, the reduced palette could be said to increase attention to Holbein’s artistry; compared to his father’s Virgin and Child, this comes across as a rather erudite and self-consciously virtuosic artwork. Holbein demonstrated his range of invention in another set of religious images with a traditional function, metalcut designs intended for a type of German prayer book known as the Hortulus animae (Garden of the Soul). Similar to the Books of Hours that circulated in France and the Low Countries, they were intended for laypeople and often well illustrated.19 They began with a calendar, followed by various liturgical sequences of texts and prayers that loosely imitated the more strictly regulated sequences of devotional services carried out each day by monks and canons. The German Hortulus, produced both in Latin and in German editions, reached its apogee in the 1510s.20 Holbein probably designed a first group of such images around 1519, with a second group starting at the same time or a year or two later.21 The scenes typically included the infancy and Passion of Christ, and numerous individual saints. A proof sheet in Basel shows eight among a set of more than seventy scenes (illus. 36), with the full range possibly designed over a number of years between about 1519 and 1524, and cut in different stages by Jacob Faber and the Master cv.22 The proof group was most likely cut around 1521/2 by Faber, and it is typical of the whole set in its depictions of individual saints (here Anthony Abbot, Mary Magdalene and Veronica, plus Bernard of Clairvaux receiving the miraculous lactation of the Virgin) and

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compact narrative scenes depicting traditional subjects and tenets of the Church, here the Adoration of the Magi, the bread of the Eucharist being given to laypeople during a Mass, Pentecost and the Mass of St Gregory. The latter was a well-known legend, widely promoted by the Church and popular in images, in which the literal appearance of Christ

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on an altar during a performance of the Mass confirmed the transubstantiation of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ.23 Most of the individual saints are framed by Renaissance-style architecture, each individually designed, like the framing around the stained-glass series of the Passion (see illus. 13) though on a much smaller 36 Hans Holbein the Younger (design) and Jacob Faber (cutting), proof sheet of illustrations for a Hortulus animae, c. 1521–2, metalcut.

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scale. The small dimensions of these images, each measuring only 5.8 × 4.3 cm, was common in this genre, so that each image could appear on a page alongside, or surrounded by, a related text, whether the Office of the Virgin, biblical extracts, parts of patristic writings or prayers to individual saints. The images thus would have worked in conjunction with the text to focus the reader’s attention, highlighting the community of saints and some of the major themes of the Christian faith. However, the publishers who initially commissioned these images hesitated to issue them and then abandoned the projects altogether, so that the images did not appear in print until many years later, when the metal blocks were taken over by other publishers elsewhere.24 Evidently the reformist critiques of traditional religious practices had already advanced to such an extent by the early 1520s that the market for lay prayer books, recently such a popular genre, collapsed in Basel and other reform-leaning cities, only to be revived much later in places that remained Catholic. Works of this type lost their appeal for audiences who took to heart Martin Luther’s rejection of the Church’s theology of salvation. In its essence, Christianity proposes that human beings are intrinsically sinful creatures deserving of eternal damnation after death, who earn the possibility of entering heaven only because Christ’s sacrifice of his own life more than compensated for all of humanity’s collective sins. Luther argued that over the course of several centuries the Church as an institution had accumulated false claims to intercede in human salvation. It claimed to offer absolution for the confession of sins, when it was only God rather than a Church official who could hear and accept an individual’s genuine

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repentance; and more importantly, the Church invented a whole series of ‘good works’ that supposedly compensated for sins and reduced one’s time in Purgatory, including prayers said before images, pilgrimages, prayers to saints, paying for masses or indeed paying direct cash to the Church in exchange for indulgences. Luther argued, to the contrary, that salvation was achieved only because of Christ’s sacrifice; that each individual could benefit from that sacrifice only through genuine faith in God’s grace; that God’s grace was given only by the Holy Spirit; and that this was all conclusively stated within the Bible, particularly in the Gospels and Paul’s letters. Good works of any kind could have no impact whatsoever on an individual’s salvation.25 He or she needed only to believe wholeheartedly, with no need for any intervening person or institution. Luther did still confirm the sacred character of two Church sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist, but their performance did not directly cause salvation. These arguments challenged most of the justifications for religious images.26 Paying for them carried no benefit for the fate of the donor’s soul, which led many people to immediately stop commissioning them; nor could particular interactions with images earn any credits towards salvation, so the indulgences supposedly attached to Holbein the Elder’s San Paolo panel became obsolete within Protestant theology. Reformers also argued that a large proportion of religious images depicted false subjects, in that they encouraged adoration of saints (who, Luther argued, were merely good role models for human behaviour, not specially sacred beings who could intervene in heaven on people’s behalf ); thus the focus on Paul in the San Paolo panel, or the individual saints in Holbein the Younger’s

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Hortulus animae prints, would have become problematic for reformed viewers. The Virgin and Child panel would also be reinterpreted as objectionable in that Mary herself was just an exemplary woman as the chosen mother of Jesus, so images that focused on her as a quasi-divine creature were no more valid than images of other saints. Luther personally did not object to the emotive power of images when used for beneficial purposes; if images of acceptable subjects, such as Christ’s crucifixion, helped some people to focus their belief, then those people could continue to use them, even though it was preferable not to rely on images.27 Holbein’s diptych with Christ and the Virgin would be on shaky grounds here, in that it encouraged the viewer’s emotional engagement with the depicted subjects, but without really teaching anything about the theological purpose of Christ’s sacrifice. Luther would probably have less objection to the Passion panels, since they narrated the story of Christ’s sacrifice and might thus play some role in instructing viewers. But some viewers could still misinterpret the paintings as embodying divine figures, and Luther greatly preferred images that communicated theology in a different format, making themselves self-evidently pictures of ideas. Lucas Cranach the Elder collaborated with Luther to paint new Protestant images in a highly stylized manner, creating a range of iconographies that Luther approved, whether Old Testament subjects, very carefully selected New Testament episodes, or more complex images that taught theological ideas in a diagrammatic fashion.28 Holbein painted a panel of the latter kind for an unknown patron, a subject known as Law and Grace, which instructed the viewer (though arguably not as clearly

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as Luther probably expected) about the relative roles of law and grace in salvation.29 Polemical images that promoted the new religious ideas often used a similar diagrammatic format, and here again Holbein created a handful of such images, including a woodcut (cut by Hans Lützelburger) depicting Christ as the True Light (illus. 37).30 As with many polemical broadsheet pictures circulated by reformers, this contrasts a ‘good’ side at the left (evangelical teaching) against a ‘bad’ right side (the corruption of the old Church), set against an evocative mountainous landscape like that of Switzerland. On the right, the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle are depicted as blind men stumbling into a ditch, leading in their wake the equally blind hierarchy of the Catholic Church, from the pope wearing his triple tiara to monks, bishops, cardinals, canons and priests. The charge against Plato and Aristotle stemmed from their overly prominent role in setting the parameters of medieval theology, which reformers argued should be firmly grounded instead in the Bible (similar to Erasmus’s critiques in Praise of Folly of misguided and dumbfounding theology, see illus. 25). While this contingent makes its way towards the crevice, Christ on the left beckons a group of ordinary layfolk, including women and a farmer carrying a flail, towards a central lamp with a brightly burning flame. The lamp is supported on a base of four figures representing the four Gospel books: an angel for Matthew, eagle for John, winged lion for Mark, and on the far side would be an ox for Luke. The message here, which would have been fairly self-evident for viewers with some grounding in the religious debates, is that Christ reveals the truth of the Gospel

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directly to all people, while the Church establishment focuses inwards and merely leads itself astray. The original intended purpose of the woodcut is not entirely clear, but it must have been designed by Holbein before he left for England in 1526, and cut by Lützelburger before he died unexpectedly that same year; it was first published in a calendar printed in Zurich in 1527, written by a city physician, Johann Copp, who had an interest in both Protestant religion and astrology (he had published some astrological tracts earlier in the 1520s, predicting forthcoming cosmological disasters as a consequence of the Church’s failure to reform).31 His 1527 calendar was a suitable context for Holbein’s image in that it replaced the traditional saints identified with each day of the year with figures from the Old Testament and events from the New Testament, emphasizing the relevant textual sources for each in the Bible.32 37 Hans Holbein the Younger (design) and Hans Lützelburger (cutting), Christ as the True Light, woodcut, c. 1525–6 (first printed by Christoph Froschauer, 1527).

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This type of imagery remained a very small component of Holbein’s work, at least of what survives. It is possible that polemical Reformation images were not to his personal taste, although a more likely explanation concerns his typical market: the great majority of Protestant polemical images were rather crude, cheap and aimed at popular audiences,33 whereas Holbein’s imagery was always of great refinement, and surely comparatively expensive. It is difficult to imagine that a very extensive market existed for religious polemics rendered with Holbein’s typical levels of visual and conceptual sophistication. But it remains an intriguing, if ultimately unanswerable, question as to what Holbein thought personally about the religious controversies, particularly the views of the more radical reformers. Once Luther had opened the floodgates, many others went further, rejecting any concept of Church sacraments, including both baptism and the Eucharist (which

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Luther had retained); they also held much deeper objections to religious images. Within this more extreme worldview, the central human error lies in always wanting to attribute spiritual power to things that are material and man-made. A religious image, they argued, will always encourage idolatry, that is, improper worship of a mere object. They refused to allow the possibility that a viewer might be able to look at religious images (such as the Christ and the Virgin diptych, or the Passion panels) without attributing some form of undue power to the painting as an object, mistakenly perceiving in it some trace of the divine.34 However Holbein’s religious paintings were originally used when made, they must have appeared very different to many viewers just a few years later. Before long, they turned into art objects, rather than religious works. Whether Holbein shared the shift in perception cannot be known, but a few of his religious images of the 1520s could be interpreted as indicating his (and/or the patrons’) thorough understanding of reformers’ critiques of images, while seeking means to deflect them. Although most of Holbein’s religious paintings with identifiable patrons were commissioned by individuals who remained Catholic, some of these individuals

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were well-educated moderates likely to take interest in images that probed religious truths with considerable thoughtfulness. The strongest potential case is the highly unusual painting Dead Christ in the Tomb (illus. 38).35 The subject matter is not in itself unusual, showing Christ in burial after his death and before the Resurrection; the imagery connects closely with the liturgy carried out during Easter Week, when large sculptures of Christ were often ‘buried’ on Good Friday in some kind of sepulchral structure set up in church choirs, and then ‘resurrected’ on Easter Sunday.36 However, paintings of Christ’s dead body usually show him before the actual burial, or at least before the tomb door was closed, including at least one mourning figure to emphasize the emotional response of those around him as well as the larger narrative, which eventually culminated in his resurrection. Here, to the contrary, we seem to have a view directly onto the body lying alone in the tomb; and most crucially, this is arguably the most explicitly corpse-like rendition of the dead Christ ever made in art. By stretching the body out with stiffened muscle (rather than relaxed as in sleep), leaving the eyes staring unblinkingly open, and depicting the flesh with subtly mottled tones of greenish-grey, Holbein has eliminated any sign that

38 Hans Holbein the Younger, Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1521–2, oil on limewood.

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Christ’s death is a temporary event. All trace of divine power has vanished from the body, left behind as purely worldly and inert matter. The corpse looks extremely naturalistically depicted, although if viewed sideways as an upright figure, it becomes clear that Holbein has subtly distorted the proportions of the body away from the kind of ideals advocated in contemporary Italian theory: the torso is too long, the legs (specifically the thighs) too short, and this likely contributes unconsciously to viewers’ impression of estrangement.37 The depicted setting, showing an angled view of the wall at the right, implies a viewing approach from the left with the painting at eye level, a vantage point that somewhat improves the overall proportions of the body, though not the discrepancy between the short thigh and long shin. The perspectives onto the head and feet, on the other hand, imply a close centred viewing,38 so it seems that Holbein deliberately did not design a single consistent perspective. The specific function of this unusual painting cannot be confirmed beyond doubt, but a persuasive hypothesis suggests that it was originally commissioned by Bonifacius Amerbach (see illus. 8) for an epitaph he planned to erect for his parents in the Carthusian monastery in Basel, although the epitaph was eventually completed as text alone without the painting, which became an independent work.39 Holbein initially painted the panel in 1521, inscribing his initials and the date on the wall seen at the right, within a curved rather than rectangular niche; he changed the format in 1522, altering the placement of the date and his initials, but then reverted the date back to 1521. Amerbach initially kept his Catholic faith as the Reformation unfolded in Basel, but he eventually

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become a moderate reformer, which would tie in well with the thoughtful nature of the painting. It prompts its viewers to reflect on the meaning and value of external signs by showing Christ as so thoroughly lacking in life and divine power, so beholders are left to question the basis of their own faith. Even while the image itself provides no hopeful signs, the biblical word of God alone ought to enable the believer to keep faith in the coming resurrection. Another panel that could hint at reformist critiques is the Solothurn Madonna, initialled and dated 1522 at the lower right (illus. 39). Its general conception takes inspiration from Italian images of so-called sacra conversazione (holy conversations), in which the Virgin and Child are anachronistically flanked by saints of different eras.40 Here the setting is extremely simple and dignified, a plain barrel vault supported by tie rods, similar to the Fleckenstein panel design (see illus. 12) and very different from the over-elaboration of the architecture in the diptych with Christ and Mary. The coats of arms in the carpet identify the donors as Hans Gerster, the city secretary in Basel who ran the administration and records of the civic government, and his wife Barbara Guldinknopf. The painting probably hung in Basel’s parish church of St Martin, to which the couple belonged, which would account for the presence of St Martin at the left, a fourth-century bishop of Tours, here depicted giving gold coins to a beggar kneeling behind the Virgin. The knight at the right is St Ursus, a member of the third-century Theban legion martyred as early converts to Christianity; he was widely venerated in Switzerland, where his relics were located. In contrast to the abstract nature of the diptych, the figures here are represented with a great deal

39 Hans Holbein the Younger, Solothurn Madonna, 1522, oil on limewood.

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of naturalistic detail. The precise function of the panel is not known; it could have been an altarpiece, or a separate panel donated as a votive offering, as a gesture of thanks or remorse. One of Gerster’s sons and his son-in-law were reprimanded and fined in 1522 for illegally fighting alongside the pope and the Imperial army against France the previous year, so it is possible that the commissioning of the painting was connected to those events.41 Gerster remained Catholic after Basel’s conversion to Protestantism, so it is not surprising that the painting he commissioned a few years earlier expresses faith in the divine role of the saints. Nevertheless, it is striking how little idealization the painting presents, and the subtly glorifying halo of light behind Mary is very restrained. The Virgin and Christ Child are thought to have been modelled after Holbein’s wife and young son Philip, and although it was by no means unusual for an artist to use real-life models as a basis for representing saints, the degree to which these figures look ordinarily human is distinctive. The Christ Child in particular looks like a thoroughly human infant, to a degree virtually unprecedented in previous religious images – compare, for example, with the different gestures and body type of Holbein the Elder’s Christ Child in his devotional panel (see illus. 33). As the town secretary, Gerster would have been well aware of the religious controversies, and it is possible that the composition was consciously designed to encourage a response that was affectionate and respectful in character, rather than overly adulatory. St Martin’s act of generosity to a beggar, whom he looks straight in the eye, not a common feature in such pictures, also emphasizes the importance of true Christian charity

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towards fellow human beings, rather than acts motivated by their final value to the doer. The Solothurn Madonna presents a potential model for moderate religious images in an era of reform, but things progressed too swiftly and too far for such imagery to find a widespread audience. Luther originally hoped to convince the Church to reform internally, but his official condemnation as a heretic at the imperial Diet of Worms in 1521, approved by Charles v but without the support of all of the princes in the Holy Roman Empire, made it likely that a split would form within the Church. 42 The condemnation did nothing to diminish Luther’s popularity, since he had already by then gained a widespread following, particularly in south German cities and the Swiss cantons, and he used an enforced period of hiding immediately following the Diet of Worms to begin translating the Bible into German, an immensely influential work that crystallized the reformers’ claims that God’s word should be directly accessible to all people. Although most people in authoritative positions in the Church (and many individuals of other stations) remained unconvinced that it had fundamentally lost its way, many others, whether laity or clerics, were persuaded by Luther’s ideas, either because the theological arguments made sense to them, or because they appreciated some of the consequences of his critiques when a community became Protestant, such as the independence gained by local churches from the papacy, the abolition of monasteries and nunneries, or the fact that celibate priests now became pastors who could marry and have children, which could potentially reduce sexual hypocrisy and corruption. Opinions became even more severely divided as

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other more radical reformers followed in Luther’s footsteps and made even more extreme proposals for theological and institutional change, including Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich, Johannes Oecolampadius in Basel and, later, John Calvin in Geneva. Precisely how the Reformation progressed varied considerably from place to place, depending on its immediate political situation and the relative power of warring factions; even among the Swiss cantons, some like Zurich became Protestant, while others like Lucerne remained Catholic. In Basel, Luther’s ideas were published from the beginning, initially perceived as aligning with the goals of moderate reform-minded humanists like Erasmus: thus Froben published some large volumes of Luther’s collected Latin works in 1518 and 1519, accompanied by imagery designed by Holbein, among others. As the religious controversies deepened, Froben stopped publishing Luther’s works, but his more polemical writings and those of other reformers like Andreas Karlstadt, Zwingli and Oecolampadius were widely disseminated by other Basel publishers, often in short inexpensive tracts, occasionally with Holbein’s imagery, though more often with cheaper or no decoration. 43 Broadly speaking, the wealthy and powerful merchants who ran the most important guilds (and dominated the city government) tended to resist the reform ideas, whereas the middle and especially the lower guilds supported them, as did a few individuals among the higher guilds. Over the next few years the city council attempted to preserve its power by allowing reform in some of the city’s churches while keeping the old religion in others. But the reformers eventually won out, and after a series of iconoclastic riots

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during which images were forcibly destroyed in several churches, reformers took full control of the city council early in 1529.44 The religious controversies, and their concomitant impact on artistic commissions, were surely a central factor in Holbein’s decision to leave for London in 1526. Erasmus’s recommendation letter to Pieter Gilles stated that the arts were no longer appreciated in Basel, so Holbein hoped to find more income in England.45 Initially absent for just two years (in keeping with Basel’s citizenship laws), Holbein returned to witness the implementation of the Reformation in 1529. The only recorded indication of his personal religious views comes from an investigation carried out by the city council in 1530 as to who among the city’s guild members had not been attending religious services.46 While most of the respondents either immediately said they were now willing to conform, or stated that their adherence to the old faith was too strong for them to go to Protestant services, Holbein is recorded as saying he needed a better explanation of the Eucharist. Perhaps he was unconvinced about just how far Basel’s reinterpretation of the Eucharist had gone: while Luther still saw it as a holy sacrament in which Christ became bodily present on the altar, the Zwinglian theology prevalent in Basel argued that the bread and wine were mere symbols of Christ’s body and blood, without literally transforming into them (this quickly became the central point on which the various Protestant factions could not agree).47 The records indicate that Holbein subsequently conformed, but perhaps we might conclude from this episode that he did not have the deepest of convictions either way: he apparently was not fully persuaded by

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the new Protestant theology, particularly wanting to know what version of the Eucharist he would be expected to adhere to, but neither was he sceptical enough to refuse. The fact that the city council shortly thereafter offered him a valuable commission, to paint the final wall of the council chamber that he had begun in 1521–2,48 implies that the decision could have been more expedient than expressing his convictions. There is no way of knowing how many of Holbein’s religious artworks might have been destroyed in the iconoclasms of 1528 and 1529. One work formerly attributed to him, a Last Supper now thought to have been largely executed by a follower, appears to have been physically attacked,49 and the separation of the Passion wings from the rest of their altarpiece suggests that they could have been removed to preserve them while the carved elements of the altarpiece were destroyed. However, analysis of his surviving works suggest that, even by around 1523–4, very few patrons in Basel were willing to risk new religious commissions, even those who remained Catholic. There were occasional exceptions, including an important commission to paint protective wings for the organ in the Basel Münster (illus. 40), which on stylistic grounds appear to have been painted around 1525/6 or soon after Holbein returned from London in 1528.50 By that time only wealthy and confident individuals or ecclesiastic institutions would still be willing to commission a new religious artwork to appear in a public location. The specific patron(s) of the organ wings have not been identified, although it must have been at least approved by Basel’s bishop, if not his personal commission (Nikolaus von Diesbach served as bishop until 1527, then was followed by Philipp von Gundelsheim). These oddly shaped

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linen panels were designed to fold over the pipes of the organ to protect them from dirt and dust while not in use. Because they were hung extremely high on the walls of the nave, they escaped the iconoclasm that swept through the Münster in February 1529, and in fact they remained in place until the eighteenth century. Their imagery is entirely orthodox, though also highly restrained in style. The left wing features a partially damaged representation of the church building, flanked by images of the eleventh-century Holy Roman Emperor Henry ii (later canonized as a saint) and his wife Empress Kunigunde, the founders of the Basel Münster. On the right wing are the Virgin (the dedicatee of the cathedral) with the Christ Child, musician angels (again with some areas of damage, the result of natural wear rather than direct attack) and St Pantalus, Basel’s first bishop. The figures are designed to appear to project slightly beyond the picture plane, particularly Kunigunde’s cross, the foot and elbow of Henry ii, the Virgin’s knee and Pantalus’s foot and crozier. As appropriate for their high placement, they are rendered as if seen from below, and each figure is shown in a subtly dynamic pose, employing Holbein’s command of figural anatomy and effective composition.51 As such, and as images foregrounding saints, the organ wings can be seen as entirely traditional, yet they also have a restrained quality in both colouring and design, which perhaps reflects some acknowledgement of the religious controversies of the day. The grisaille colouring matched the wood relief carving of the organ casing (the connection is particularly picked up through the imitation carving at the tops of the central sections), but it also served other aesthetic functions. In some respects it

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recalls the earlier diptych with Christ and the Virgin, but the overall sensibility of the two works is very different: while the diptych seems to call attention to Holbein’s exuberant virtuosity, the organ wings appear to focus on communicating the inner character of the depicted figures. This restrained quality, as well as their practical function, perhaps helps to account for why they were left in place for so many years, long after Basel became an avowedly Protestant city. As with Holbein’s other religious images, it is impossible to judge whether they reflect his own religious attitudes, or if he merely welcomed the opportunity of another increasingly rare painting commission. Prior to leaving for England in 1526, Holbein’s documented trip to France in 1524 was probably motivated by hoping to find better prospects elsewhere. King Francis i had invited Erasmus to move to France where he would be given a substantial benefice (an offer that the scholar graciously declined), 40 Hans Holbein the Younger, wings for the organ of Basel Cathedral, c. 1525/6 or 1528, distemper on canvas.

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so when Erasmus reported in a letter to Willibald Pirckheimer dated 3 June 1524 that a ‘very elegant artist’ had taken a portrait of him to France – extremely likely to be Holbein – we can imagine that he did so hoping that it might help get him a hearing as a prospective artist for the royal court.52 France was going through its own religious disruptions, but it remained a firmly Catholic realm, with a king who encouraged the arts when not distracted by other matters. Those who promoted internal reform in the Church were supported by the king’s sister Marguerite, whereas Francis himself, while occasionally favouring some of his sister’s views, more typically opposed Protestant ideas, as did the powerful, and very conservative, theological faculty at the University of Paris.53 Francis was widely recognized as supporting Italian as well as native artists, and it seems likely that Holbein was hoping to gain access to royal patronage; but he visited at a time when the king was preoccupied by war in Italy against the Holy Roman Empire, and there is no evidence that he had any success, although his drawings of the statues of the Duke and Duchess of Berry, attributed to Jean de Cambrai (d. 1438), indicate that he gained access to the palace chapel in Bourges, where Marguerite’s court was based.54 The only conclusive benefits of the trip appear to have been his encounters with contemporary artistic practice in France, including the use of chalks, and courtly portrait formats developed by Jean Clouet.55 When Holbein left Basel again two years later to try England, this time he sought out specific contacts via Erasmus, which yielded far more success. Although Holbein initially visited England for only two years, he gained enough work

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to make him decide to return four years later, that time permanently. As it happened, very little of Holbein’s work in England was religious in subject matter: most of his time was occupied by portraiture and by designs for jewellery and similar objects. The few religious works by Holbein generally addressed the intersection of religion and politics, appropriate for a kingdom in which the beliefs of the monarch determined the religious direction of the entire realm. When Holbein first went to England it was still firmly Catholic; its king, Henry viii, had earned the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ from the pope for a treatise he wrote against Luther in 1521, and for the rest of the decade he remained personally committed to the Catholic faith, even as many others within the realm became sympathetic to reform ideas. But by the time of Holbein’s return in 1532, the country was on the verge of its own Reformation, not through the king’s theological conversion, but because he wanted to annul his marriage to his queen Catherine of Aragon (who happened to be the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles v).56 Although Henry and Catherine’s marriage had been long and mostly happy, Catherine’s failure to give birth to a living male heir led Henry to conclude that the marriage had never been valid, since Catherine had previously married Henry’s older brother Prince Arthur, who had died before that marriage was consummated. Although at the time the pope had given official approval of Henry and Catherine’s wedding (on the grounds of the non-consummation of the previous marriage), Henry had decided by 1527, when he became infatuated with Anne Boleyn, that it had all been a mistake and that the current pope should now sanction his divorce (or annulment,

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as he perceived it), so that he could marry Anne and produce an heir. As it happened, the current pope, Clement vii, had little interest in even hearing the case for Henry’s divorce, since he was in an extremely difficult political position between the secular powers of Europe – with Charles v staunchly opposed to the divorce, and Francis i temporarily supportive to counteract Charles’s power – and a decision either way would stir immense controversy. By the end of 1532 Henry had given up on receiving any decision from Clement, and he turned to Protestantism as a solution to the dilemma: by breaking with the Roman Church, he as head of state claimed control over the Church of England, whose ministers were thereby able to approve the divorce without sanction from outside the realm. The break from the papacy also gave the state legal powers over Church officials who had previously been subject to Rome, and eradicating the country’s monasteries proved a handy source of income. Thus over the course of the 1530s the monastic institutions that had stood for centuries in England were dissolved and the buildings destroyed or sold off, with many of them still standing today as ruins in the landscape.57 Theologically, on the other hand, the change was less clear-cut, and only during the realm of Henry’s son Edward vi did Protestant theology become more truly embedded in the new Anglican Church. In the midst of these political manoeuvres, it is entirely fitting that Holbein’s religious images highlighted the interrelationship between religion and political power. In 1535 Miles Coverdale authored the first full translation of the

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Bible into English, using a range of sources (though not the original Hebrew and Greek), and this was printed on the continent with a title border designed by Holbein (illus. 41).58 At the top of the page, on either side of a representation of the Hebrew name of God, Adam and Eve at the left signal the fall of humanity that necessitated the coming of Christ, shown resurrected at the top right. In the next two registers, Old Testament subjects on the left signal the dissemination of the law (Moses’s reception of the Ten Commandments, and a Pharisee reading out the law), and they are paired with New Testament scenes at the right (Christ sending out his apostles to teach all people, and Paul preaching). In conjunction, these images highlight the generation and legitimate circulation of God’s word throughout both parts of the Bible. At the lowest register, these biblical scenes culminate in the present day, as the enthroned king – not a carefully detailed portrait, but clearly representing Henry viii himself – hands a book to bishops to the left, while other crowned princes at the right look on, flanked by the Old Testament figure of King David, the greatest king of the Israelites, and the New Testament figure of Paul. Henry is here presented as the legitimate authority who sees to the dissemination of true religion. Like other Protestant imagery, the diagrammatic format of the image deflects any danger of idolatry, though in contrast to the positive/negative juxtaposition seen in Christ as the True Light (see illus. 37), here most of the imagery coalesces into a unified message, with law and grace of equal importance. Once again, there is no way of discerning what Holbein might have thought personally about the situation. The commission called for an image that

41 Hans Holbein the Younger (design) and unidentified cutter, title border for the Coverdale Bible (1535).

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would encourage the king to support Coverdale’s vernacular translation, still a risky undertaking in a realm that had not yet fully committed to many Protestant precepts, and he supplied just what was needed. Although official acceptance of the Coverdale translation remained marginal, Holbein’s general conception of presenting the king as the rightful authority over the Bible was imitated in the title page (by another unidentified artist) for the Great Bible of 1539, the first translation that Henry fully authorized.59 A similar conception – one might say, a similar willingness to overtly flatter authority – governs a private image that Holbein painted around the same time, a miniature depiction on vellum of the Old Testament king Solomon, the son of David and renowned for his wisdom, receiving the gifts of the Queen of Sheba (illus. 42). The restricted grisaille colour range with the dramatic contrasts of light and shade partly recalls the devotional diptych made over a decade earlier (see illus. 35), and again it has an effect here of emphasizing Holbein’s artistry, although this time he used the extremely expensive pigment ultramarine (made with the rare mineral lapis lazuli) to depict the blue cloth backdrop covered in fleurs-de-lis. They and other details are picked out in shell gold paint, while the only other colour accent is a box of red fruit or flowers held up by one of the Queen of Sheba’s attendants.60 The seated king, enthroned at the centre of the image slightly above the crowds and framed by classical columns backed by an impressive cloth hanging, once again recalls Henry viii. As a whole, the image could be interpreted as an allegory of the Church before Christ, although the visual equation of Solomon with Henry also appealed directly to

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the monarch’s sense of his own power, reinforced by the texts depicted as if embroidered onto the cloth hangings, a variation on an Old Testament passage that celebrates divinely instituted kingship: Happy are thy men, and happy are thy servants, who stand always before thee, and hear thy wisdom. Blessed be the Lord thy God, who hath been pleased to set thee on his throne, king of the Lord thy God. Because God loveth Israel, and will preserve them forever: therefore hath he made thee king over them, to do judgment and justice (2 Chronicles 9:7–8). It is possible, though unprovable, that Holbein created this image as a New Year’s gift for the king, whether directly from himself or through another courtier, to advertise what he could offer to the monarch. It seems a fairly naked attempt at flattery, but that would have done him no harm. By 1535 or 1536 at the latest, Henry appointed Holbein as one of his court painters, although the exact date cannot be pinpointed because of missing records.61 As Holbein had been hoping for, the appointment gave him a reliable income as well as an acknowledged status, and he spent most of the last part of his life in a very different context from that of Basel, mostly producing portraits (and some other works) for a range of sitters, from merchants and lowly court officials up to the high aristocracy, including many of the most powerful men of the realm. We will return in Chapter Five to the complex social milieu within which Holbein worked, after first examining another aspect of contemporary change

42 Hans Holbein the Younger, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, c. 1534, brown and grey wash, blue, red and green bodycolour, white heightening, gold, and pen and black ink over metalpoint on vellum.

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that significantly affected him: the dramatic expansions in the early sixteenth century in scientific knowledge and geographical discoveries. In the end, the upheaval of the Reformation did not prevent Holbein’s success as an artist, but it did propel him to diversify into new fields.

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hat people knew about the world went through dramatic transformations in the sixteenth century. Interest in classical sources was one factor, as humanists sought to recover knowledge from antiquity that had been lost in the intervening centuries. But it was increasingly understood that only direct study of the world in the present day could significantly improve understanding of the globe and its constituent parts. Astronomy, geography, medicine, botany, zoography and mineralogy – to name some of the most important fields – went through significant changes over the course of the sixteenth century.1 The gaps between ancient and current knowledge were nowhere more obvious than in geography. During the fifteenth century the text usually known as Geographia (or sometimes Cosmographia), written by the second-century Greek astronomer Ptolemy, had been rediscovered and recirculated in western Europe, and it revealed how limited European understanding of the world’s geography had been for some time.2 But in the same period, European exploration of the west coast of southern Africa began to highlight that the knowledge of the ancients had its own limits. By the turn of the sixteenth century, as lands previously completely unknown to Europeans were discovered

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in the Americas, it was clear that classical sources could serve only as a starting point: the world had to be studied in its own right, and contemporary knowledge would quickly surpass what had been achieved before. It seems unlikely that Holbein ever had much personal interest in science per se, at least not of a straightforward kind. Where his older contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer carefully investigated how the appearance of natural phenomena pointed back to underlying principles,3 there is no evidence that Holbein compiled manuscripts of his observations, or sought to apply a consistent system of representation in his images. Nevertheless, the advancements in science did come to play an important role in Holbein’s work. Some knowledge of the mathematical arts appears already in his Praise of Folly drawings, including one of Atlas holding up the cosmos, and another of a mathematician surrounded by objects representing the quadrivium, and we have seen the inclusion of astronomical instruments in the Cebes Tablet page border (see illus. 27). But as study of the sciences expanded in the early to middle decades of the sixteenth century – in part, perhaps, fostered by individuals seeking an alternative to the controversies of religion – new opportunities arose for Holbein to create works with scientific content or purpose: first when he moved to England in 1526 and encountered the Bavarian astronomer Nicolaus Kratzer, then again after he returned to Basel and collaborated for a couple of productive years with the cosmographer Sebastian Münster. The extant works Holbein produced with them suggest that his own often idiosyncratic approach to representation collided in interesting ways with

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the more systematic thinking of his mathematically minded collaborators. A couple of Holbein’s drawings made before his departure for England reveal what made his approach to representation idiosyncratic. Perhaps around 1523, Holbein made animal studies of a lamb and the head of a sheep (illus. 43), and another of a bat, probably just two survivals out of more such studies made during his lifetime. 4 Subtle applications of watercolour, crayon and white heightening render the modelling of the animals’ features and woolly bodies with great sensitivity, as if Holbein was attentively studying a real creature. Though no context is shown, the shadows cast on the 43 Hans Holbein the Younger, studies of a lamb and the head of a sheep, c. 1523, brush over preliminary drawing in black crayon, with watercolour and some white heightening.

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ground beneath the lamb suggest that he was studying the animals outdoors in sunlight, observing how the light interacted with the colouring of their wool to create mottled effects. However, observers with knowledge of sheep anatomy will recognize that while some details of the drawing seem extremely accurate, as a whole it cannot be a straightforward study from life: the hump in the back half of the lamb is entirely unnatural, and the arrangement of the legs is also inappropriate for the species.5 The bat drawing similarly combines naturalistic details with other features that cannot be accurate. Given the appearance of precision in these depictions, one way of interpreting them is that both drawings are deliberately deceptive: Holbein knew perfectly well that his representation was not fully in accord with the real world, but he wanted to see how persuasive he could make it appear. Here he seems to have combined physiognomic features of different species, possibly a pig or another animal integrated into a lamb. Combining the limbs of different animals together was a common practice for artists representing otherworldly beasts – Holbein drew such a fantastical creature, a chimera, among his Praise of Folly sketches6 – but the intention here appears to have been to disguise the combination. If that is the correct interpretation, Holbein’s ultimate goal was not to reproduce what sheep and lambs really look like, but to develop enough understanding of animal physiognomy to be able to create an imagined or composite creature that looks convincing as a real-world animal to the uninitiated eye (unlike chimeras, which are supposed to look unfamiliar and fantastical). We might, in fact, take this as Holbein’s approach to representation more generally: he sought to reproduce

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worldly appearances in ways that on the surface look entirely persuasive, but which incorporate various departures from reality that he thought made the image more effective or interesting artistically. In doing so, he had to study the world closely, in some of the same ways as more scientifically minded observers would, but with a very different goal. Throughout his work Holbein drew upon this ability to present the natural world persuasively. For example, he depicted animals with great vividness in a few of his later portraits, including on a couple of occasions hawks in portraits of noblemen, such as an unidentified 28-year-old man painted in 1542 (illus. 44). The man’s status is indicated through his gold rings (rendered, like the background inscription, with real gold) and by his understatedly expensive clothing – the red silk lining of his black jacket just shows at his right wrist and through a fashionable slash at his upper left sleeve – while the hawk acts as another status symbol, given the close association between hunting and the nobility. Technical analysis has revealed that the bird was actually added in at a relatively late point during painting, perhaps requested to increase the visual signs of the man’s status.7 The bird’s beak, head shape and eye colour reveal that it is a hawk rather than a falcon, meaning it caught its prey by being tossed towards it on the ground, an easier (if still expensive) form of hunting than the organized spectacles of falcons attacking other birds from the air.8 In holding the hawk’s hood, which obstructs its vision and thus controls its independence of flight, the man demonstrates his authority over a species of bird that was difficult to fully tame: it appears that either he is just about to release it, or it has just returned from an attack, obediently responding to his call.

44 Hans Holbein the Younger, Nobleman with a Hawk, 1542, oil on wood.

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The specificity and vividness of the details of representation operate in constructive tension with the entirely blank ground, which removes the portrait from any particular setting. Holbein’s capacity to render the animal with perfect control meant that he could effortlessly make the hawk look simultaneously like a closely observed study of a real animal and an effective symbol. Holbein’s most direct engagement with scientific imagery began after he first moved to England towards the end of 1526. The trip itself must have been an adventurous voyage, covering some 965 kilometres (600 mi.) and including travel by ship. His father had regularly travelled across southern Germany to carry out artistic commissions, and his sons might sometimes have accompanied him, though there is no way of knowing for certain. At a minimum Holbein the Younger would have travelled from Augsburg southwest to Basel (some 370 kilometres (230 mi.) by road), and a few years later west from Basel to Bourges and back (over 480 kilometres (300 mi.) each way), trips that must have been primarily or entirely over land. Whether he travelled south to Italy, which would have involved the more dramatic experience of crossing the Alps, is a matter of speculation.9 His trip to London via Antwerp is documented only through letters written between Erasmus and two of his humanist friends abroad, Pieter Gilles in Antwerp and Thomas More in London, which indicate that Holbein carried letters of recommendation from Erasmus (and delivered other correspondence for him), and that he hoped to make some good income in England. Holbein might have travelled part or most of the way by river, taking the Rhine from Basel and

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across to the Scheldt to arrive at Antwerp, although it is possible that he travelled partly or fully overland, since river tolls could be expensive, and overland trading routes between Antwerp and Germany were also well developed.10 Nothing more is known of the journey, or how long he stayed in Antwerp, although Erasmus suggested that Gilles could send his servant with Holbein to visit the painter Quentin Metsys, who had created a portrait medal of Erasmus in 1519, and a couple of years earlier had painted a diptych portrait of Erasmus and Gilles, given as a gift to More.11 Whether the two artists actually met remains unknown, but Holbein would have then sailed across the English Channel to reach London, where he appears to have been welcomed into the household of Thomas More, a lawyer with a humanist education whose career was moving ever further into politics: he was then a secretary and adviser to Henry viii, and he would later become Lord Chancellor.12 Ten years earlier More had written the book Utopia, a satire dedicated to Erasmus and written in the vein of Praise of Folly, where a fictional world traveller describes to fictional versions of More and Gilles a remarkable new land that he has encountered overseas. A couple of the Holbein brothers’ early title borders had appeared in editions of the text published by Froben in Basel, and Ambrosius produced a map of the fictional country of Utopia, supposedly a large island somewhere in the new world of the Americas.13 Thus More must have previously encountered Holbein’s work, and he clearly appreciated his talents, though he warned Erasmus in his response letter that Holbein might not find England as lucrative as he hoped.14

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More nevertheless set in motion major commissions for Holbein towards the beginning of his two-year stay, starting with two related portraits of More, one of himself alone, the other using the same template but surrounded by his family.15 The latter painting was destroyed by fire in the eighteenth century but is known through copies and from an original preliminary drawing (illus. 45), which is analogous to the Seymour cup drawing (see illus. 22) in that it represents a late but not quite final stage of design. It presents the main outlines of the composition with great clarity in black ink, without indicating the intended colours or shading; it was probably made as a presentation image for More’s approval before painting began. Additions in a much lighter brown ink indicate some changes to be made in the final composition: there were several objects to be added (a viol, books, Alice More’s pet monkey), while a short note in German at the right

45 Hans Holbein the Younger, study for the Thomas More family portrait, c. 1526/8, black pen and brush over preliminary chalk drawing, with inscriptions and motifs in brown ink.

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margin indicates that Alice should sit rather than kneel. The other inscriptions are in Latin and indicate each figure’s age and relationship to More, versions of which were added in gold lettering to the final painting. These inscriptions are in another hand, which has been identified as that of the Bavarian astronomer and horologer Nicolaus Kratzer.16 The drawing thus constitutes the first direct evidence of their collaboration; one imagines them discussing the drawing in More’s company, passing the pen between them as they made their annotations. Kratzer had come to England around 1517 and was very well known to More, Gilles and Erasmus.17 His own expertise lay in the mathematical rather than the literary arts: he held a position as maker of sundials and clocks for the king, and in addition to making instruments for other patrons, he lectured in mathematics and astronomy in Oxford. His participation in the More family portrait, and the fact that he wrote on the drawing in Latin while Holbein wrote in German, implies that he acted as an interpreter-collaborator when Holbein first arrived in England: by then Kratzer had been in the country for a decade and could speak English as well as Latin, whereas Holbein probably could not use either very proficiently. But Kratzer became a true collaborator with Holbein on artistic matters as well. Kratzer had previously met Albrecht Dürer, and their mutual interest in scientific matters is attested by one extant exchange of letters, the content of which implies that this was just one of other communications.18 Kratzer thus would have been well primed to collaborate on another major commission that More probably helped to arrange for Holbein: large-scale paintings made to celebrate a peace treaty with France.

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After many decades of antagonism and occasional outright war between England and France, the two countries signed a peace agreement in 1527 to offset the increasing political power of Charles v and his Holy Roman Empire. Towards the beginning of the year the court began planning elaborate celebrations for the French ambassadors and other vips, which took place at Greenwich Palace (8 kilometres (5 mi.) east of London) in May. A temporary banqueting hall and theatre were erected for the occasion, known primarily from two contemporary descriptions of the event, as well as the payment records made to the various craftsmen who constructed the works.19 After a display of jousting, the attendees feasted in the lavishly decorated banqueting house, in which stood a triumphal-arch structure; and as the company was leaving to go to the theatre, the king stopped to point out a painting that had been erected on the back of the arch, a depiction by Holbein of England’s siege of the French city of Thérouanne in 1513. English and Imperial troops had besieged the city for several weeks before the concluding battle, in which the French cavalry were routed. Henry viii had himself participated in this event, as had some of the other men who took part in the Greenwich celebrations.20 It seems a poor choice of subject for a peace celebration, reminding its viewers of France’s previous defeat by England and its then ally the Holy Roman Empire: a chronicler noted that the French ambassadors enjoyed the painting more than their memories of the event itself.21 This was a rare occasion on which Holbein was asked to depict a recent event that had taken place in a specific location, with the concomitant necessity to make the scene sufficiently

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recognizable for those in the audience with direct memory of it. It seems likely, then, that Holbein would have used sources such as maps and/or previous depictions of the battle to serve as guidelines for his own rendition. Only one depiction of a contemporary battle by Holbein survives, though it is of a different type: it shows mercenary soldiers with swords and lances fighting on foot, their bodies and weapons delineated in black ink with wash shading added to about two-thirds of the scene (illus. 46).22 The drawing seems likely to have been a preliminary study towards a larger painting, although probably not the Thérouanne commission, since it shows nothing of the setting and instead focuses on the chaotic mêlée as the two sides meet, even while imposing an artistic order onto the scene: the figures are arranged in a curved arc, with the two sides clashing at the apex nearest the viewer. Holbein must have studied contemporary weaponry 46 Hans Holbein the Younger, Battle Scene, c. 1524, pen and ink with some black brush and grey wash.

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and its specific deployment in order to depict the men’s postures persuasively, although despite the presence of a couple of fallen bodies, there is little sense of truly bloody violence here. While he might have studied the individual components of what made up a battle, he had probably not witnessed one directly and made little attempt to capture its real effects, not least because that is typically not what the audience of an artwork wants to see. The Thérouanne painting might not have depicted any actual violence, since according to the description by the chronicler Edward Hall, it showed how the various components of the warring sides were arranged in the landscape around the town.23 Thus its emphasis lay not on the final pitched battle, but on the topographic context, whose eventual conclusion the spectators already knew. It might have

47 Unidentified designer and cutter, Der Statt Terwona in Picardey belegerung und eroberung (The Siege and Capture of the City Thérouanne in Picardy), c. 1553, woodcut, published by Heylreich Zell, Strasbourg.

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looked something like a later woodcut that depicted a second, and much more disastrous, siege of Thérouanne by Imperial troops in 1553 (illus. 47).24 The walled city with its large cathedral appears in the centre, with the notations ‘mittag’ (noon) at the top and ‘nidergang’ ([sun-]setting) at the right indicating the directions of south and west respectively. The woodcut focuses on how the imperial troops were ranged around the beleaguered town, with the locations of particular contingents noted by inscriptions, thus imbuing a recent historical scene with elements from maps and diagrams, as Holbein’s own image might also have done. When the party moved on from the banqueting house to the theatre, they encountered the second of Holbein’s works, a large ceiling painting devised in collaboration with Kratzer, which, according to the two extant descriptions, combined a map of the world with a rendition of the earth as a cosmological sphere, including its polar axis, the bands of the equator, tropics and polar circles, the planets, and images of the zodiac.25 Although this painting does not survive either, the descriptions make it clear that it combined various elements that are normally found in separate kinds of representations. The overall conception seems likely to have resembled a woodcut designed by Albrecht Dürer for a 1525 edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia (illus. 48), the ancient text that provided the coordinates of various locations across the globe and explained different methods of how to project the three-dimensional surface of the planet onto a two-dimensional map.26 Ptolemy’s text survived into the Middle Ages through later manuscript copies, although his original maps did not; these had depicted various regional maps of different parts of the world, together

48 Albrecht Dürer, Ptolemy’s third projection of a world map, 1525, woodcut, printed in Ptolemy, Geographia (1525).

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with at least one map representing the full extent of the world’s populated territory according to ancient knowledge. These ‘world maps’ only included somewhat less than one-quarter of the planet’s surface, given that the Greeks and Romans did not know of the existence of what would later be called the Americas, nor did they have much knowledge of Asian geography, and they thought that the lands south of the Tropic of Cancer became too hot for habitation. When Ptolemy’s text was revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, successive editions began to include new maps, some of them reproducing what were thought to be Ptolemy’s originals, while others were new modern maps: local and regional maps showing modern place names and political boundaries, as well as new world maps encompassing the entire globe, including what had become known of the New World. Since world maps required some kind of mathematical manipulation to portray the earth’s curved surface on a flat image (see, for instance, illus. 51), Ptolemy had explained three different methods of doing so. Only two of these projections were represented in the modern editions, and they omitted the unknown parts of the ancient globe, focusing only on the stretch of earth between Europe and Asia (as far as it was then known), and south to the northern part of Africa, with the Arctic regions also omitted. Dürer’s addition to the Nuremberg 1525 edition was an unprecedented image recreating Ptolemy’s third projection, showing this area of the earth spread across a representation of the full globe.27 Although the woodcut did not depict any of the actual geography of the map, showing only where it would be applied onto the globe, around this time Dürer collaborated with

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the astronomer Johannes Stabius to create another large woodcut depicting the full globe with as much geography as was then known and visible from their chosen point of view, which focused on the Mediterranean.28 These images seem likely to have formed the basis for the painting by Holbein and Kratzer, which, according to the descriptions, included further elements not normally included on this type of diagram: representations of the planets in relation to zodiac figures. However these were constructed, they would have derived from different kinds of figurative models. Although we can only guess at what the painting looked like, it was clearly an immensely impressive work that combined Kratzer’s astronomical and geographical knowledge – he must have been the one who worked out the precise arrangement of the scientific features – with Holbein’s ability to render a complex diagram clearly, augmented with attractive figural imagery. Henry viii inspected the works at Greenwich shortly before the festivities began, and although his opinion of the ceiling painting has not been recorded, it must have set the stage (together with the Thérouanne painting) for his later appointment of Holbein as his court painter. Meanwhile, Holbein seems to have spent most of his remaining time in England working on portraits, commissioned by individuals from various social stations, though mostly with connections or aspirations to the court. Kratzer commissioned his own portrait from Holbein in 1528 before his return to Basel (illus. 49).29 Holbein designed the composition to emphasize Kratzer’s activity as a practical instrument-maker: he wears academic dress, but rather than lecturing, he poses with a half-constructed sundial of an

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unusual polyhedral shape. The hour lines of its various dials are not fully completed, and the gnomons (the tabs that cast the sun’s shadow onto each face) have yet to be added. Tools hang on the back wall with others scattered on the table, and Kratzer holds a pair of dividers, which would be used for marking out the circular dials, although it is open too wide to correspond to the radius of the dials shown on the polyhedron. A piece of paper and an awl appear to project slightly out of the picture plane past the front edge of the table, where Holbein painted a distinct line of shadow to define its frontal plane. The paper states in Latin, ‘The portrait of Nicolaus Kratzer of Munich, a Bavarian, taken from life when he was completing his forty-first year, 1528’, a formulation that derives from Quentin Metsys’s portrait medallion of Erasmus.30 This is the first image where we can directly study the creative intersections between the interests of a scientist and Holbein’s subtly creative approach to representation. Although on first glance this looks like a neutral and precise rendition, various clues indicate that the painting was carefully manipulated, with some elements depicted inaccurately. First, the overall space does not make much sense; the table appears to stand at a diagonal in relation to the back wall, but given that Holbein carefully delineated its front visible edge as running parallel to the surface of the picture plane, that would make its top surface an elongated triangle. Other clues require specialized knowledge to appreciate. Holbein included three different astronomical instruments in the painting. The one at the back of the shelf at the upper left is an unusually large version of a well-known type of sundial, a cylinder dial (also

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known as a pillar or shepherd’s dial). They were very easy to use, if not especially accurate in comparison with other kinds of sundials. Although much of the object is painted in shadow, Holbein rendered its details very carefully, and with striking precision. In contrast, the other two objects, the polyhedral sundial in Kratzer’s hand and the semicircular dial at the front of the back shelf – to which the circular disc lying on the table belongs – are unusual instruments, seemingly experimental objects of Kratzer’s own invention, and close analysis reveals that Holbein has manipulated the representation of each of them, changing the object’s perspective and/or geometry.31 An average viewer will not be aware of these distortions, but Kratzer, who had a keen interest in geometry, must have been, and it seems likely that he worked with Holbein to construct this representation as a kind of subtle in-joke, calling into question the reality of the scene and Kratzer’s own capacity to master the secrets of the universe. Similar ideas recur in The Ambassadors, painted five years later (illus. 50), and it seems highly likely that Kratzer helped to design it. Two men, depicted in life-size, stand on either side of an array of objects distributed across two shelves, backed by a large green curtain pulled back just far enough at the upper left to reveal a small crucifix. A diagonal slash of mottled grey paint running along the bottom resolves, when seen from a close angle towards the right side of the painting, into the image of a skull, symbol of mortality. Holbein’s signature appears in the back shadows of the floor at the lower left, but the two men are identified only by age (28 and 25 respectively) rather than by name, and their identities were rediscovered only through extensive research

49 Hans Holbein the Younger, Nicolaus Kratzer, 1528, oil on oak.

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around the turn of the twentieth century.32 The nobleman Jean de Dinteville, on the left, served as the official French ambassador to Henry viii’s court for the calendar year 1533, and since the painting was later recorded in his château in France, he must have commissioned and paid for it, then taken it back home with him when he left England at the end of the year. The other man, Georges de Selve, son of the president of the French parliament and shortly to embark on his own ambassadorial career, is documented as having visited Dinteville in London around May. Dinteville wrote

50 Hans Holbein the Younger, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (‘The Ambassadors’), 1533, oil on oak.

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to one of his brothers that he enjoyed Selve’s visit, but no other sources record the connection between the two men, or explain why Selve came to England; thus the meaning of their dual presence, like everything else in the painting, must remain subject to speculation. In a general sense, other documents of the time indicate that Selve – who despite his young age had already been appointed as a bishop, as a reward for his father’s loyal service to the crown – was particularly concerned with preserving the unity of the Christian Church, while Dinteville’s concerns at that time lay with preserving secular diplomacy between nations.33 Both of these, needless to say, were extremely difficult challenges in 1533. Although the painting conveys an initial impression of precise realism, almost like a photograph, the presence of the anamorphic skull signals that all is not as it appears on first glance. Anamorphosis, an extreme but systematic geometric distortion of an image, which can then be corrected in some way, often through a shift in viewing position, had recently become popular in German prints and would remain in vogue for some years in Tudor England,34 although the fact that the distorted image here was a well-known symbol of death suggests a more sombre purpose. The floor pattern is a quincunx, an arrangement of circles inscribed within squares, a motif often seen in the medieval mosaic floors known as Cosmati or Cosmateque work. A quincunx Cosmati floor built for the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey in the thirteenth century includes an inscription that explicitly equates the geometric pattern with the cosmos.35 Holbein’s floor does not directly replicate that of Westminster or any other Cosmatesque work, but it seems probable that in a more general way it

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signifies the cosmos as a unified pattern. The various objects on the shelves are carefully selected and arranged to signal the four branches of the mathematical arts, the quadrivium: arithmetic, represented by a merchants’ arithmetic book at the lower left; music, signified by a lute, a set of Lutheran hymn books and a set of flutes; geometry, represented by the terrestrial globe behind the arithmetic book (also by the floor pattern and the perspective throughout the painting); and finally the upper shelf presents six instruments representing astronomy.36 No direct evidence proves Kratzer’s involvement with the painting, but his assistance in planning the composition is suggested by a few factors. Three of the six astronomical instruments on the upper shelf reproduce (with variations) the ones in the Kratzer portrait, and although Dinteville is recorded as having an interest in science, such an array of objects was far more likely to be owned by Kratzer than either Dinteville or Selve (or indeed Holbein). The painting also shares with the Kratzer portrait, as with so many other Holbein images, an initial impression of great naturalism, which breaks down on closer inspection. Some hints of trouble in the composition have been noted before, although most of the problems with the representation itself have been overlooked. A string on the lute is broken; a flute as well as one of the hymn books is missing; the depicted geometry of the floor is subtly imprecise; and the measurement scales of the astronomical instruments are all inaccurate, in most cases significantly distorted. Such flaws are extremely easy to overlook, especially given the large size of the painting, and some details such as distortions of the astronomical instruments

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would be evident only to viewers who already knew what they ought to look like, which was probably as rare in the sixteenth century as it is today. Close study indicates that the degree of distortion increases in a fairly systematic way from each of the mathematical arts to the next, culminating in the major flaws with the measuring scales in all of the astronomical instruments.37 Like the distortions in the Kratzer portrait, then, Holbein’s capacity to make an image look realistic at first glance, while actually containing specific divergences from real life, appears to be essential to the meaning of this painting, though here with a more serious purpose than in the portrait. As a whole, the image suggests that the mathematical balance and harmony that symbolically represented the goals of the two men – harmony between nations and religions – was profoundly threatened, and probably intrinsically impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, the painting does not merely express nihilistic despair about the futility of their goals: the crucifix in the upper left corner serves as a subtle reminder that Christ watches all, and that the possibility of salvation remains eternally present. Even if perfection must lie beyond reach of the human world, resolution will still be achieved in the world beyond this one. Both the Kratzer portrait and The Ambassadors are distinctive in applying Holbein’s unique talents to carefully planned representations of scientific objects. In other scientific images, Holbein’s art was employed for somewhat different ends. In between painting the Kratzer portrait and The Ambassadors, Holbein had spent four more years in Basel; the city’s terms of citizenship prohibited leaving for more than two years,

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and he was back by the end of August 1528, when he bought a house together with his wife Elsbeth.38 Although Holbein had left her and their two young children behind during his initial absence in England, his return, and the purchase of a house on doing so, suggests that his goal all along had been to generate new income to better provide for them. Over the next four years he and Elsbeth had two more children and bought the smaller house next door in addition to the first one. But an artistic career continued to be challenging in Basel, with the religious controversies heading towards the final iconoclastic riot and city conversion in early 1529. After he had been back in Basel for a year or two, Holbein embarked on a new collaboration with a scientist, this time the geographer/cosmographer Sebastian Münster, who had himself moved to the city in 1529. How and when the connection arose is unknown; if they had not already met previously, perhaps Holbein came to Münster’s attention through his commission from the city council to paint the clock on the Rhine tower in 1530, work that would have been very publicly visible.39 It is tempting to speculate that Holbein welcomed the opportunity to expand into new work that built upon his recent experience in London with Kratzer but went in new directions. Although Kratzer and Münster had knowledge of similar scientific areas, the differences in the works Holbein produced with them suggests that they were men of rather different outlooks: Kratzer with a well-informed professional scepticism about the limits of human knowledge, whereas Münster had more of an amateur’s enthusiasm (and possibly naivety) about what it could achieve. Holbein appears to have adapted equally well to what each wanted from him.

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Münster had spent much of his life to that point as a Franciscan priest with expertise in Hebrew, publishing a number of scholarly texts with Froben in the 1510s and early 1520s, while living elsewhere in southern Germany. But as the Reformation developed, Münster left his order and converted to Protestantism, moving to Basel to join the university faculty as a professor of Hebrew. 40 In these years he was shifting his professional interests to encompass geography and astronomy, and here Holbein’s artistic skills proved to be of great use to him. In 1544 Münster would publish the first edition of his magnum opus, Cosmographia, a massive collection of maps and descriptions of locations all across the globe, with a particular emphasis on the German-speaking lands of Europe. He began working on this project in the mid-1520s by making various local maps of his own, and calling upon others to contribute to the enterprise; and as part of the project, he published instructional texts explaining how to make and use sundials, take local topographical surveys and make predictions about the movements of the Sun and Moon, since all of these activities could assist (in theory at least) with map-making. Until Holbein’s departure for London in mid1532, the two worked together on various woodcut images for these publications. The best-known of these collaborations, a world map (illus. 51), appeared not in one of Münster’s own publications but as an insert in a Latin-language collection of travel narratives and descriptions of various parts of the world (Novus orbis regionum ac insularum), to which Münster also added an introduction.41 The volume brought together texts of very different periods, including medieval descriptions of the Holy Land

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and the Far East, and fifteenth-century descriptions of the Portuguese explorations of Africa, though the majority were more recent accounts of discoveries in the New World, India and Asia, plus a couple of recent descriptions of eastern Europe and Russia. Each of these texts had already been published elsewhere (in some cases in another language), but they were brought together by the humanist Johann Hüttich and given a preface by another member of the language faculty at the University of Basel, Simon Grynäus (a specialist in Greek). The texts were not arranged in chronological order or by geography, so the publication was not scientific in the sense of trying to impose order onto the contents. Instead the emphasis lay on gathering together diverse accounts of all parts of the globe, similar to Münster’s aim in his later Cosmographia to describe the world, although in that case the contents were organized both geographically and chronologically.42 Münster’s and Grynäus’s prefaces both emphasized recent advances in knowledge: Grynäus stated that mathematicians’ abilities to visualize the globe had enabled modern discoveries, while Münster remarked on how much more was known than in ancient times about the world’s geography.43 The world map was well suited to this particular context. The actual mapping would have been done by Münster himself, although there are a number of problems with it, both because knowledge of the globe constantly changed in that period, and because world mapping was not really at the forefront of Münster’s own expertise. Many details are obviously flawed compared to our own knowledge of the globe, including the only partially mapped North and South America, the incorrect extent and shape of East Asia (which in that era was

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almost as unknown to Europe as the New World), the absence of Australia and Antarctica, and the errors in rendering the southern extent of Africa, as well as Scandinavia. To some degree that reflects the imperfect geographical knowledge of the time, but even for 1532 Münster’s map was actually not fully up to date; when Novus orbis was reprinted slightly later in the year in Paris, it was given a new map by the French mathematician Oronce Fine, which gave a more accurate rendering of current geographical knowledge.44 But the map is particularly interesting for its figural imagery, which was added by Holbein. Within the map itself are a couple of imaginary sea monsters. A ship sailing the ocean between South America and Africa looks to be a more realistic depiction, although in fact it is not quite the right kind of ship for such a sea voyage, since it carries only a single square-rigged mast, whereas ocean-going ships by this date were typically three- or four-masted carracks, with square sails at the front to best capture the force of the winds on the open ocean, and lateen (triangular) sails at the back for better manoeuvrability in contrary winds (see illus. 54 for a somewhat more plausible depiction). Angels at the top and bottom of the globe pull on cranks, as if either turning the globe,45 or stirring up the ocean waters; the latter interpretation seems more likely, both because in this period the earth was understood to stand still at the centre of the universe, and because the two angels appear to be turning their cranks in opposite directions. Holbein’s most significant contributions are the narrative scenes around the margins, emphasizing details from a selection of the texts contained in the book. The killer serpents and elephant and the lip-plated natives at the upper

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left come from Alvise Cadamosto’s account of the west coast of Africa;46 the cannibals at the lower left were a recurring theme in texts describing the people who lived along the coasts of South America; and the scenes at the right, showing an exotic civilization in the lower corner, and spices juxtaposed with figures hunting with bows and arrows at the top, appear to be derived from Ludovico di Varthema’s account of his travels in India, the Middle East and Asia, first published in 1510.47 The map thus gave some sense (however imperfect) of the overall geography of the earth, while conveying the range of exotic creatures and modes of living that were then believed to exist in places far from the readers’ Europe. Perfect accuracy of scientific knowledge was not the map’s central aim: much more important was bringing the travel narratives into vivid imagination. 51 Hans Holbein the Younger and Sebastian Münster (design) and unidentified cutter, Typus cosmographicus universalis (world map), 1532, woodcut.

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Holbein’s other collaborative images with Münster, a range of prints published between 1531 and 1534, all concerned astronomy and/or astrology in some way, although they served a range of purposes, some more functional than others. The first that appeared in print were four illustrations of different types of sundials, including a cylinder dial like the one in the portrait of Kratzer, in one of Münster’s books explaining how to construct a wide range of sundials, first published in 1531 and then republished with expansions in 1533.48 The four woodcuts attributed to Holbein’s design (at least in part) stand out against the book’s other more crude sundial representations, so the advantage of employing Holbein seems to have been that his skills at naturalistic depiction made the three-dimensional forms of the objects easier to understand, as well as more elegant. Another group of woodcuts added to the 1533 edition of this text, Horologiographia, served a different, more artistic purpose. They accompanied a new section of the text summarizing the ancient writer Hyginus’ description of the main constellations, including the twelve signs of the zodiac.49 Hyginus focused particularly on the mythologies surrounding the subjects, as well as describing how the stars were arranged, although these descriptions were not particularly accurate. Previous printed editions of this text had included illustrative woodcuts of the constellations indicating the supposed star locations, although like the textual descriptions, they would not be of any assistance for anyone wanting to identify an actual constellation in the sky. Münster commissioned Holbein to design a new set of these illustrations (illus. 52), based heavily on an edition of the text printed in Venice in 1517.50

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Holbein’s depiction of Capricorn shows how his close study of mammals enabled him to render the goat-like torso and forelegs very persuasively, while the back half is far more overtly imaginary, ending in an almost purely decorative tail, somewhat like the sea creatures in the world map. As was the case with Holbein’s source images, the star indications here have little to do with the actual arrangement of stars in the constellation Capricorn; instead the image focuses on creating an elegant rendition of the hybrid figure. As a result, it seems that the primary aim here had little to do with scientific knowledge; rather the woodcuts enhanced the book’s aesthetic appeal by presenting attractive images. These might in turn have increased their general memorability, though without making it any easier to recognize the actual star arrangements. There is little sense throughout Holbein’s collaborations with Münster that he had much intrinsic interest in the scientific content of the works. That was left to Münster to arrange, while Holbein’s contributions lay primarily in enhancing the visual interest and aesthetic appeal of the works, as seen in his figurative and decorative imagery on an elaborate woodcut instrument used for calculating Sun and Moon movements (illus. 53). Holbein must have designed this before he left Basel in mid-1532, although the work as a whole was not completed and published until 1534.51 Münster had previously made two similar woodcut instruments, one related to the Sun completed in 1525, and another for the Moon completed in 1529, whereas this third example was designed as an improved combination of both instruments into one. Its ultimate purpose was to enable users to predict lunar and

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solar eclipses, which required making precise predictions about the movements of the Sun (a comparatively straightforward undertaking) and the Moon (much more complicated). Münster was interested in eclipses because, in theory at least, they were one means of measuring longitude (east-west position on the globe), which was much more difficult to calculate 52 Hans Holbein the Younger (design) and unidentified cutter, Capricorn, c. 1531–2, woodcut, printed in Sebastian Münster, Horologiographia (1533).

53 Hans Holbein the Younger and Sebastian Münster (design) and Veit Specklin (cutting), New Instrument of the Sun and the Moon, design c. 1530–32 (completed 1534), woodcut.

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than latitude (north-south position).52 Other people, however, tended to be interested in eclipses because they were seen as dangerous events signifying potentially malign influences from the heavens on the world. At the centre of the main image is a series of circular diagrams, including zodiac figures mostly designed by Holbein (in somewhat different compositions compared to the larger Hyginus constellations), and culminating in a calendar that presents the 365 days of the year running around the outer circle. Other circular diagrams in the corners either serve as tables of information (at the top) or enable additional calculations (bottom). The previous two instruments had included decorative imagery, but not as extensive or as beautiful as here, which suggests that Münster was able to appreciate the superior talents of his latest artistic collaborator. The work was cut by a talented cutter, Veit Specklin, who appears to have well captured the elegance of Holbein’s original work, including a dragon and the decoration of two circular dials that appeared on separate woodcuts, as well as all of the floral and narrative imagery squeezed into the spandrel areas between the circular diagrams on the main sheet. The four narrative scenes in the side spandrels present subjects related to astrology: clockwise from the upper left, they represent farmers at work underneath astrological signs, a horoscope created at the birth of a child, bloodletting (the timing of which was determined by astrology), and medical study of a patient’s urine. In truth this instrument had only very limited relevance for astrology, so the inclusion of these scenes looks like a marketing tool, designed to attract buyers who were less interested in data collection than its astrological

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consequences. The elegance of Holbein’s artistic imagery also fits well with the intrinsic elegance of the instruments’ geometric structure. Precision played a complementary role for both aspects of the print: it enhanced the accuracy of the instrument diagrams themselves, while also enhancing its visual aesthetics. A few of Holbein’s other images, though not scientific works per se, also reflect the expansion of contemporary knowledge about the world. A drawing in Frankfurt of a threemasted ship (illus. 54), which might be a good copy after a lost original, acts as a moralizing critique of bad behaviour: some of the men on board are drinking, one vomits over the side, another gropes a topless woman, and no one appears to be steering. These details relate to moralizing literature and imagery of the era, including Sebastian Franck’s satirical book Ship of Fools, which uses the ship as a metaphor for society and an opportunity to critique the flaws of human nature (like Erasmus’ Praise of Folly).53 Since the drawing has been cut down, there is no way of knowing whether the sail at the top of the mainmast once included any identification of the original patron. However, a plausible (if unprovable) hypothesis interprets this as a preparatory study for a large-scale painting that would originally have had a counterpart of a well-run ship, a pair of subjects that would have appealed to the German Hanseatic merchant community who resided in London in a compound known as the Steelyard (located at what is now Cannon Street railway station).54 They certainly commissioned from Holbein two similar paintings on canvas (lost in an eighteenth-century fire but known from preparatory studies) representing the Triumph of Wealth and the Triumph of Poverty,

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as well as a number of portraits of individual merchants (see illus. 66).55 Interesting in this context are the details of the ship itself. It is difficult to confirm whether it represents northern or southern European construction, since techniques of northern shipbuilding changed substantially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to adapt practices from the Iberian peninsula and Italy. The most important change concerns the construction of the hull: the earlier northern system of creating a hull’s shape through overlapping and nailing split planking together (‘clinker’ construction) was replaced, at least for higher prestige ships, by fastening sawn planks to a skeletal structure (‘carvel’ construction), which was ultimately 54 Hans Holbein the Younger (or copy after?), Ship with Sailors, c. 1532–3, black pen and ink with watercolour in grey, blue, pink and red, on handmade paper laid on card.

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more stable and easier to repair, as well as an easier system to apply to larger ships carrying three or four masts.56 Holbein’s depiction of the lower part of the hull as completely smooth does not reflect actual shipbuilding practices. The depiction of the rigging, on the other hand, accords with what had become standard practice in both northern and southern ships by the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in that two front masts carry square sails, with an additional smaller square sail at the top of the main (middle) mast – these could carry the full force of strong winds on open seas – whereas the mizzenmast at the back (left), though not unfurled, appears by its structure to be lateen (triangular), a much better type of sail for contrary winds; they were widely used on many of the early exploration ships from Portugal and Spain, and from there the technology was exported to other parts of Europe.57 The combination of square and lateen sails represented a hybrid combination of northern and southern traditions that enabled the best overall navigation. Holbein’s ship thus looks very similar to some of those used in the voyages of discovery, although it could equally well represent a trading ship, whether from southern or northern Europe. It is clearly not a warship, given the absence of guns and gunports, other than a single hatch at the left. As so often in Holbein’s images, the drawing combines strongly plausible details with invention. The figures are vastly too large in relation to the ship – more than double the size they should be – as are the anchor at the right and the rowing boat at the lower left.58 The ship should also be much longer in proportion to its height. Numerous details of the rigging appear to be based on close observation,

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probably of actual ships, or possibly very good representations of them in other media such as prints. The ropes and pulleys enabling control of the sails and yards, the outligger yard at the back and the bowsprit at the front (with the man crawling along it), and the shrouds that hold up the mast on each side (attached via paired deadyes to chain-wales at the hull, a particular invention of the late fifteenth century)59 can all be related to what is known of ships at the time. There are other details that make less sense. The positioning of an unfurled spritsail on a separate spar evidently positioned below the bowsprit (rather than directly attached to the bowsprit itself ) is puzzling; a similar construction appears in a slightly later representation of ships in the English fleet (including the Mary Rose), but that is not how they would actually be built.60 The lower right corners of the two square sails appear to be unconnected to anything, whereas they ought to tie to the outer part of the ship on the side nearest the viewer – presumably that was omitted to keep them out of the way of the oversized figures (who if correctly proportioned would stand well below the sails). All in all, while the ship as a whole hardly represents an accurate ‘portrait’ of a specific example, it nevertheless includes numerous specific details that would likely enhance its appeal to viewers well versed in contemporary sailing and shipbuilding, whether the Steelyard merchants or another patron somehow connected to shipping. Another drawing shows the advance of contemporary knowledge by depicting a mining scene, in a roundel format that suggests it was a design for stained glass (illus. 55). Though often associated with religious images, individual

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stained-glass panels, particularly in south Germany and Switzerland, often portrayed secular subjects (as in Holbein’s design for Hans Fleckenstein, see illus. 12).61 Two copies of the drawing exist, one of which (in the British Museum) has at times been attributed to Holbein’s hand, though it is now usually thought that both drawings copy a lost original.62 Mining was an important industry in central Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, as new silver and copper deposits were discovered and exploited. Gold and silver were also mined in some of the new territories conquered in the Americas, which might have further enhanced contemporary interest in the subject, although the dress of the figures in Holbein’s drawing indicates European rather than overseas activity. Mining was at that time becoming a subject of conceptual investigation as well as financial investment. Georgius Agricola completed the first major modern analyses of mining, smelting and mineralogy in a series of publications primarily dating to the 1540s and ’50s. They reflect his four years working as a physician in the new mining town of Joachimsthal, in what is now just over the border into Bohemia (the Czech Republic), but was then on the eastern edge of Saxony.63 Agricola owned some shares in the silver mines there, and he also used metals and related substances in his medical practice. Thus he developed an appreciation of the first-hand knowledge acquired by the people who worked in mining, which in many ways went beyond the knowledge derived from classical sources, as he expressed in a Latin-language dialogue completed in 1528 and published in Basel in 1530 with a couple of Holbein’s decorative initials.64 Erasmus wrote a preface to this text (Bermannus; or,

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A Dialogue on Metallurgy) in which he spoke of the vividness of the imagery: The novelty of the subject delighted me, the urbane humour that is scattered throughout the work put me in a cheerful mood, and I was not displeased by the simplicity of the style, which had something Attic about it. But what particularly captured my interest was the graphic way in which everything was brought so vividly before my eyes. I seemed not to be reading, but actually seeing those valleys and hills and mines and machines.65 Holbein’s drawing could be taken as a visualization of this sentiment, although (presumably for practical reasons) it only shows activity that takes place above ground, and it also focuses on the activity of acquiring ore rather than how it is subsequently processed. The composition seems likely to have been commissioned by someone with a commercial interest in mining, which could well entail intellectual interest in the topic. The largest group of men in the middle-left part of the drawing insert wedges into the edge of a rocky outcrop and then hammer them to break off the material. Another man at the right kneels to shovel some of the material into a container, while another basket waits to be filled at the lower left. At the bottom foreground, a man wearing a headlamp appears either about to descend into an underground shaft or has just returned; and at the upper right, a car laden with ore has just been pushed out of a horizontal shaft, presumably to be dumped onto the ground below at the end of its track. Although the accuracy of the scene is

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difficult to judge, and it only depicts certain aspects of the mining process, it is similar to the ship drawing in presenting specific details that correspond to contemporary practices and equipment, and thus must have served its purpose for a well-informed patron. Holbein’s patrons were critical to the subjects and style of his works, and although the individuals who commissioned his images cannot always be identified, it is clear that some of them at least became increasingly interested in study of the natural world. The expanding crisis of the Reformation must have stimulated the expansion of artistic imagery into new subject matter, as religious works became increasingly 55 Hans Holbein the Younger (copy after), Mining, c. 1590–1600 (original drawing c. 1520–43), pen and brown ink with grey wash.

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problematic. In the last part of Holbein’s career, it was portraiture that came to play the dominant role, as individuals went to him in ever greater numbers for an image that captured their individual persona.

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N

o direct evidence demonstrates how Holbein organized his workshop or went about securing commissions. Nevertheless, some inferences can be made given the range and characteristics of his works that survive. Many artists of his era made artworks for the open market, including Albrecht Dürer, who designed and produced his own prints, to be sold at book fairs and other venues; in fact Dürer claimed to one of his patrons, Jakob Heller, that his prints were much more lucrative than carefully worked paintings.1 An open market for paintings was also expanding in the early sixteenth century, particularly in the Low Countries, where artists and dealers found that certain subjects and compositions readily attracted buyers.2 As far as can be discerned, however, Holbein followed his father’s example in making commissioned works for particular clients. Even with his print designs, there is no evidence that either their conception or their final dissemination arose from Holbein’s own initiative; instead, he designed images that were commissioned, turned into reality and sold by others, not only his humanist book decorations, but major series like the early Hortulus animae images (see illus. 36), the Dance of Death (see illus. 71) and the Icones (see illus. 19), each

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of which sat unused for years when the initial project was left unfinished. Holbein seems to have had no involvement in seeing them through to completion or publication. Moreover, virtually all of Holbein’s paintings appear to be individual commissions. Even in cases where no patron can be identified by inscriptions, coats of arms or other signs, the fact that virtually every image by Holbein was markedly singular implies that each one was the specially made result of a particular request. In that respect, his work can be contrasted not only with the copied compositions sold in the Netherlandish markets, but with the workshop practices of Lucas Cranach the Elder, who worked with many assistants to produce multiple variations of popular works, each confirmed by the workshop’s insignia as reaching an expected standard, but often carrying only minimal input from Cranach himself.3 Holbein differed from Cranach, and departed from his father’s example, in not running a large workshop, as far as can be discerned, or collaborating extensively with other artists. He did often create designs for others to produce in different media, but the fact that such works were executed by a range of individuals – at least, that is certainly the case with the print designs – implies that he was not working within formal partnerships. His surviving paintings also contain little evidence that they were the product of various workshop hands, unlike both Cranach and Dürer, who in their mature years trained and worked with several assistants (if far more systematically in the case of Cranach). 4 There are only isolated paintings like the Last Supper and a Venus and Cupid that have previously been attributed to Holbein but are now thought to have been largely executed by a follower working on the basis

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of his initial conception, and those two particular cases appear to be connected to Holbein’s departure for England in 1526.5 Possibly that artist, whoever he was, helped Holbein execute other paintings, although if so, his hand is difficult to detect. All of this implies that Holbein sought to create value within his works by emphasizing their singularity and their consistently exceptional quality as originating from his own hand. In England he worked for a range of clients of different social means, but even in those paintings made for sitters with fewer financial resources, the compromise was not on artistic quality, but on the material aspects of value: size of panel (that is, degree of effort) and materials (amount and expense of pigments). For example, his 1534 portrait of an unidentified court attendant wearing livery (illus. 56), together with another of the man’s wife, takes the form of a very small roundel oil painting – under 12 centimetres in diameter – whose gold background inscription, which gives the year and the man’s age (thirty), appears to be an imitation with yellow paint.6 The specific form of the red cap and jacket, embroidered with ‘H R’ (for Henricus Rex, King Henry), which also appear in another roundel portrait now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, accords with documented cases of master craftsmen who had been awarded such livery through the king’s approval.7 This must have been one of Holbein’s least expensive painting commissions, but it is an exquisite depiction whose quality of representation matches that of much larger or more precious portraits. In fact, the relatively small scale enabled Holbein to show off his exceptional precision and refinement, for instance in the black-line embroidery at the man’s collar, the gold embroidery around the ‘H R’, and the lines defining

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the beard and moustache. The man’s slightly raised eyebrows (his wife has much the same expression) might be read as conveying alertness and readiness to serve, although different viewers might read his features differently. Another example is the 35 by 36 centimetre panel made in 1528 that squeezed Thomas Godsalve and his son John next to each other in a fairly tight space (illus. 57). Thomas’s act of writing, giving his own name and age (47), is rare in portraiture of the time and hints at his legal profession as registrar in Norfolk of the Consistory Court for the diocese of Norwich, a religious court presided over by the bishop that heard both civic and ecclesiastical cases. An additional trompe 56 Hans Holbein the Younger, Court Attendant to Henry viii, 1534, oil on limewood.

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l’œil slip of paper, depicted as if pasted onto the surface of the panel with wax, gives the year, although this was a later addition, not by Holbein himself. By including his son just behind him, Thomas’s commission suggests the family’s aspirations for John to rise through court service (as he did in the ensuing years).8 Although Godsalve was a relatively wealthy landowner in Norfolk, the limitations of his income compared to men of noble means is suggested by the modest size of the panel, and perhaps also by the muddy tone of the background, which may be made with a less expensive pigment than the vivid blues of some of Holbein’s other portraits (although a yellowed varnish currently obscures the original colour). Holbein surely discussed both the cost and the potential effects of different pigment options with his patrons. Again, however, the quality of the representation itself does not fall below Holbein’s more ostentatious panels: the subtlety of the two men’s physiognomies, the rich texture of the fur lining of their coats, and the still-life of the ink pot and pen case demonstrate Holbein’s skills at capturing naturalistic details. Both men appear to look at something specific off to the right, as if fixed on a particular object of attention, giving their portraits a lively immediacy. The slight tilt of John’s head seems somehow indicative of his youthful age, in comparison with Thomas’s more stately bearing. Artists like Cranach or Dürer might differentiate the works made for higher-end clients by the degree to which they themselves, rather than workshop assistants, contributed to the panel: Dürer, for example, assured the demanding Jakob Heller that ‘no one else except me shall paint a single brushstroke of [your altarpiece], and so I shall spend a great deal

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of time on it’, implying that other panels might not receive the same dedication.9 But all the portrait panels attributed to Holbein’s hand, even the more unassuming ones, appear to have been carried out by himself, to his highest standards. Many of his English portraits were copied several times by other artists, but there is little indication that this practice was directly connected to Holbein himself.10 The conclusion we might draw is that Holbein wanted everything that he produced to serve as an optimal advertisement of his artistic skills. For whatever reason – pride, professional calculation, personality – he never produced multiple variations of successful compositions carried out in part (or almost entirely) by assistants, even though this was an established and respected practice by some of his highly esteemed compatriots: the Cranach workshop, for instance, produced dozens of copied portraits of Martin Luther, or the Electors of Saxony.11 Perhaps the exacting nature of Holbein’s skill meant that assistants tended to be of less use to him, whereas Cranach’s style was more easily imitated. This artistic choice had a striking impact on the shape of Holbein’s career, in that he was dependent on finding individual patrons who were willing to commission relatively expensive individual works. He started his career in a selfgoverning city, Basel, where he presumably anticipated a similar environment to his home town of Augsburg. It has been speculated that something perhaps went wrong with the Holbeins’ professional position in Augsburg,12 although it seems more likely that Ambrosius and Hans judged Augsburg to be already well-populated with artists, whereas the Swiss cantons offered more open opportunities (also it was common

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for young German artists to travel after completing their initial training). Most of the works Holbein carried out in Basel were for patrons who were either part of scholarly circles, or successful through business, which in turn typically entailed political power; in other words, he worked for people whose social position was closely connected to their advanced profession, developed through intellectual and/or economic resources. Such patrons were similar to the types of people his father worked with, except that Augsburg’s ruling classes represented an even more closed oligarchy compared to Basel’s.13 Holbein the Elder also worked much more often with major religious institutions, populated with individuals 57 Hans Holbein the Younger, Thomas and John Godsalve, 1528, oil on oak.

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from long-established noble families (as with the Dominican convent that commissioned the basilica panels, see illus. 32). Basel’s economy was smaller than Augsburg’s, it was never the centre of imperial visits, and its old patrician families were no longer in political power. While great social distinctions remained between those of the lowest and the highest guilds (and were deeply resented by those in the lower classes), Holbein aimed his work at a fairly consistent range of people in the middle-top levels of Basel society. By the time he was nearing thirty years old, he actively abandoned that environment to seek court employment, a very different social context where the hierarchies were much more extended, with the highest-ranked holding their position through landed titles. It seems probable that Holbein was looking for a discerning clientele who would choose to support the work of a singularly talented artist. While scholarly circles had previously been at the forefront of his patronage, by the mid-1520s he may have concluded that royal and noble circles offered a more promising opportunity than the increasingly art-wary middle classes of Basel. Holbein did not grow up interacting with aristocracy, as far as we know, but he must have been able to adapt well to them as an adult in England, enough to attract and maintain their patronage: it has been calculated that among the 83 peerage families that existed between 1526 and 1543, Holbein painted portraits for more than 20 per cent of them (the title-holder, and/or their wives or children).14 For instance, Holbein painted portraits for both of the English dukes of the later 1530s and early 1540s. He painted a large portrait of the third Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard,

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around 1539 (see illus. 1), and he also portrayed Norfolk’s poet son Henry Howard, who held the title Earl of Surrey by courtesy (not as a peer in his own right), at least three times.15 In 1541 he painted miniatures of the two young sons of Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk (illus. 58). Though small in size – the painted surface of this one is only 5.5 centimetres in diameter – miniatures were expensive in part because of their difficult and time-consuming technique, which Holbein might have first encountered on his trip to France in 1524. Whereas oil paint is a relatively viscous substance that dries slowly and enables artists to blend their brushstrokes smoothly, portrait miniatures are made with a watercolour medium, applied with an extremely fine brush in tiny individual strokes that do not fully blend like oil does.16 The apparent perfection of the resulting image thus demanded precise and painstaking work. Miniatures were also expensive because of their materials: five-year-old Henry Brandon (as well as his four-year-old brother Charles) was depicted against an extremely expensive bright blue ultramarine background – the contrast with the Godsalves is immediately apparent – and although both miniatures are currently held in Victorian frames, they would probably have been housed originally in a turned ivory or ebony box, if not a jewelled pendant.17 Holbein’s charming renditions of the Suffolk children indicate the boys’ elevated social position through their expensive and fashionable clothing, while simultaneously communicating their youthful lack of guile as they pose in innocently boyish postures, with endearingly open expressions. Holbein thus successfully developed a reputation with the highest ranks in the country, particularly among those who

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frequently made an appearance at court. During his first stay in England he had already attracted the patronage of Sir Henry Guildford, who oversaw the organization of the Greenwich revels in 1527. Guildford subsequently commissioned large portraits of himself and his wife (illus. 59 and 60), standing before vine tendrils and a curtain rod that is supported by a classical pier in Mary Guildford’s panel, which includes an inscription with the year and her age, 27 (the slip of paper on Henry’s panel is another later addition).18 Their blue backgrounds are made with a high-quality grade of azurite, the next best blue pigment after ultramarine.19 Henry Guildford holds a white staff representing his office as Comptroller of 58 Hans Holbein the Younger, Henry Brandon, 2nd Duke of Suffolk, c. 1541, watercolour on vellum laid on playing card.

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the Household, and Holbein has used shell gold (gold flakes mixed with gum arabic) to depict his strikingly rich cloth of gold tunic and his chain of the Order of the Garter, a highly exclusive chivalric company of up to 24 nominated knights plus the king. Mary holds a closed book and wears several gold chains, a pendant hung with pearls, and clusters of pearls around the front edge of her gable hood. This large and materially opulent pair of paintings, each more than twice the height of the Godsalves panel, is designed to signal Guildford’s prominent position in Henry viii’s court, and Holbein might well have anticipated finding similar commissions on his return to England, in addition to more modest images for less prominent patrons. Although Guildford had died by the time Holbein returned to England in 1532, within four years Holbein gained the position of painter to the king, which brought job security as well as prestige. When and in what circumstances this took place is unknown. An anecdote in Holbein’s first extant biography, written in the early seventeenth century by Karel van Mander, asserts his close connection to Henry by recounting that he asked for (and received) the king’s protection after angrily throwing a nobleman down a flight of stairs for intruding into his studio. However, the narrative accords with later tropes about famous artists earning privileged relationships with royal patrons (like Apelles and Alexander the Great), and thus does not necessarily have anything to do with Holbein’s actual experience at the Tudor court.20 There is no direct evidence that reveals Henry viii’s attitude towards Holbein, but the artist retained his position even after the king’s disastrous fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves in 1540, whose

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overly flattering portrait Holbein had painted.21 His annual salary was slightly less than that of the Flemish miniaturist Lucas Horenbout, but moderately higher than other court artists of that period, which implies that his distinct skills were appreciated, if not excessively so.22 As the portraits of the Godsalves and the unknown court official demonstrate, Holbein did not only serve the aristocracy 59 Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Henry Guildford, 1527, oil on oak.

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in England: he produced paintings for a wide array of people, including professionals, merchants, court officials, gentry, all five levels of the peerage (from barons to dukes) and royalty.23 This range still only includes people of middle social rank upwards (Holbein’s art remained well beyond the reach and interests of the lower classes), but it nevertheless represents a broader spread of patrons than had been characteristic of 60 Hans Holbein the Younger, Mary, Lady Guildford, 1527, oil on oak.

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his earlier career. Interestingly, this expanded range coincides with the dramatic increase of portraiture within Holbein’s oeuvre: although he did create some other works in England, the great majority of his clients wanted portraits of themselves or other members of their families, and these images necessarily convey an impression of their social status as well as their individual persona. While Holbein’s portrait drawings (such as that of Lady Elyot, see illus. 9) concentrate on the face itself, with lesser attention given to the clothing and jewellery that most clearly announce status, these details were filled out in the final paintings, typically with greater attention to detail than seen in his earliest portraits in Basel (such as the Jacob Meyer/Dorothea Kannengiesser diptych, illus. 6). Thus Holbein’s mature portraits use their materials and composition to signal the varying social levels as well as the personal and professional interests of his sitters. Clothing and contextual objects, where they are included, play an essential role in establishing the sitter’s identity, as already seen in the portraits so far examined. Guildford would hardly have tolerated having himself portrayed with a pen in hand, even though his roles certainly required extensive use of writing, while the Godsalves and the court official would not be shown wearing gold damask (in fact it was illegal for anyone under the rank of esquire to wear cloth of gold, according to Henry viii’s sumptuary laws).24 A particularly intriguing case is the deliberate replication of composition between Holbein’s 1523 portrait of Erasmus with a pilaster and the 1527 portrait of Archbishop William Warham (illus. 61 and 62). In each painting the man stands or sits with his hands resting on something, gazing to our

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left, with an array of further objects just behind him in a notfully-realized space. The choice of facing to the viewer’s left was usually unavailable to men portrayed with their wives, given that double portraits almost always followed the heraldic protocol of men at the left facing their wives to the right 61 Hans Holbein the Younger, Erasmus, 1523, oil on wood.

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(see illus. 56 and 59–60), but both Erasmus and Warham were clerics. Erasmus’s portrait was designed to emphasize his scholarly endeavours: he rests his hands on a book that is inscribed on the front edge with ‘The Works of Hercules’ in Greek, with his own name in Latin on the other visible edge, thus analogizing his feats of writing in both ancient languages with the physical feats of the mythological hero.25 His standing posture reflects the fact, well known to many of his correspondents, that he wrote while standing up.26 The anachronistic Renaissance-style pilaster next to him (hardly likely to be actually holding up anything) highlights his interest in classical material, although the specific symbolism of the siren on the capital has been subject to debate. One of the books on the shelf behind gives the year on its cover while an erudite Latin inscription along its edge lauds Holbein’s work as painter, thus emphasizing, in another intellectual format, the personal skills of the painting’s creator. As with the portrait of Kratzer (see illus. 49), the space of the painting is not fully logical, visually emphasizing that its various elements are not mere ordinary objects but carriers of meaning, whose precise interpretation is left for viewers to analyse.27 The style of Erasmus’s hat and fur-lined cloak identify his position as scholarly and non-noble, but materially successful. This portrait preceded Holbein to England: Erasmus wrote to William Warham on 4 September 1524 that he should have now received his portrait sent as a gift, and the visual parallels with Warham’s own later portrait strongly suggest that this was the one referred to.28 Warham had been Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest ecclesiastical position in

62 Hans Holbein the Younger, Archbishop William Warham, 1527, oil on oak.

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England, since 1504, and for many years he was Erasmus’s most important patron, certainly in England if not altogether. In 1512 Warham granted an annuity to Erasmus which, despite sometimes being difficult to collect, helped the scholar to focus on his work without having to worry about whether his publications would earn a living.29 Warham himself was not born into a particularly important family (his relations occupied craft professions such as carpenter and chandler), but through his Oxford education, culminating in a doctorate in canon law, he advanced well beyond his origins.30 He eventually held a number of positions under Henry vii, initially as a diplomat, then advancing rapidly to be appointed as Master of the Rolls, Keeper of the Great Seal and Lord Chancellor, although for the most part he retreated from government offices to focus more on his spiritual work in the reign of Henry viii (whose later interventions in the Church Warham opposed, although he died of natural causes in August 1532 before matters reached their full crisis). Simultaneously serving as Chancellor of Oxford University, Warham always held a strong interest in learning, particularly the kind of Christian humanism championed by Erasmus. Erasmus had long since abandoned identifying himself externally as an Augustinian priest, although he never renounced the priesthood or the promotion of pastoral care through his writings.31 Although no external evidence records Holbein’s encounter with the archbishop in 1527, the portrait itself suggests that Warham requested of Holbein (or agreed to Holbein’s suggestion) that he should be depicted as Erasmus’s ecclesiastical equivalent, appropriately enough given their parallel interests, even though Warham had achieved an external

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status far beyond Erasmus’s. The slightly different proportions of Warham’s upper body suggest that he sits rather than stands, and he wears ecclesiastical dress, a fur-lined black tippet over a white rochet with fur cuffs, with a hint at the neck of a red cassock underneath. Although he rests his hands on a brocade cushion rather than a book, lying next to him is a breviary open to the Litany of the Saints, with two more closed books behind him to the right.32 Perhaps Warham wanted the breviary next to, rather than under, his hands so that its text would be clearly visible; by this date, the Litany in itself strongly signalled the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church, given the reformers’ rejection of the existence of saints. Although in the painting Warham has set aside his mitre, its encrustation with gold, jewels and pearls – employing real gold in the representation, as in Guildford’s portrait – signals the elevation of his personal and official position, as do the gold brocade cushion, the other expensive textiles behind him (a green silk damask curtain and a Turkish carpet), and the gilded and jewelled crucifix, which also signifies the importance of images in Catholic liturgical performance. Seen together – as they would have been for at least a few years, when Warham owned both panels – the two portraits not only highlight the personal connection between the two men, but convey the sense that each worked towards similar goals, from his own position. Perhaps owing to their relatively humble backgrounds, but with both men having risen to success within their respective professions, Warham was content to show himself as a parallel to Erasmus, if distinguished as an ecclesiastic and with more luxurious surroundings (it might also have been a deliberate choice to

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ensure that his painting was a little larger than Erasmus’s). There is little to distinguish the two physiognomies, in the sense that one could imagine manipulating digital reproductions to switch the faces, and with minor adjustment of proportions neither would look particularly out of place in the other panel, other than perhaps in colouring: Warham’s 63 Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of a Woman, c. 1532–4, oil on oak.

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much ruddier skin tones, which seem out of keeping with his more advanced age, were perhaps visually necessary for his face to emerge well against the green curtain and white rochet. Each face is carefully rendered, with seemingly meticulous attention to detail; subtle tightening of their facial muscles here and there suggests a degree of animation, although neither sitter carries an identifiable expression (typical of Holbein’s and other portraiture of the era).33 The overall sense of each man’s persona is therefore largely generated by the context, and by whatever interpretation each viewer might bring to the unfixed facial expressions. A far greater differentiation emerges in two other Holbein portraits that employ a broadly similar stance for two women occupying very different parts of the social spectrum (illus. 63 and 64): an unidentified woman whose small portrait (measuring 23 by 19 centimetres) now hangs in Detroit, and a portrait in Vienna of Jane Seymour, Henry viii’s third wife, who died twelve days after giving birth to the future Edward vi. It seems hardly worth mentioning that these two paintings should make the social gap between the sitters so obvious, but precisely how Holbein did so is still worth defining. As with Erasmus and Warham, clothing is one significant factor. The unidentified woman’s fur sleeves and lining, as well as her jewelled rings and the single pearls on her bonnet and neckline, suggest that she is reasonably well off for her station, but the cut and material of her headdress and clothing indicate that she does not rank above the lower gentry, or she could just as well come from a merchant or professional family (her outfit is almost identical to that of the wife of the unknown court attendant).34 Facing right, her portrait was most likely

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designed individually, rather than as a part of a diptych with a husband. She appears to be seated on a bench set before an undefined blue background, demurely (or perhaps slightly nervously) clasping her hands in front of her. Queen Jane, on the other hand, wears bright red, gold and silver, and each of the textiles of her clothing represents the most expensive of materials: velvet, gold brocade, cloth of silver, fine embroidery.35 She casts a shadow against her azurite blue background, but otherwise her portrait is not linked to any defined context or time. Although this panel appears to have been designed as an independent work, the fact that she faces left meant that the pattern could be adapted and incorporated into other depictions with Henry viii. For instance they faced each other in the larger-scale Whitehall Palace wall painting now only known by a later copy and by the left side of Holbein’s original cartoon (illus. 65) – the full-size drawing used to transfer the composition to the wall – showing Henry viii with his father Henry vii, who were originally paired with Jane and Henry viii’s mother, Elizabeth of York, on the other side of a central inscribed tablet.36 This was of course a completely fictitious grouping, given that Elizabeth of York had died in 1503 and Henry vii died in 1509, shortly after Jane Seymour was born. Holbein here drew upon his facility with the classical style to invent a richly ornamented architectural backdrop, a fitting setting for proclaiming the grandeur of the Tudor dynasty, which had so far lasted for over fifty years, though only represented by two kings. While Henry vii rests an elbow casually on a corner of the central tablet, Henry viii stands in a deliberately forceful pose, his open-leg stance a breach of normal etiquette that

64 Hans Holbein the Younger, Jane Seymour, c. 1536/7, oil on oak.

65 Hans Holbein the Younger, Whitehall Palace Cartoon: King Henry viii, King Henry vii, c. 1536–7, ink and watercolour.

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only someone of his rank could afford to adopt.37 In contrast with the emphasis on Jane’s form-fitting dress, Holbein strategically used large pleats of heavy cloth to turn the king’s increasing weight in these years into an impression of physical power, even though in reality the king was getting fat owing to worsening leg ulcers that inhibited his previous habits of vigorous exercise.38 It is possible that the Whitehall painting was completed after Jane had died, given that the composition celebrates the Tudor dynasty; she was the only one of Henry’s six wives who produced a male heir, so the commission might have been inspired by the birth of Prince Edward. The Vienna portrait, on the other hand, was surely made while she was still alive. The sequence of jewels lining the front edge of the gable hood matches those of her dress, belt and necklace, and the dominant pearls and gold reflect the colours of her fabrics. Whether this was an exacting replication of specific clothing Jane wore, or a partial embellishment on Holbein’s part, cannot be certain, although similar jewels and items of clothing are mentioned in inventories of the time.39 The preliminary drawing for the portrait, which is in poor condition and at least partly overdrawn by another hand, shows the jewels somewhat differently, while another version of the painting by another artist (which follows the jewel structure of the drawing) portrays her wearing simpler sleeves; the Whitehall painting changed the clothing yet again, judging by the later copy. 40 In any case, Jane’s clothing is entirely appropriate to, and immediately signals, her royal stature, just as the unknown woman’s very different clothing signals her middling status. The materiality of the two panels is also sharply differentiated: that of the unknown woman is

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unusually modest in size, while the portrait of the queen is not only larger – well over twice as high – but is constructed using gold and silver leaf. Just as important as these external markers of status, however, are more subtle differentiations in body posture and physiognomy, as well as in representational style. Both women adopt clasped-hand postures that come across (at least in part) as femininely demure and self-controlled; it is somewhat difficult to picture either of them adopting the more relaxed and open positions of Erasmus or Warham, and completely unimaginable that they would stand in either Henry vii’s casual pose or Henry viii’s manly posture. But subtle differences in the positioning of the two women’s arms create different impressions. The unknown woman holds her hands towards her lap, with one hand holding the other rather loosely, whereas Jane’s forearms appear parallel to the ground, and her hand clasp is firm, suggesting that she holds her arms before her in a consciously controlled stance. Likewise, Jane gazes steadily across to our left, while the unknown woman is seen slightly from above with her head angled slightly down, which conveys a far more modest impression. Some viewers might read her expression as slightly dejected, in contrast to Jane’s tight-lipped determination (although as with all Holbein portraits, that is subject to personal interpretation). The queen would outrank almost everyone who looked at her, whether male or female, whereas that would not have been the case for the unknown woman, whoever she was. Equally importantly, Holbein differentiated the style of representation, portraying Jane in a slightly stylized manner that he typically reserved for his royal portraiture: it recurs

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in his portraits of King Henry, Prince Edward and Anne of Cleves. 41 Her clothing appears subtly abstract and stiffly rendered, anticipating the more overt flatness and stylization that would become characteristic of Elizabethan royal portraiture. 42 The textures of the unknown woman’s dress, in contrast, are integrated into a more naturalistic overall style of representation. The ruddier modelling of her face also contrasts strikingly with the queen’s paleness. Neither woman has features that would typically be interpreted as beautiful – the unknown woman has a rather recessive chin and protruding upper lip, while Jane was described by the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys as ‘no great beauty, so fair that one would call her rather pale than otherwise’43 – but Jane’s features could nevertheless be described as more delicate (note for instance her precisely shaped eyebrows). This quality bears some resemblance to the face of Mary Guildford, whose expression was made far more rigid in the finished painting than in her lively preliminary drawing, 44 although the royal portrait appears to take this a step further. As with Warham, the stronger colouring of the unknown woman suits the juxtaposition with her white clothing, whereas the queen’s lighter skin works well against the blue and red that surround it. Even though the queen was renowned as pale-skinned, there is also a somewhat porcelain-like quality to Holbein’s depiction, as if, as with the clothing, he sought to differentiate her appearance ever so subtly from the fleshier embodiment of most of his sitters. The fact that Holbein used an unusually light shade of pink as the ground colour of the preparatory drawing supports the inference that he sought to emphasize her paleness as an integral part of her identity, partly probably

66 Hans Holbein the Younger, Cyriacus Kale, 1533, oil on oak.

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reflecting her real colouring, but also signalling her elevated status as queen.45 In the case of Erasmus and Warham, Holbein’s portraits suggest that internally – as individual personas – they are greatly alike, even if occupying different professional and social contexts. The queen and the unknown woman, on the other hand, are not only differentiated by external markers, but seem intrinsically differentiated at a level of core being. One feels that even if the unknown woman were to temporarily put on the queen’s clothing, she would still not appear regal: these faces could not be switched. No doubt some of that has to do with the way that status and clothing affect how individuals present themselves. Previously a lady-inwaiting to the king’s first two wives, Jane came from a noble background – she could claim descent from Edward iii – and quickly adapted to her royal status (while always remaining subservient to Henry),46 whereas the other woman would have experienced the world from a far more modest social position and carried herself accordingly. But much of the effect must be a consequence of Holbein’s careful construction of each portrait to create an image appropriate to the sitter’s position. His skill in doing so, and in making each resulting image appear not only fitting, but naturally so, must have a great deal to do with his success as a portraitist. As a foreigner in a strikingly diverse society (and initially at least not knowing the local language), Holbein might have become all the more attuned to the subtle visual cues that communicate both personality and social position, which as an artist he had a distinct ability to create as well as to record. In any case, his portraits of all manner of people successfully

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generate the impression that the inner person is fully aligned with their external projection. For instance, two portraits that he made within a couple of years of returning to London clearly differentiate the sitters’ divergent social positions, even though they use a very similar composition and colour scheme (illus. 66 and 67). Both men, the German merchant Cyriacus Kale and the French noble ambassador Charles Solier, were foreigners temporarily living in England. Their frontal pose is somewhat similar to the one Holbein applied a couple of years later to Henry viii, though both men are depicted half-length (slightly longer for Solier), fully frontal, gazing directly at the viewer, their hands occupied with something in front of them. Despite the strong visual similarities, Kale’s panel is only two-thirds the height of Solier’s panel, and each painting establishes a subtly different persona that can easily be interpreted as resonating with the sitter’s social position. Cyriacus Kale is presented against a plain, rather dark background (perhaps originally a somewhat brighter blue) with a gold-letter inscription announcing the year (1533) and his age (32), together with the motto ‘In als gedoltig’ (patience in everything). 47 The two letters he holds bear legible German inscriptions addressed to him at the Steelyard in London, which identifies him as one of the Hanseatic merchants who lived in the compound next to the River Thames. Holbein painted a series of Steelyard merchant portraits between 1532 and 1534, perhaps finding readier access at first to his fellow countrymen than to the English,48 although the Hanse traders came from different parts of Germany (north and west) than he did. Kale was possibly from Braunschweig,

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where the painting has been since at least the eighteenth century and where a Kale family is well documented, but no sources related to him have been found, so the portrait itself currently stands as the only extant witness to his existence.49 His face is well lit from the front right, with only a small amount of relatively light shading concentrated on the proper right half of his face. A slight sense of raised eyebrows, 67 Hans Holbein the Younger, Charles Solier, Sieur de Morette, c. 1534–5, oil on oak.

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together with an impression that his lips could just be on the verge of parting, lends him an air of direct and open address. He has chosen to be shown wearing very rich fabrics, implying his material success as a businessman, though in muted colours: the black of his velvet coat and the dark brown of his silk sleeves highlight by contrast his face and his hands holding the two letters. In earlier decades the Hanseatic League had issued repeated remonstrances against its members in London offending the surrounding community by wearing rich textiles like velvets and silks (and thereby disregarding English sumptuary expectations), but the exhortations seem to have had little effect.50 Kale’s muted colours might then represent a carefully considered balance between demonstrating his prosperity and not overstepping local boundaries too ostentatiously. The choice of holding letters addressed to him at the Steelyard, also featured in a couple of Holbein’s other Steelyard portraits, indicates pride in and identity with his profession. What merchandise Kale bought and sold in London is unknown (perhaps English cloth and Scandinavian stockfish, typical Hanseatic goods), but generally speaking the structure of Hanseatic trade depended on personal partnerships between individuals who sold each other’s goods in local markets, meaning that trust and a good reputation were essential to success.51 Holbein’s presentation of Kale seems well designed to encourage viewers to read him as open and personable, ready to engage in discussion, with nothing to hide. His rich but visually understated dress, shifting attention towards his face and the letters, subtly communicates his prosperity while also implying that the accumulation of wealth was less important to him than his engagement with people.

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The larger portrait of Charles Solier, in contrast, encourages far greater attention to the opulence of his clothing.52 He too wears brown (fur) and black (silk and velvet), but his gold chain and array of gold buttons – painted with real gold, as is the dagger – plus his fashionable slashes, whereby tufts of his white shirt are pulled through gaps in the sleeves, make the structure of his attire far more eye-catching. His background is also constructed of the folds of a rich dark green damask, rather than a flat plane of colour. He is lit from the left, and the opposite side of his face is deeply shadowed, leaving his complete physiognomy less fully defined. His expression appears much more penetrating than Kale’s, with a slightly furrowed brow and focused gaze that might be read as sizing up whomever he sees. Altogether he comes across as a forceful personality – somewhat more so than in the preliminary drawing, which is on a much smaller scale53 – and the impression is enhanced by the gesture of holding his dagger in front of him with one gloved hand. Solier was one of Jean de Dinteville’s successors as French ambassador to the Tudor court; possibly he had heard about his predecessor’s impressive painting by Holbein (see illus. 50) and took the opportunity while resident in London of getting his own. Though not on the same scale or level of complexity as The Ambassadors, Solier’s large portrait clearly announces his nobility through the panel’s material qualities and his seemingly natural aura of authority, very unlike the persona conveyed by Kale’s portrait. How these paintings were materially constructed plays an integral role in how they are interpreted. Painted panels were built up in a series of layers: once the wooden surface

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(constructed from a series of joined boards) had been carefully smoothed, it was covered with a chalk ground, which itself was smoothed and polished; then the artist made an underdrawing, usually in charcoal or black ink, to set out the main lines of the composition; this might be covered with a semi-transparent layer (imprimatura) to preserve the underdrawing and establish a ground tone; then painting began, typically in two or three sequences, with highlights and shadows developed in these successive layers. The modern technology of infrared reflectography can in some circumstances pass through paint to reveal any carbon black used in underdrawing, so that any changes made during the underdrawing process, or between drawing and painting, can be studied, which sometimes provides further insights into the artist’s procedures. Likewise, X-rays, which highlight the lead used in lead white pigment, can sometimes reveal changes made during the course of painting.54 Holbein often made minor adjustments while painting his portraits, for instance adjusting the contours of features or modifying a detail of clothing. On rare occasions he made more substantial changes, such as to the setting or head position – in the Whitehall wall painting, for instance, he shifted Henry’s head to a frontal position rather than the slightly turned angle shown in the cartoon – but usually he appears to have focused on a refined aesthetic assessment as to whether every detail of the design made the optimal visual impression.55 Painters must have typically produced several preliminary drawings to establish the composition before beginning to draw on the panel, although very few such works survive from this period. We have seen that for portraits, Holbein

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had an established practice of taking portrait drawings separately, in which the face and usually any headwear were carefully rendered, whereas the rest of the clothing was indicated in a much sketchier fashion, with no information about contextual setting (see illus. 7, 8, 9 and 69). While many of these head drawings survive, there are no extant complete compositional drawings of portraits, other than the pen outline drawing of the Thomas More family (see illus. 45). Moreover, the drawn hands for the Erasmus portraits (see illus. 11, with one other sheet) are the only other studies that can be directly connected to a portrait. Thus how Holbein developed studies of clothing, settings and so on can only be guessed. Contrasted with these losses, his portrait drawings might have survived in far greater numbers for two different reasons. Near the time of their making, they could serve as potential templates for further portraits, for instance when portraits of single figures were later integrated into group images, as with Jane Seymour, so they might have retained some independent value as artistic tools, whereas other kinds of working sketches were more likely to have served their purpose once the painting was completed. A copied portrait needed to follow the original pattern of the face extremely closely to preserve the likeness, whereas the precise details of the setting were less important. And for later collectors – or not even that much later, since Edward vi appears to have been looking through an album of Holbein’s portrait drawings already in 1549 – they provided vividly realized representations of the sitters, most of whom were significant figures of the Tudor court, and could thus be independently appreciated.56

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The majority of Holbein’s extant portrait drawings cannot be connected to a completed original painting, which can mean either that a painting was never completed, or (probably much more often) that it has been lost. But where drawings match one of Holbein’s paintings, it is clear that the drawn model served as a direct template. The drawn and painted figures are usually on exactly the same scale (with a few exceptions), and in most cases Holbein directly transferred the main lines from preliminary drawing to the painting’s underdrawing through tracing or by pouncing (pricking holes through outlines and shaking charcoal dust through them, then going over them with ink).57 The settings within which these heads are placed, however, vary tremendously, as we have seen: in some cases the background is flat and blank, sometimes there are one or two objects or pieces of furniture within an otherwise undefined space, and in other cases a fuller context is presented, although these never make perfect sense as ‘real’ spaces (as we have seen with the portraits of Kratzer and the French ambassadors, see illus. 49 and 50, as well as Erasmus, Warham and the Whitehall painting). Even though Holbein’s final portrait paintings were necessarily a fictionalized construction – in that a portrait face taken from life was adjusted and slotted into a setting invented by Holbein – they convey an impression of perfect congruity: the visual qualities of the features appear inseparable from the body position and context. Some significant consequences arise from that observation. One is that by the time Holbein had his sitters pose for him, he must have already planned out what overall pose the person would hold in the final painting, and how they would be situated spatially,

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often including a greater extent of the body than is present in the preliminary drawing. This advance planning would have been carried out in the light of the person in front of him and the image she or he wanted to convey. Another consequence of Holbein’s procedures of making, when considered in relation to the surviving portrait drawings, is that his post-sitting development of the represented body and setting played a central role in generating the sense of the sitter’s social position. Take the likeness of Margaret, Lady Elyot (see illus. 9), who unusually faces right while the matching drawing of her husband faces left. Both are among Holbein’s portrait drawings that cannot be connected to a completed painting. One imagines preliminary conversations about the gable hood she should wear to the sitting, then on the day Holbein arranging its precise folds (for instance to extend past her face on the right side) before starting to draw, although he surely also made adjustments to his representation as he went along. The hood, which is not quite as opulent as Queen Jane’s, reinforces Margaret’s status as a member of the upper gentry, both in her own right as the daughter of Sir Maurice Barrow and as the wife of the scholar and courtier Sir Thomas Elyot, who was knighted in 1530, probably for his work as senior clerk of the king’s council (although his standing in the court quickly deteriorated in 1533, given his opposition to the king’s divorce, after which he retired to his estates and concentrated on writing).58 Margaret’s slightly upward gaze and confident bearing can easily be imagined within a fuller portrait confirming her stature as a member of the lesser nobility. At the same time, however, it is also fairly easy to imagine these facial features per se slotted into

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a body wearing different clothing, in which case she could plausibly turn into the wife of a successful merchant or lawyer; or, switched into another costume, she might be convincingly rendered as a countess or duchess. In other words, while the drawing presents a woman with a certain self-confidence, her particular identity as a member of the upper gentry seems something like a happenstance of birth at the drawing stage. We can only imagine how the lost (or never completed) final painting, amplifying her representation into the costume and pose of gentility, might have turned the contingencies of the real world into an aura of inevitability congruent with her inner being. The contingencies underlying Holbein’s process of construction are particularly evident in relation to the composition drawing of the More family (see illus. 45). This possibly represents a type of drawing that Holbein made on other occasions to present to patrons, although no other such works survive, whereas this one does probably because it was later given to Erasmus as a memento of the family, whom he had met many years previously and with whom he still corresponded with.59 Separate head-and-shoulder drawings also exist for seven of the depicted figures.60 The Thomas More drawing exists in two versions, both of them on a larger scale than the others and thus evidently designed as the immediate model for the large single portrait of More now in the Frick Collection, in which he sits in a fairly undefined space in front of a hanging green curtain. Holbein reused the figural composition on a reduced scale for the family portrait, in which More is now surrounded by family members, each of whom Holbein drew separately on the smaller scale of the final painting. From their

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varying positions, it is clear that by the time these life drawings were taken, he had already worked out, at least approximately, how they would be arranged in the full composition. The composition makes a persuasive visual case that all the figures belong exactly where they are, but it is clear that the family never actually gathered together in that configuration, and the space in which they are placed might well be invented rather than an accurate depiction of More’s Chelsea house. All of this highlights an important principle underlying the success of Holbein’s portraiture. Among the essential appeals of portrait paintings, like photographs today, is that they capture the appearance of individuals at a particular time of their lives.61 Hence, no doubt, the frequency in Holbein’s painted portraits of inscriptions recording the year and/or the sitter’s age, far more often than the sitter’s name. (Those on the Royal Collection drawings were later additions.) The portraits thus carry a certain poignancy in appearing to preserve, and make timeless, a moment that is in fact transitory. Equally, however, Holbein’s portraits essentialize, and naturalize, a personal and social identity for each sitter. They appear to capture a timeless essence, even while vividly rendering the contingent details of appearance at a particular moment; and this effect was generated through a combination of attention to realistic detail and artistic construction of a desired image, with both aspects carefully aligned to make them appear indistinguishable.62 Holbein’s unique skills in capturing or creating the sitter’s persona must have seemed all the more valuable in an era when social position was subject to enormous potential change. Status in previous centuries was largely determined by

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birth, with upward social mobility achieved by rare individuals – most often through a successful legal, political or administrative career – but rarely sustained beyond one or two generations.63 By the Tudor era, and particularly in the reign of Henry viii, the challenge posed by non-noble but talented professionals to traditional social hierarchies had become a familiar literary trope. Where the nobility had traditionally earned their place through skilled military service, in the new era the crown often found other professional skills equally useful, and a good education or a close personal connection to the monarch could do as much or more for an individual’s life trajectory than ancient lineage.64 Individuals could be raised from commoner status not only to the gentry, but on occasion even to the peerage. Conversely, even the highest nobility were not immune to attainder or execution if they were successfully charged with treason. Such instability of position was accelerating just as Holbein was working at the Tudor court, which could only have increased the attraction of images that portrayed individual identity as essential, internal and fixed. For many connected to the court, their trajectory was upwards, but that typically depended on favour from the king. Thomas Howard (see illus. 1), from a long-standing noble family, earned his titles as Earl of Surrey (in 1513) and Duke of Norfolk (inherited in 1524) through successful military service, the traditional means through which the peerage earned their position, but the Duke of Suffolk came from a much less elevated family and was awarded his title through his personal friendship with Henry.65 Henry Guildford was not actually a member of the peerage at all, even though his portrait makes him look like

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one (compare illus. 59 and illus. 1): he too was a childhood friend of the king and earned his court offices, which provided most of his status, through personal appointment. He was only elected as a Knight of the Garter in 1526 after twice being passed over by the king, apparently because he did not come from the upper nobility.66 Court connections could be equally important to the rise of those from lesser backgrounds: the unknown court attendant (see illus. 56) was proud to identify himself as a professional servant of the royal household, and John Godsalve (see illus. 57) would eventually earn a knighthood through his crown service. Several of the individuals Holbein portrayed in England were among the ‘new men’ who acquired influence through their court positions and benefited financially from the dissolution of the monasteries.67 Of course, what went up could just as easily come down. The Duke of Norfolk carefully threaded his way through the vagaries of royal politics over several decades, but he lost his title at the end of Henry’s reign and remained imprisoned throughout Edward vi’s, only to be finally released and reinstated when Mary came to the throne in 1553. His son, the Earl of Surrey, was even less fortunate, executed for treason in 1547 (a fate evidently spared the duke only because Henry viii died just before it could be carried out).68 Thomas More famously suffered the same end. He had risen high prior to his downfall: although his father was a barrister, and his grandfathers were a baker and a chandler, by the time Holbein’s portraits were made he had become a member of the higher gentry – the level just below the peerage – since he was personally knighted in 1521 for his service to the crown.69 The clothing in the portraits of More and his family accords

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with this social position, with most of the women’s dresses including red velvet and/or cloth of gold, as well as pearls around the edges of their gable hoods (according to the copies of the final painting).70 Thomas’s father Sir John More (who likewise had been knighted for his legal work, not long before his son) was shown in the final painting in his red judge’s robes, while Thomas wears the gold chain that signalled his position as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; both thus emphasized the most important markers of their current status. More rose even further to the position of Lord Chancellor in 1529, only to resign in 1532 because he could not support Henry viii’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. He was then imprisoned and finally executed in 1535 when he refused to accept the king’s claims of supremacy over the English Church. Against such vagaries of fortune, Holbein’s portraits preserved a different stage of these men’s lives, when their external position appeared a perfect match to their intrinsic character. The most extreme personal trajectory in the Henrician court was experienced by another of Holbein’s sitters: Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith, who through his legal talents and canny administration eventually became the king’s most important and influential minister, only to be executed in 1540, shortly after having been made the Earl of Essex (illus. 68).71 Holbein’s portrait of him must have been made between April 1532 and April 1534, given that the top letter on the table is addressed to him as Master of the Jewel House, using wording implying that it comes from the king himself; this was Cromwell’s most important office in that period, predating his higher appointments from April 1534 onwards

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(starting with Principal Secretary, ending as Lord Privy Seal and Lord Great Chamberlain, among several other offices).72 Cromwell sits behind a table arranged frontally in relation to the picture plane, next to another piece of furniture completely covered in a Turkish carpet; behind him appears panelling somewhat like that of the unknown Detroit woman, but the wall above it is covered in a blue patterned material, similar to cloth. Cromwell wears relatively unostentatious 68 Hans Holbein the Younger, Thomas Cromwell, c. 1532–4, oil on oak.

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clothing, a fur-lined coat but not showing off the material of the black fabric. As with several of the Steelyard portraits, the objects on the table – letters, a quill pen and scissors, an ink case, a book – emphasize that Cromwell’s position resulted from his acumen with communications, rather than high birth. The book’s gilded decoration, however, is made with real gold leaf. Thus there are hints in this panel both of Cromwell’s relatively humble background, and of the more expensive materials (both actual and depicted) emphasized in Holbein’s portraits of higher-status sitters. The composition is especially striking in how it positions Cromwell at an unusual distance from the painting’s viewers, both physically and psychologically. The fairly deep barrier of the table, and the fact that Cromwell gazes over to the left, with his head well turned towards profile, renders him remarkably inaccessible, particularly in comparison with most of Holbein’s other portraits. A puzzling slice of reddish cloth along the edge of the vertical panelling at the left is difficult to interpret – is it meant to be the reverse edge of the blue material? – making the overall space of the painting unclear. On the whole the scene appears less geometrically implausible than the portrait of Kratzer (see illus. 49), but the exaggerated perspective of the left edge of the table resolves into a more convincing representation only if the viewer moves to the right (while it becomes worse if standing to the left).73 This trick of perspective increases the painting’s distancing effect, even if unconsciously, by implying that the optimal viewing position requires moving even further away from the direction of Cromwell’s gaze. Whether that was specifically what Cromwell requested, it seems entirely possible that he

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wanted his portrait to make himself rather difficult to read. In any case, that is one of the painting’s most distinct effects.74 Although much of this portrait’s particular attraction may be inextricably tied to our knowledge of the sitter’s identity (and his subsequent fate), it still seems like a remarkably acute rendition of someone whose position was in fact not clearly fixed at the time the painting was made, nor did it ever become truly fixed. If most of Holbein’s other images generate a cohesive and readable identity for their sitters, the distinct elusiveness of this depiction becomes in itself Cromwell’s essence. Perhaps Holbein saw Cromwell so acutely because at the time of painting, his own position must have been similarly ambiguous: he was not yet painter to the king, and perhaps unsure how long he would stay in London this time, not yet able to predict how far his success might go. Cromwell could have seemed like something of a role model at that point. As it turned out, Holbein survived Cromwell by only three years, his life cut abruptly short at age 45 in October or November 1543 – not by beheading but probably by a fatal illness.75 His correspondence and most of his working materials subsequently disappeared. If the portrait of Melanchthon (see illus. 3) can serve as one metaphor for Holbein, the portrait of Cromwell might serve as another: suggestive of two different worlds, one of birth and one of potential achievement, his success dependent upon his own efforts but also upon satisfying his patrons. As we seek to understand his personality and his motivations, he turns away, forever inscrutable, unable or unwilling to meet our gaze.

Conclusion: The Individual and the Type

I

f we have learned anything about Holbein by studying his artworks and his changing world, it is that he adapted remarkably well to change. The consistent high quality of his work, its range of materials, style, function and subject matter, and the diversity of his patrons all point to an ability to find new opportunities, evaluate the potential of each commission, innovate where needed and deliver unique images that must have satisfied almost all of his buyers. However, in the absence of most of his preparatory drawings, it is rarely possible to follow Holbein’s processes of working out each image: in most cases we see only his final solutions, or the late stages approaching completion. It is also extremely difficult to discern his own persona through any of his works, given his capacity to adapt to whatever was in demand. Most of what we can plausibly reconstruct about Holbein’s motivations concerns his external status, his evident drive to secure a reliable professional position in the face of societal instability. At the same time, however, his unusual approach to representation – carefully planned manipulation under the guise of naturalism – points to a unique interpretation of the world around him. That raises intriguing questions both

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about his individual persona and about how he interpreted the parameters of artistic practice. His portraits appear to capture the contingent details of individual appearance, even while firmly denoting external status. What most of them lack is an unequivocal sense of personality, since their expressions and gestures almost always appear muted, held in tight control. A clear sense of inner drive comes through more readily in Holbein’s narrative images (historical, mythological, religious), yet those subjects tend to portray character types more than individuals. Does this distinction perhaps suggest how Holbein saw his role as cultural observer: showing only as much of his sitters as they wanted revealed, and reserving a more wide-ranging analysis of human behaviour to more archetypal scenes? Perhaps the most significant change across Holbein’s life concerned his own social position. ‘Here I’m a gentleman, back home “that scrounger” et cetera’: so claimed Albrecht Dürer in a 1506 letter written from Venice to Willibald Pirckheimer back in Nuremberg, and one wonders if Holbein felt something similar in London.1 By the time he died unexpectedly in 1543, he evidently planned to remain in England indefinitely: he had not accepted an offer of a generous yearly salary from the Basel government in 1538, he became an English denizen in 1541 and his London will reveals that he left behind two infant children.2 As far as is known, he had last seen his Basel family when he returned for a one-month visit five years previously, following a diplomatic mission to France to make portraits of prospective brides for Henry viii.3 People in Basel long remembered how Holbein had changed: according to Bonifacius Amerbach’s grandson Ludwig Iselin,

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he came back dressed in silks and satins, whereas previously he had to buy his wine at the tap.4 Financially at least (and, it seems, in his personal life as well), Holbein found England a preferable place to settle. By the sixteenth century many artists conceived of themselves as not only manually skilled but conceptually innovative and original, with talents analogous to those of scholars, hence worthy of more elevated social recognition.5 Changing attitudes towards artists could, at least in theory, shift the valuation of artworks away from mere computation of material costs and labour to a more refined appreciation of artistic skill: as Dürer noted in his posthumously published text on human proportion, a work done in half a day by a particularly skilled artist could be far better than something laboured over for a year by a lesser maker.6 As we have seen, material and labour costs remained determinant factors in differentiating Holbein’s works, but he surely sought appreciation of his artistic talent as much as financial recompense. In 1526 the scholar Beatus Rhenanus, within his commentary on Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, named Holbein alongside Dürer, Cranach and Hans Baldung as the greatest German artists of the day.7 Rhenanus stressed that, though born in Augsburg, Holbein was now a citizen of Basel, and that two of his elegant portraits of Erasmus had recently been sent to England. The aside was occasioned by his analysis of a passage in Pliny concerning the ancient painter Apelles, who was frequently evoked by humanists wanting to laud the achievements of modern artists. The analogy was applied on several occasions to Holbein and his work, especially after his move to England, which suggests

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that at least the well-educated continued to appreciate the intellectual side of his talent.8 One writer who did so was the reformist French poet Nicolas Bourbon, who spent nine months in England in 1534–5, when he met Holbein and many other individuals including Cromwell and Kratzer. Bourbon’s 1533 collection of poems, Nugae, had included a sufficiently overt critique of Catholicism to lead to his imprisonment in France for a number of months 69 Hans Holbein the Younger, Nicolas Bourbon, 1535, black and coloured chalks, and pen and ink on pale pink prepared paper.

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before being released by Francis i, after which he travelled to England where he was supported by Henry viii’s second queen, Anne Boleyn. She secured positions for Bourbon as a private tutor to young men from humanist-inclined families, and he became a friend of a number of religious reformers.9 Bourbon made the first known reference to Holbein as the king’s painter in a letter that named several people he had met in England, dated 5 October 1536. This was printed in two editions of his poem collection Paidagogeion published in Lyon, but the phrase referring to Holbein appears only in the edition from Jean Barbous and Philippe Romain, not the other one published by Sebastian Gryphius (or in the reprint of the latter in 1537).10 The Barbous/Romain edition includes an additional letter at the end dated 10 October 1536, suggesting that it was printed slightly later than the Gryphius version, and that the reference to Holbein was inserted then. Might that be because news had just reached Bourbon of Holbein’s royal appointment? If so, it would seem that the artist’s court position suddenly made him worthy of mention in Bourbon’s eyes. (Alternatively, it is possible that Bourbon merely realized with embarrassment that he had forgotten to include the painter, who had made a portrait of him in England, and rectified his omission at the next opportunity.) Two years later Bourbon published a four-line Latin poem lauding Holbein’s portrait. While your divine mind gave expression to my features, Hans, and your skilled hand hurried over the canvas, I painted you thus meanwhile in a single line of poetry: Hans, as he did my portrait, was greater than Apelles.11

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Although these lines (and others like them by the English antiquarian John Leland) point to Holbein’s recognition among humanists, it reveals virtually nothing about him or his art: Bourbon assimilated the individual artist to a wellestablished type, so the type is all we get. It could be argued that Holbein’s portrait of Bourbon, in contrast, assimilates the type to the individual (illus. 69). As with most of Holbein’s portrait drawings, Bourbon’s body is quickly sketched in with black chalk, while the head is rendered in far more detail. What is striking here is the choice to show Bourbon’s face in perfect profile, a highly unusual format in northern Renaissance portraits, and a clear visual reference to ancient coins and medals.12 Holbein’s perfect line of black ink silhouetting Bourbon’s forehead and nose establishes the boundaries of his features in an absolute and timeless form, an ideal exemplar of a visionary poet. Yet at the same time, the detailed and seemingly contingent rendering of Bourbon’s hair and beard presents him as an individual within a historical moment, and so does the animation of his quickly sketched body (with his hand supposedly writing the lines immortalizing Holbein as artist). The drawing served as the basis for a woodcut portrait, dated 1535, which was printed in both editions of Paidagogeion and later collections of Bourbon’s poems. It seems that Bourbon most appreciated Holbein’s ability to assimilate his sitters to recognizable visual tropes, rather than his ability to capture individual appearance. In 1539 Bourbon composed another poem printed alongside the woodcut, implying that Holbein had recently made another version of the portrait that he preferred:

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Those who know the Poet Bourbon by sight recognize this true image of him. The painter erred in this alone, that he forgot to crown the honoured head of the prophet with sacred leaf. But the painter, Hans, who recently fashioned the same wearing laurels, on that account lives more greatly renowned than Apelles.13 The verse implies that Bourbon wanted most of all to be portrayed as an ideal type of the inspired poet, and that he perceived an artist’s greatest achievement in immortalizing people through such conventions. Perhaps Holbein did actually send Bourbon a modified version of the portrait wearing laurel leaves rather than the cap, which is easy to envisage looking unintentionally comical (or perhaps intentionally so). Whether the laurelled Bourbon was a real image or just a literary conceit, the poem suggests that some people were more impressed by a well-judged stereotype than by too much contingent detail. It might not be a coincidence that Holbein’s most accomplished set of visual stereotypes, the Dance of Death (or Images of Death), had just recently, finally, appeared in print.14 Bourbon would surely have known the series, since he composed Latin verses as a preface for one of the editions of Holbein’s other long-delayed print series, the Icones, produced by the same printers, Melchior and Gaspar Trechsel.15 (Unsurprisingly, the eternally cited Apelles makes an appearance in Bourbon’s verse, as do Zeuxis and Parrhasius, the other most famous ancient artists mentioned by Pliny.) It had been over a decade since Holbein had designed these images in Basel. The Dance of Death genre was of medieval origin, typically taking the

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form of monologues by individuals of different stations of life who lament death’s intrusion, alternating with Death’s adamant declaration of his power. Sometimes these texts were accompanied by images of gleeful skeletons enticing their unwilling human partners into a dance. They appeared in manuscript illuminations and in large-scale wall paintings, particularly in monastic cloisters or cemeteries; in Basel one was painted at the Dominican cemetery around 1440, and another variation was made in the 1480s for the Dominican Klingental nunnery in Kleinbasel.16 These early representations focused on the figures themselves set against a largely abstract background, whereas when Holbein took up the theme in the 1520s he employed a much more developed context and figural detail to convey the figures’ character, which in earlier works had been communicated by the text. He first created such images in the woodcut alphabet cut by Hans Lützelburger around 1523–4 (illus. 70). Though extremely small (each letter only 2.4 centimetres square), these images are remarkably detailed and evocative. Each letter presents a type, starting with those at the top of the social hierarchy, alternating between ecclesiastic and secular – the pope, the emperor, a king, a cardinal, the empress – then moving down the social scale to the relatively humble, ending with a young child at Y, followed by the Last Judgement at Z. Settings are reduced to a minimum, but dramatic gestures clearly convey each figure’s response to Death’s intrusion: the emperor in C has dropped his orb in his struggle against two death figures, one of whom snatches at his crown; the mercenary soldier in P tries to fight back; the old monk in W can hardly resist Death’s offer of support; the infant in its

70 Hans Holbein the Younger (design) and Hans Lützelburger (cutting), Dance of Death Alphabet, c. 1523–4.

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cradle innocently yields to Death’s approach, while the mother sitting next to them cries out in horror. Compared to Holbein’s (mostly later) portraits, at that time not yet such a central feature of his work, these tiny pictures communicate a far stronger sense of each figure’s inner intent, while assimilating them to well-defined types. Though used within a few texts printed by Froben, the initials mostly circulated in proof sheets (as illustrated here) with an inscription naming Lützelburger as the cutter, probably to showcase his unique skills.17 This impressive advertisement likely secured the commission from Melchior and Gaspar Trechsel for the larger series of woodcuts (illus. 71). When Lützelburger unexpectedly died in 1526, Melchior Trechsel made a claim against his estate that certain (unnamed) woodblocks should be transferred to him, presumably to offset an 71 Hans Holbein the Younger (design) and Hans Lützelburger (cutting), Dance of Death: Duke, c. 1524–6, woodcut.

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advance payment, and if the reference was to the Dance of Death, as is generally assumed, it supports the inference that the series was initiated by Lützelburger rather than Holbein.18 The expanded series now included forty different individual types, again ranged in broad order from the top of the secular and religious hierarchies down to the lowest. Although still very small (each around 6.5 by 5 centimetres), these woodcuts provided enough space for Holbein to develop a remarkably full narrative context. Some are set indoors, some outdoors, in urban, rural or wilderness settings; some pack in a number of figures, others focus on just the main figure and one or two death skeletons. Gesture and body posture again encourage viewers to perceive well-developed storylines, but now each type is embedded into a rich context establishing their relationships with other people as well as with death. The series has a similar effect as Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, in that few of the figures escape critique as they futilely resist or try to ignore Death’s approach. On the whole each figure acts along fairly predictable class lines: the poor struggle against their lot, the powerful show little concern for (and sometimes directly exploit) those below them, while the middle classes are mostly greedy and self-absorbed. These portrayals do not necessarily reflect Holbein’s personal views; the images were designed first and foremost to sell well, while serving the ostensible function of inciting viewers to better prepare for their own death. Given that most audiences for these woodcuts would be of the well-educated middle classes rather than princes and bishops, the critical rendition of those at the top of the social hierarchy would no doubt have appealed to many who agreed that their superiors tended

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to be extremely poor role models (although people of their own rank were not portrayed much better). Still, at the time that Holbein designed the Dance of Death – in his mid- to late twenties and finding it increasingly difficult to earn a consistent living in Basel – he might have found himself unable to identify with those figures who could contentedly count up their money or enjoy their comfortable lifestyle. And he probably had not yet personally met very many people from the very highest ranks of society. He had certainly met many more of them by the time the series was finally published in 1538, when he was forty years old and had attained an entirely different position in life. Once he met Henry viii – whom, as we have seen, he assiduously flattered – did he see the king more as a generous benefactor, or as an overblown tyrant?19 Could he have started to see himself, dressed in his silks and satins, as among those in danger of excessive concern for their personal prosperity? When he painted Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk (see illus. 1), did he find in him any resemblance to his Dance of Death duke, who turns away with disdain not only from death but from a poor woman begging with her child (illus. 71)? The woodcuts carry such a powerful punch, well beyond their physical size, because of their ability to distil a rich world of social relations into a single encapsulated type, who nevertheless appears to be acting out a complex individualized existence. The question must remain open as to which should be seen as truer to life: these penetrating judgements of stereotypical behaviour, or the precisely rendered individuals who gaze out impassively from Holbein’s portraits, perfectly constructed to project an ideal image.

Chronology

1492–3 late 1497– early 1498 1509 1511 1515 1516

1517

1517–19 1519

1521

1522

First voyage of Christopher Columbus to the Americas Holbein born, probably in Augsburg Henry viii crowned king of England in April Erasmus writes Praise of Folly Francis i crowned king of France in January. Holbein is working in Basel by December Holbein completes his first print designs and commissioned portraits in Basel. The future Charles v becomes king of Spain; birth of the future Mary i of England Martin Luther completes his 95 Theses in October, critiquing the Church’s sale of indulgences and theology of salvation Holbein works in Lucerne Holbein joins the Basel painter’s guild in September and has probably married Elsbeth Binzenstock before becoming a Basel citizen in July 1520. Probable death of his older brother Ambrosius. Charles v is elected Holy Roman Emperor in June Holbein paints Dead Christ in the Tomb; his first son Philip born around this time. Martin Luther is condemned as a heretic at the end of the Diet of Worms in May Eighteen of Ferdinand Magellan’s original crew of 237 complete the first circumnavigation of the globe in September

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1523 Holbein paints portraits of Erasmus 1524 Holbein travels to France. Death of his father c. 1524–6 Holbein designs the Dance of Death images; birth of his second child Catherine 1526 Around August Holbein leaves for London, where he stays for two years; meets Nicolaus Kratzer and begins portraits for Thomas More 1527 Holbein paints two large works for the Greenwich treaty celebration in May. Henry viii begins inquiries into a divorce from Catherine of Aragon 1528 Holbein has returned to Basel by August, when he buys a house with his wife Elsbeth. Two more children are born in the next four to five years. The Icones probably designed in this period 1529 After iconoclastic attacks on images in February, a new council takes power in Basel and adopts the Reformation 1530 Holbein is asked why he has not been attending Protestant religious serves. Charles v rejects the Augsburg Confession presented by the Protestant princes of Germany at the Diet of Augsburg 1531 Henry viii named Supreme Head of the Church of England 1531–2 Holbein designs a number of scientific images with Sebastian Münster 1532 Holbein has again left Basel for London by September. He completes his first portraits of Hanseatic merchants 1533 Holbein paints The Ambassadors. Henry viii divorces Catherine of Aragon and marries Anne Boleyn; birth of the future Elizabeth i in September 1534 The Act of Supremacy confirms Henry viii and future monarchs as Supreme Head of the Church in England. The Act of Succession names princess Elizabeth rather than Mary the successor to the English throne 1535 Execution of Thomas More c. 1535–6 Holbein appointed as one of the king’s painters. In the following years he produces numerous designs for jewellery and metalwork, as well as portraits

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1536

1537

1538

1539 1540 1541 1543

Chronology

Dissolution of the greater monasteries begins in England. In May, Anne Boleyn is executed and Henry viii marries Jane Seymour. Both Elizabeth and Mary are removed from succession to the throne Holbein paints portraits of Henry viii and Jane Seymour. Jane dies in October after giving birth to the future Edward vi Holbein travels to Brussels, Le Havre and Nancy to take portraits of prospective brides for Henry viii. He visits Basel in September and is offered an annual pension by the city government, but he returns to England. The Dance of Death and Icones woodcuts are finally published Holbein travels to Düren to take prospective bride portraits of Anne and Amelie of Cleves Henry viii marries Anne of Cleves in January; annulment in July. Execution of Thomas Cromwell Holbein becomes an English denizen Holbein’s will, written 7 October, is proved on 29 November in London. He leaves 7 shillings 6 pence per month to support his two infant children, whose mother is not mentioned

references

Introduction 1 For compilations of primary sources concerning Holbein, see especially Edouard His, ‘Die Basler Archive über Hans Holbein, den Jüngern, seine Familie und einige zu ihm in Beziehung stehende Zeitgenossen’, Jahrbücher für Kunstwissenschaft, iii (1870), pp. 113–73; Eduard His, ‘Holbeins Verhältniss zur Basler Reformation’, Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft, ii (1879), pp. 156–9; Hans Reinhardt, ‘Nachrichten über das Leben Hans Holbeins des Jüngeren’, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, xxxix (1982), pp. 253–75. For Dürer, in contrast, see Jeffrey Ashcroft, Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography, 2 vols (New Haven, ct, and London, 2017). 2 Carl Zimmer, ‘The Neurobiology of the Self ’, Scientific American, ccxciii (2005), pp. 92–101. 3 Stephanie Buck and Jochen Sander, Hans Holbein the Younger: Painter at the Court of Henry viii, exh. cat., Mauritshuis, The Hague (London, 2004), no. 20. 4 James H. Pragman, ‘The Augsburg Confession in the English Reformation: Richard Taverner’s Contribution’, Sixteenth Century Journal, xi (1980), pp. 75–85; Rory McEntegart, Henry viii, the League of Schmalkalden, and the English Reformation (Woodbridge, 2002), esp. ch. 2. 5 Rob Pauls, ‘The World as Sin and Grace: The Theology of Melanchthon’s Loci communes of 1521’, in Christian Humanism: Essays in Honour of Arjo Vanderjagt, ed. Arie Johan Vanderjagt et al. (Leiden and Boston, ma, 2009), pp. 469–78; Charles P. Arand et al., The Lutheran Confessions: History and Theology of the Book of Concord (Minneapolis, mn, 2012), ch. 4–5.

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References

6 Harry Vredeveld, ‘“Lend a Voice”: The Humanistic Portrait Epigraph in the Age of Erasmus and Dürer’, Renaissance Quarterly, lxvi (2013), pp. 509–67 (pp. 552–4). 7 Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein, trans. Cecilia Hurley and Pascal Griener, 2nd edn (London, 2014), ch. 6; Susan Foister, ‘Humanism and Art in the Early Tudor Period: John Leland’s Poetic Praise of Painting’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Woolfson (Basingstoke and New York, 2002), pp. 129–50; Andrew W. Taylor, ‘Between Surrey and Marot: Nicolas Bourbon and the Artful Translation of the Epigram’, Translation and Literature, xv (2006), pp. 1–20 (pp. 13–16). 8 Hans Reinhardt, ‘Ein unbekannter Holzschnitt Hans Holbeins d.J. von 1536 und Holbeins Melanchthon-Bildnis’, Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, xxxii (1975), pp. 135–40. 9 Fritz Grossmann, ‘Holbein, Torrigiano and Some Portraits of Dean Colet: A Study of Holbein’s Work in Relation to Sculpture’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xiii (1950), pp. 202–36; Christian Müller, ed., Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515– 1532, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel (Munich and London, 2006), nos 100–101.

1 Techniques, Materials, Skill 1 Katharina Krause, Hans Holbein der Ältere (Munich and Berlin, 2002), p. 194. 2 Gregory Jecmen and Freyda Spira, ‘The Imperial City of Augsburg: An Introduction’, in Imperial Augsburg: Renaissance Prints and Drawings, 1475–1540, ed. Gregory Jecmen and Freyda Spira, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc (2012), pp. 25–37. 3 Dürer-Holbein-Grünewald: Meisterzeichnungen der deutschen Renaissance aus Berlin und Basel, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel, and Kupferstichkabinett der Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (Ostfildern, 1997), no. 8.12. 4 Krause, Hans Holbein der Ältere; Jochen Sander, Hans Holbein d.J.: Tafelmaler in Basel, 1515–1532 (Munich, 2005), pp. 64–6. 5 Krause, Hans Holbein der Ältere, pp. 46, 117, 147, 326. 6 Ibid., pp. 184–6.

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7 Christian Müller, ed., Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515– 1532, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel (Munich and London, 2006), no. 116. 8 John Rowlands and Giulia Bartrum, Drawings by German Artists and Artists from German-speaking Regions of Europe in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: The Fifteenth Century, and Sixteenth Century by Artists Born Before 1530, 2 vols (London, 1993), no. 300. 9 Pia F. Cuneo, ‘The Basilica Cycle of Saint Katherine’s Convent: Art and Female Community in Early-Renaissance Augsburg’, Woman’s Art Journal, xix (1998), pp. 21–5 (p. 22). 10 Dürer-Holbein-Grünewald, no. 8.11. 11 On the technique see Joanna Russell et al., Northern European Metalpoint Drawings: Technical Examination and Analysis (London, 2017) and Kimberly Schenck, ‘Drawings under Scrutiny: The Materials and Techniques of Metalpoint’, in Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, ed. Stacey Sell and Hugo Chapman, exh. cat., British Museum, London, and National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc (2015), pp. 9–23. 12 Giulia Bartrum, ‘Silverpoint Drawings by German and Swiss Renaissance Artists’, in Drawing in Silver and Gold, ed. Sell and Chapman, pp. 63–99 (esp. p. 71); Ashcroft, Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography, i, pp. 545–638. 13 Rowlands and Bartrum, Drawings by German Artists, no. 302. 14 Victoria Button, ‘The Portrait Drawings of Hans Holbein the Younger: Function and Use Explored Through Materials and Techniques’, PhD thesis, Royal College of Art, London (2013), pp. 115–20. 15 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, nos 23–5. 16 Ibid., p. 164. 17 Button, ‘The Portrait Drawings’, pp. 128–9. 18 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. 106. 19 Stephanie Buck and Jochen Sander, Hans Holbein the Younger: Painter at the Court of Henry viii, exh. cat., Mauritshuis, The Hague (London, 2004), no. 10. They suggest it could date to circa 1527– 8, although the other extant drawings datable to this period do not use pink-prepared paper. 20 Button, ‘The Portrait Drawings’, pp. 98–106.

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21 Krause, Hans Holbein der Ältere, pp. 242–50. 22 Button, ‘The Portrait Drawings’, pp. 122–4; Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. 86. 23 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. 88. 24 Krause, Hans Holbein der Ältere, pp. 216–22. 25 Bernhard Anderes and Peter Hoegger, Die Glasgemälde im Kloster Wettingen (Baden, 1989); Barbara Butts and Lee Hendrix, ‘Introduction: Drawn on Paper – Painted on Glass’, in Painting on Light: Drawings and Stained Glass in the Age of Dürer and Holbein, ed. Barbara Butts and Lee Hendrix, exh. cat., J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, ca, and St Louis Art Museum, St Louis, mo (Los Angeles, ca, 2000), pp. 1–16. 26 See, for example, Christian Müller, ed., Katalog der Zeichnungen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im Kupferstichkabinett Basel, Teil 2A: Die Zeichnungen von Hans Holbein dem Jüngeren und Ambrosius Holbein (Basel, 1996), nos 295–325. 27 Butts and Hendrix, eds, Painting on Light, pp. 294, 296. 28 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. 31; Butts and Hendrix, eds, Painting on Light, no. 138; Nikolaus Meier, ‘Tactics and Strategy: Holbein’s Patrons in Basel: Bankers, Scholars and Nobles’, in Holbein: The Basel Years, ed. Müller, pp. 58–65 (p. 62). 29 See, for instance, the panels designed for the cloister of Wettingen, Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, nos 97, 298, and Butts and Hendrix, eds, Painting on Light, nos 141–3. 30 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, nos 130–39; Butts and Hendrix, eds, Painting on Light, nos 146–50. 31 Butts and Hendrix, eds, Painting on Light, no. 150. 32 The extant prints attributed to Holbein the Elder as well as both of his sons are catalogued in Tilman Falk and Robert Zijlma, eds, Hollstein’s German Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts, 1400–1700: vol. xiv, xiva, xivb: Ambrosius Holbein to Hans Holbein the Younger (Roosendaal, 1988). 33 Jochen Sander, ed., Albrecht Dürer: His Art in Context, exh. cat., Städel Museum, Frankfurt (Munich, 2013), no. 2.20; Dürer-HolbeinGrünewald, no. 10.4; Rainer Schoch et al., Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, 3 vols (Munich, 2001), vol. iii, no. 262. 34 Sander, ed., Albrecht Dürer, p. 62.

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35 E. P. Goldschmidt, The Printed Book of the Renaissance: Three Lectures on Type, Illustration, Ornament (Cambridge, 2010), p. 46; Butts and Hendrix, eds, Painting on Light, p. 86 n. 6. 36 For a sceptical view see Peter Schmidt, ‘Why Woodcut? Dürer in Search of his Medium and Role’, in The Early Dürer, ed. Daniel Hess and Thomas Eser, exh. cat., Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (2012), pp. 146–59 (pp. 149–51). 37 On the technique of woodcut, see David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (New Haven, ct, 1994), pp. 21–3, 28–30. 38 Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, nj, 1945), pp. 47–59. 39 Heinrich Alfred Schmid, ‘Holbeins Thätigkeit für die Baseler Verleger’, Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, xx (1899), pp. 233–62 (pp. 239–42). 40 Christian Rümelin, ‘Holbeins Formschneider’, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, lv (1998), pp. 305–22. 41 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. d.7; Konrad Koppe, ed., Kostbare illustrierte Bücher des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts in der Stadtbibliothek Trier: Hans Baldung Grien, Urs Graf, Ambrosius und Hans Holbein, exh. cat., Stadtbibliothek, Trier (Wiesbaden, 1995), no. 50. 42 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, nos d.21 and d.22. 43 Christian Rümelin, ‘Hans Holbeins “Icones”, ihre Formschneider und ihre Nachfolge’, Münchner Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst, xlvii (1996), pp. 55–72. 44 Claudia Hermann and Jochen Hesse, ‘Das ehemalige Hertensteinhaus in Luzern: Die Fassadenmalerei von Hans Holbein d.J.’, Unsere Kunstdenkmäler, xliv (1993), pp. 173–86; Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, nos 28–9; Meier, ‘Tactics and Strategy’, p. 62. 45 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, nos 60–62. 46 Rowlands and Bartrum, Drawings by German Artists, pp. 152–5; Müller, ed., Katalog der Zeichnungen, Teil 2A: Holbein, nos 184–7, 191–258. 47 Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven, ct, and London, 2004), pp. 137–47. 48 Thomas Eser, ‘Holbeins Söhne: Zur berufsstrategischen Alternative “Goldschmied oder Maler” im 16. Jahrhundert’,

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in Hans Holbein und der Wandel in der Kunst des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. Bodo Brinkmann and Wolfgang Schmid (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 113–46. Rowlands and Bartrum, Drawings by German Artists, no. 361g. Marc-Henri Jordan and Francisca Costantini-Lachat, ‘Moorish Tracery’, in The History of Decorative Arts: The Renaissance and Mannerism in Europe, ed. Alain Charles Gruber (New York and London, 1994), pp. 275–345. Rowlands and Bartrum, Drawings by German Artists, no. 326. Christian Müller, ‘Holbein oder Holbein-Werkstatt? Zu einem Pokalentwurf der Gottfried Keller-Stiftung im Kupferstichkabinett Basel’, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, xlvii (1990), pp. 33–42. Ibid.

2 Education, Knowledge, Styles 1 Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, ct, 1980), pp. 135–42. 2 Bruno Bushart, Die Fuggerkapelle bei St. Anna in Augsburg (Munich, 1994), pp. 15–31. 3 Ibid., pp. 47, 63–73. 4 Ibid.; Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors, pp. 133–5, 296–8. 5 Andrew Morrall, Jörg Breu the Elder: Art, Culture and Belief in Reformation Augsburg (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 108–10. 6 Ibid., pp. 115–25. 7 Kristian Jensen, ‘The Humanist Reform of Latin and Latin Teaching’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 63–81. 8 John C. Olin, ed., Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings of Erasmus, With his Life by Beatus Rhenanus and a Biographical Sketch by the Editor, 3rd edn (New York, 1987); N. Scott Amos, ‘New Learning, Old Theology: Renaissance Biblical Humanism, Scripture, and the Question of Theological Method’, Renaissance Studies, xvii (2003), pp. 39–54. 9 Martin Kintzinger, ‘“Ich was auch ain Schueler”: Die Schulen im spätmittelalterlichen Augsburg’, in Literarisches Leben im Augsburg

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während des 15. Jahrhunderts, ed. Johannes Janota and Werner Williams-Krapp (Tübingen, 1995), pp. 58–81. Ibid., p. 79; Frank Swetz and David Eugene Smith, Capitalism and Arithmetic: The New Math of the 15th Century, Including the Full Text of the Treviso Arithmetic of 1478 (La Salle, il, 1987). A.H.T. Levi, ‘Introduction’, in Erasmus, Praise of Folly; and, Letter to Maarten Van Dorp, 1515, trans. Betty Radice (London and New York, 1993), pp. xi–liii. Heinrich Alfred Schmid, ed., Encomium Moriae i.e. Stultitiae Laus: Praise of Folly: Published at Basle in 1515 and Decorated with the Marginal Drawings of Hans Holbein the Younger, trans. Helen H. Tanzer (Basel, 1931), pp. 22–3, 65–6. Ibid., pp. 34–6. Erika Michael, The Drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger for Erasmus’ ‘Praise of Folly’ (New York, 1986), pp. 39–44. J. Austin Gavin and Thomas M. Walsh, ‘The Praise of Folly in Context: The Commentary of Girardus Listrius’, Renaissance Quarterly, xxiv (1971), pp. 193–209. Harry Vredeveld, ‘“Lend a Voice”: The Humanistic Portrait Epigraph in the Age of Erasmus and Dürer’, Renaissance Quarterly, lxvi (2013), p. 542. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 41. Christian Müller, ed., Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515– 1532, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel (Munich and London, 2006), no. 10; Michael, The Drawings for ‘Praise of Folly’, pp. 73–4. Peter Litwan and Christian Müller, ‘Holbeins Wandbilder im Basler Grossratsaal: Die Inschriften und ein Rekonstruktionsversuch’, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, lxxiii (2016), pp. 55–87 (pp. 62, 64–5). Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 41. Christian Müller, ed., Katalog der Zeichnungen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im Kupferstichkabinett Basel, Teil 2A: Die Zeichnungen von Hans Holbein dem Jüngeren und Ambrosius Holbein (Basel, 1996), no. 25. Michael, The Drawings for ‘Praise of Folly’, p. 136; Müller, ed., Katalog der Zeichnungen, Teil 2A: Holbein, no. 62. Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, ma, 1995), esp. ch. 7; Wilhelm Schmidt-

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32 33 34 35 36

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Biggemann, ‘History and Prehistory of the Cabala of jhsuh’, in Hebrew to Latin, Latin to Hebrew: The Mirroring of Two Cultures in the Age of Humanism, ed. Giulio Busi (Berlin and Turin, 2006), pp. 223–41. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, p. 101. Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven, ct, and London, 2004), pp. 128–30. Hans Reinhardt, ‘Nachrichten über das Leben Hans Holbeins des Jüngeren’, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, xxxix (1982), p. 261. Christian Müller, Hans Holbein d.J.: Die Druckgraphik im Kupferstichkabinett Basel (Basel, 1997), nos 28–31; Koppe, ed., Kostbare illustrierte Bücher, no. 60; Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. d.8. Keith Seddon, Epictetus’ Handbook and the Tablet of Cebes: Guides to Stoic Living (London and New York, 2005). Johannes Rhagius Aesticampianus, ed., Tabula Cebetis philosophi socratici: cu[m] Johan[n]is Aesticapiani Epistola (Frankfurt, 1507). Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, p. 441. I agree with Christian Rümelin’s suggestion in Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. d.8, that Holbein probably drew only one design, with the variations representing different attempts to articulate it in print. However, I disagree with his proposal that Holbein only designed version A and the others followed. Various details make that unlikely, including the mislabelling of the couple as Avaritia at the lower right, and the omission within False Education of astronomers holding a quadrant and an armillary sphere – the latter of which also appears in the pastiche version B – which are likely to be Holbein’s own invention. Seddon, Epictetus’ Handbook and the Tablet of Cebes, p. 187. Ibid., pp. 196–7. Müller, Hans Holbein d.J.: Die Druckgraphik, no. 139. Sander, Hans Holbein d.J., pp. 176–7. Heinrich Alfred Schmid, ‘Holbeins Thätigkeit für die Baseler Verleger’, Jahrbruch der Königlick Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, xx (1899), pp. 237–9. Müller, Hans Holbein d.J.: Die Druckgraphik, nos 133, 138, 148. Galen, Hapanta, 5 vols (Basel, 1538); Alfred Woltmann, Holbein und seine Zeit, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1874–6), vol. ii, no. 266.

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39 Müller, Hans Holbein d.J.: Die Druckgraphik, nos 154, 157, 158. 40 Jeanne Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric (University Park, pa, 2011), pp. 32–4. 41 Erasmus, Hyperaspistes Diatribae adversus Servum arbitrium Martini Lutheri (Basel, 1526); Erasmus, Controversies: De libero arbitrio, Hyperaspistes 1, Collected Works of Erasmus, lxxvi (Toronto, 1999). 42 Peter Burnhill, Type Spaces: In-house Norms in the Typography of Aldus Manutius (London, 2003). 43 Albrecht Dürer, Underweysung der messung, mit dem zirkel und richtscheyt, in Linien ebnen unnd gantzen corporen (Nuremberg, 1525), Kii–Lvi. 44 Ibid., Lvi verso–Miii. 45 Müller, Hans Holbein d.J.: Die Druckgraphik, no. 134. 46 Tilman Falk and Robert Zijlma, eds, Hollstein’s German Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts, 1400–1700, vol. xiv: Holbein (Roosendaal, 1988), nos 28–9.

3 Religion, Reformation, Politics 1 Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven, ct, and London, 1989). 2 Richard C. Trexler, ‘Being and Non-being: Parameters of the Miraculous in the Traditional Religious Image’, in The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Erik Thunø and Gerhard Wolf (Rome, 2004), pp. 15–27. 3 Kathryn M. Rudy, Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts (Leiden, 2017), pp. 30–51. 4 Pia F. Cuneo, ‘The Basilica Cycle of Saint Katherine’s Convent: Art and Female Community in Early-Renaissance Augsburg’, Woman’s Art Journal, xix (1998), p. 25 note 1. 5 Ibid., p. 24. 6 Kurt Löcher, Die Gemälde des 16. Jahrhunderts (Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997), p. 275. 7 Peter Litwan and Christian Müller, ‘Holbeins Wandbilder im Basler Grossratsaal: Die Inschriften und ein Rekonstruktionsversuch’, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, lxxiii (2016), pp. 55–87 (pp. 62, 64–5).

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8 Krause, Hans Holbein der Ältere; Jochen Sander, Hans Holbein d.J.: Tafelmaler in Basel, 1515–1532 (Munich, 2005), pp. 66–7. 9 John Rowlands, Holbein: The Paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger (Boston, ma, 1985), no. r.m.3. 10 Christian Müller, ed., Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel (Munich and London, 2006), no. 104. 11 Bernd Wolfgang Lindemann, ‘Die Passionstafeln von Hans Holbein dem Jüngeren’, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, lv (1998), pp. 219–25; Sander, Hans Holbein d.J., pp. 206–8. 12 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. 65; Daniel Hess, ‘Der Oberried-Altar im Freiburger Münster’, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, lv (1998), pp. 181–92. 13 Nikolaus Meier, ‘Tactics and Strategy: Holbein’s Patrons in Basel: Bankers, Scholars and Nobles’, in Holbein: The Basel Years, ed. Müller, pp. 58–65, pp. 60–61. 14 Müller, ed., Holbein: the Basel Years, no. 51. 15 Ibid., p. 226. 16 Mitchell B. Merback, ‘The Man of Sorrows in Northern Europe: Ritual Metaphor and Therapeutic Exchange’, in New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows, ed. Catherine R. Puglisi and William L. Barcham (Kalamazoo, mi, 2013), pp. 77–116. 17 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, p. 226. 18 Lynn F. Jacobs, Opening Doors: The Early Netherlandish Triptych Reinterpreted (University Park, pa, 2012), pp. 120–22. 19 Roger S. Wieck, ed., Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York, 1988). 20 As is apparent by searching the digitized database of sixteenthcentury publications in the German-speaking parts of Europe, Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des xvi. Jahrhunderts, www.gateway-bayern.de/index_vd16.html. 21 Hans Koegler, Hans Holbein d.J.: Die Bilder zum Gebetbuch Hortulus Animae (Basel, 1943). 22 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. d.16. 23 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St Gregory in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and

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Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton, nj, 2006), pp. 208–40. Christian Müller, Hans Holbein d.J.: Die Druckgraphik im Kupferstichkabinett Basel (Basel, 1997), nos 80–83. Euan Cameron, The European Reformation, 2nd edn (Oxford and New York, 2012), ch. 10. Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts (London and New York, 1993). Martin Luther, ‘Eight Sermons at Wittenberg, 1522’, in Luther’s Works, vol. li: Sermons 1, ed. and trans. John W. Doberstein (St Louis, mo, 1959), pp. 69–100 (third and fourth sermons, pp. 81–5). Jean Wirth, ‘Le dogme en image: Luther et l’iconographie’, Revue de l’art, lii (1981), pp. 9–23; Bonnie Noble, Lucas Cranach the Elder: Art and Devotion of the German Reformation (Lanham, md, 2009). Jeanne Nuechterlein, ‘Reformation Typology and the Interpretive Challenge of Law and Grace’, in Visual Typology in Early Modern Europe: Continuity and Expansion, ed. Dagmar Eichberger and Shelley Perlove (Turnhout, 2018), pp. 153–76. Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. d.2. Robin Bruce Barnes, Astrology and Reformation (New York, 2016), pp. 114–16. Ernst Götzinger, Zwei Kalender vom Jahre 1527: D. Joannes Copp evangelischer Kalender und D. Thomas Murner Kirchendieb- und Ketzerkalender (Schaffhausen, 1865), pp. 3–27. Bob Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford, 1994). Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts, ch. 2; Bryan D. Mangrum and Giuseppe Scavizzi, eds, A Reformation Debate: Karlstadt, Emser, and Eck on Sacred Images. Three Treatises in Translation (Toronto, 1991), pp. 19–39. Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. 66. Justin E. A. Kroesen, The Sepulchrum Domini through the Ages: Its Form and Function (Leuven and Sterling, va, 2000), pp. 56–108; Annemarie Schwarzweber, Das Heilige Grab in der deutschen Bildnerei des Mittelalters (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1940), pp. 61–4. Jeanne Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation and Renaissance Rhetoric (University Park, pa, 2011), p. 166.

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38 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, p. 257. 39 Christian Müller, ‘Holbeins Gemälde “Der Leichnam Christi im Grabe” und die Grabkapelle der Familie Amerbach in der Basler Kartause’, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, lviii (2001), pp. 279–89. 40 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. 83. 41 Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art, p. 141. 42 Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, vol. i: From Maximilian i to the Peace of Westphalia, 1490–1648 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 171–82. 43 Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art, pp. 26–34. 44 Hans R. Guggisberg, Basel in the Sixteenth Century: Aspects of the City Republic Before, During, and After the Reformation (St Louis, mo, 1982), ch. 2; Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge and New York, 1995), ch. 4. 45 Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1658 to 1801, January 1526 to March 1527. Collected Works of Erasmus, xii (Toronto, 2003), no. 1740, p. 312. 46 Emil Dürr and Paul Roth, Aktensammlung zur Geschichte der Basler Reformation in den Jahren 1519 bis Anfang 1534, 6 vols (Basel, 1921–50), vol. iv, no. 547, pp. 483–95 (Holbein’s response on p. 492). 47 Cameron, The European Reformation, pp. 188–94. 48 Müller, ed., Holbein: the Basel Years, pp. 260–61 and nos 145–7. 49 Paolo Cadorin, ‘Les moyens d’investigation scientifique au service de l’oeuvre de l’art et de son histoire – Un cas d’espèce: La Dernière Cène de Hans Holbein le Jeune’, Geschichte der Restaurierung in Europa/Histoire de la Restauration en Europe, ii (Worms, 1993), pp. 121–36; Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. 105. 50 Müller, ed., Holbein: the Basel Years, nos 112–13. 51 Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art, pp. 75–6. 52 Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1356 to 1534, 1523 to 1524, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. x (Toronto, 1992), no. 1452, p. 278. 53 R. J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis i (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 7; Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister – Queen of

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Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549) and her Evangelical Network, 2 vols (Leiden, 2009). Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, nos 100–101; Peter Cornelius Claussen, ‘Holbein’s Career between City and Court’, in Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532, ed. Christian Müller, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel (Munich and London, 2006), pp. 46–57 (pp. 48–50). Etienne Jollet, Jean et François Clouet, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Paris, 1997). Richard Rex, Henry viii and the English Reformation, 2nd edn (Basingstoke and New York, 2006), pp. 1–11. R. W. Hoyle, ‘The Origins of the Dissolution of the Monasteries’, Historical Journal, xxxviii (1995), pp. 275–305; G. W. Bernard, ‘The Dissolution of the Monasteries’, History, xcvi (2011), pp. 390–409. Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven, ct, and London, 2004), pp. 159–63; Guido Latré, ‘The 1535 Coverdale Bible and its Antwerp Origins’, in The Bible as Book: The Reformation, ed. Orlaith O’Sullivan and Ellen N. Herron (London and New Castle, de, 2000), pp. 89–102. Tatiana C. String, ‘Henry viii’s Illuminated “Great Bible”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, lix (1996), pp. 315–24. Foister, Holbein and England, pp. 152–4. Ibid., pp. 12–14.

4 Science, Observation, Manipulation 1 Allen G. Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1978). 2 Toby Lester, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map that Gave America its Name (London, 2009), esp. ch. 8–9. 3 Martin Kemp, Leonardo, revd edn (Oxford, 2004); Jeffrey Ashcroft, Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography, 2 vols (New Haven, ct, and London, 2017). pp. 774–8, 863–86. 4 Christian Müller, ed., Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515– 1532, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel (Munich and London, 2006), nos 95–6.

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5 Personal communication, Niall Healy of Corran, Co. Cork, Ireland, whom I thank for his observations. 6 Christian Müller, ed., Katalog der Zeichnungen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im Kupferstichkabinett Basel, Teil 2A: Die Zeichnungen von Hans Holbein dem Jüngeren und Ambrosius Holbein (Basel, 1996), no. 63. 7 Stephanie Buck and Jochen Sander, Hans Holbein the Younger: Painter at the Court of Henry viii, exh. cat., Mauritshuis, The Hague (London, 2004), no. 36. 8 Richard Grassby, ‘The Decline of Falconry in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 157 (1997), pp. 37–62 (pp. 37–8). 9 Arguments in favour of such a trip are made on the basis of circumstantial evidence in Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein, trans. Cecilia Hurley and Pascal Griener, 2nd edn (London, 2014), pp. 216–17; for a more sceptical view, see Krause, Hans Holbein der Ältere; Jochen Sander, Hans Holbein d.J.: Tafelmaler in Basel, 1515–1532 (Munich, 2005), pp. 56–61. 10 Donald J. Harreld, High Germans in the Low Countries: German Merchants and Commerce in Golden Age Antwerp (Leiden and Boston, ma, 2004), pp. 105–7. 11 Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print, revd edn (Princeton, nj, 1993), pp. 27–39; Harry Vredeveld, ‘“Lend a Voice”: The Humanistic Portrait Epigraph in the Age of Erasmus and Dürer’, Renaissance Quarterly, lxvi (2013), pp. 521–6. 12 Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (London, 1998). 13 Thomas More, Utopia, 2nd edn (New York and London, 1992); Tilman Falk and Robert Zijlma, eds, Hollstein’s German Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts, 1400–1700, vol. xiv: Holbein, Ambrosius nos 3, 4, 13; Hans nos 10, 13. 14 Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 2204 to 2356, August 1529–July 1530, Collected Works of Erasmus, xvi (Toronto, 2015); The Correspondence of Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus, xii, no. 1770, p. 417. 15 Christian Müller, ed., Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel (Munich and London, 2006), no. 104; David R. Smith, ‘Portrait and Counter-portrait in Holbein’s “The Family of Sir Thomas More”’, Art Bulletin, lxxxvii (2005), pp. 484–506; Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, nos 120–22.

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16 Otto Pächt, ‘Holbein and Kratzer as Collaborators’, Burlington Magazine, lxxxiv (1944), pp. 134–9. 17 John D. North, ‘Nicolaus Kratzer, the King’s Astronomer’, Studia Copernicana, xvi (1978), pp. 205–34; Willem Hackmann, ‘Nicolaus Kratzer: The King’s Astronomer and Renaissance Instrumentmaker’, in Henry viii: A European Court in England, ed. David Starkey, exh. cat., National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (London, 1991), pp. 70–73. 18 Jeffrey Ashcroft, Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography, 2 vols (New Haven, ct, and London, 2017), vol. ii, pp. 737–43. 19 Kent Rawlinson, ‘Hall’s Chronicle and the Greenwich Triumphs of 1527’, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (Oxford, 2012), pp. 402–21; Susan Foister, ‘Holbein’s Paintings on Canvas: The Greenwich Festivities of 1527’, in Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, ed. Mark Roskill and John Oliver Hand (New Haven, ct, and London, 2001), pp. 109–23. 20 Charles Cruickshank, Army Royal: Henry viii’s Invasion of France, 1513 (London and Oxford, 1969); William Arthur Shaw, The Knights of England: A Complete Record From the Earliest Time to the Present Day of the Knights of All the Orders of Chivalry in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of Knights Bachelors, 2 vols (London, 1906), vol. i, p. 36 lists Henry Guildford and Henry Wyatt, who organized the Greenwich revels, as well as Richard Carew, the father of the Nicholas Carew who participated in the tournament. 21 Edward Hall, Hall’s Chronicle: Containing the History of England, During the Reign of Henry the Fourth, and the Succeeding Monarchs, to the End of the Reign of Henry the Eighth (London, 1809), p. 722. 22 Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. 102. 23 Hall, Chronicle, p. 722. 24 Pieter Martens, ‘La destruction de Thérouanne et d’Hesdin par Charles Quint en 1553’, in La forteresse à l’épreuve du temps: Destruction, dissolution, dénaturation, viiie–xxe siècle, ed. Gilles Blieck et al. (Paris, 2007), pp. 63–117. 25 Hall, Chronicle, p. 723; Rawdon Brown, ed., Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections

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of Venice and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy, vol. iv: 1527–1533 (London, 1871), p. 59. J. L. Berggren and Alexander Jones, eds, Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters (Princeton, nj, and Oxford, 2000). Susan Dackerman, ed., Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, exh. cat., Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, ma (Cambridge, ma, and New Haven, ct, 2011), no. 57; Angelo Cattaneo, ‘Map Projections and Perspective in the Renaissance’, in Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance, ed. Zur Shalev and Charles Burnett (London and Turin, 2011), pp. 51–80 (pp. 70–72). Rainer Schoch et al., Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, 3 vols (Munich, 2001), vol. ii, no. 242. Elisabeth Foucart-Walter, Les Peintures de Hans Holbein le Jeune au Louvre (Paris, 1985), pp. 37–48. Vredeveld, ‘“Lend a Voice”’, p. 524, note 63. A full analysis will appear in the author’s forthcoming book on Holbein’s scientific images. Mary Frederica Sophia Hervey, Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’: The Picture and the Men (London, 1900). Susan Foister et al., Making and Meaning: Holbein’s Ambassadors (London, 1997), pp. 14–18; Glenn Richardson, ‘The French Connection: Francis i and England’s Break with Rome’, in ‘The Contending Kingdoms’: France and England, 1420–1700, ed. Glenn Richardson (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 95–116 (pp. 107–10). Jennifer Nelson, ‘Directed Leering: Social Perspective in Erhard Schön’s Anamorphic Woodcuts’, Source: Notes in the History of Art, xxxiv (2015), pp. 17–22; Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art (New York, 1977). Richard Foster, Patterns of Thought: The Hidden Meaning of the Great Pavement of Westminster Abbey (London, 1991), pp. 92–110. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago, il, 1980), p. 17. The connection to the quadrivium has been questioned, for instance by Foister et al., Making and Meaning, p. 33, but the author’s forthcoming book on Holbein’s scientific images will argue that it was integral to the painting’s composition.

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37 Some of the flaws in the quadrant and polyhedral sundial have been previously identified, for instance by Elly Dekker and Kristen Lippincott, ‘The Scientific Instruments in Holbein’s Ambassadors: A Re-examination’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, lxii (1999), pp. 93–125. 38 Eduard His, ‘Holbeins Verhältniss zur Basler Reformation’, Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft, ii (1879), p. 123. 39 Rudolf Riggenbach, ‘Schmuck der Mauern und Tore’, in Die Kunstdenkmäler des Kantons Basel-Stadt, vol. i: Geschichte und Stadtbild, ed. C. H. Baer and François Maurer (Basel, 1971), pp. 195–221 (pp. 210–14). 40 Matthew McLean, The Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster: Describing the World in the Reformation (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 5–44. 41 Christian Müller, Hans Holbein d.J.: Die Druckgraphik im Kupferstichkabinett Basel (Basel, 1997), no. 114a; Peter H. Meurer, ‘Die Basler Weltkarte Typus cosmographicus universalis von Sebastian Münster, 1532’, Cartographica Helvetica, 50 (2014), pp. 41–50. 42 McLean, The Cosmographia, pp. 189–340; Sebastian Münster, Sebastian Münster. Cosmographei: Basel 1550: With an Introduction by Prof. Dr. R. Oehme (Amsterdam, 1966). 43 Simon Grynäus and Johann Huttich, Novus orbis regionum ac insularum veteribus incognitarum (Basel, 1532), sig. α3 r, δ4 verso. 44 Rodney W. Shirley, The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, 1472–1700, 4th edn (Riverside, ct, 2001), nos 66–7. 45 Edward Rosen, ‘The First Map to Show the Earth in Rotation’, in Copernicus and His Successors, ed. Edward Rosen (London, 1995), pp. 173–80. 46 Jean Michel Massing, ‘The Image of Africa and the Iconography of Lip-plated Africans in Pierre Desceliers’s World Map of 1550’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. T. F. Earle and K.J.P. Lowe (Cambridge and New York, 2005), pp. 49–69. 47 Meurer, ‘Die Basler Weltkarte’. 48 Sebastian Münster, Compositio horologiorum (Basel, 1531); Müller, Hans Holbein d.J.: Die Druckgraphik, no. 115n–q. 49 Müller, Hans Holbein d.J.: Die Druckgraphik, no. 115a–l. 50 Hyginus, Libri quattuor non solum poeticas et hystoricas verum astronomicas permultas veritates, enodantes cum tabula (Paris, 1517).

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51 Müller, Hans Holbein d.J.: Die Druckgraphik, no. 116b–e; Dackerman, ed., Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge, no. 73. 52 The author’s forthcoming article on Sebastian Münster’s astronomical images will provide a full description and analysis. 53 Ulrich Gaier, ‘Sebastian Brant’s “Narrenschiff ” and the Humanists’, pmla, lxxxiii/2 (1968), pp. 266–70. 54 Katrin Petter-Wahnschaffe, Hans Holbein und der Stalhof in London (Berlin, 2010), pp. 164–70; Derek Keene, ‘New Discoveries at the Hanseatic Steelyard in London’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, cvii (1989), pp. 15–25. 55 Petter-Wahnschaffe, Holbein und der Stalhof, pp. 132–61; Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven, ct, and London, 2004), pp. 130–37. 56 Jonathan Adams, A Maritime Archaeology of Ships: Innovation and Social Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 2013), esp. ch. 4. 57 Reinhard Paulsen, Schifffahrt, Hanse und Europa im Mittelalter: Schiffe am Beispiel Hamburgs, europäische Entwicklungslinien und die Forschung in Deutschland (Cologne, 2016), pp. 174–7. 58 Petter-Wahnschaffe, Holbein und der Stalhof, p. 166; she suggests the discrepancy likely stems from Holbein working from memory rather than direct observation, although a deliberate adjustment of proportion seems more likely. 59 André Wegener Sleeswyk, ‘The Engraver Willem A. Cruce and the Development of the Chain-wale’, Mariner’s Mirror, lxxvi (1990), pp. 345–61. 60 C. S. Knighton and David Michael Loades, eds, The Anthony Roll of Henry viii’s Navy: Pepys Library 2991 and British Library additional ms 22047 with Related Documents (Aldershot, 2000); see the reconstruction in Peter Marsden, ed., Mary Rose: Your Noblest Shippe: Anatomy of a Tudor Warship (Oxford and Philadelphia, pa, 2015). 61 Barbara Giesicke and Mylène Ruoss, ‘In Honor of Friendship: Function, Meaning, and Iconography in Civic Stained-glass Donations in Switzerland and Southern Germany’, in Painting on Light: Drawings and Stained Glass in the Age of Dürer and Holbein, ed. Barbara Butts and Lee Hendrix, exh. cat., J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, ca, and St Louis Art Museum, St Louis, mo (Los Angeles, ca, 2000), pp. 43–55.

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62 John Rowlands and Giulia Bartrum, Drawings by German Artists and Artists from German-speaking Regions of Europe in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: The Fifteenth Century, and Sixteenth Century by Artists Born Before 1530, 2 vols (London, 1993), no. 308; Müller, ed., Katalog der Zeichnungen, Teil 2A: Holbein, no. 333; Butts and Hendrix, eds, Painting on Light, no. 144. 63 Jiři Majer, ‘Ore Mining and the Town of St Joachimsthal/ Jáchymov at the Time of Georgius Agricola’, GeoJournal, xxxii (1994), pp. 91–9; Bocchini Varani, ‘Agricola and Italy’, GeoJournal, xxxii (1994), pp. 151–60; Hans Prescher, ‘Dr Georgius Agricola, 1494–1555: A European Scientist and Humanist from Saxony’, GeoJournal, xxxii (1994), pp. 85–9. 64 Georgius Agricola, Bermannus, sive de re metallica (Basel, 1530); Owen Hannaway, ‘Georgius Agricola as Humanist’, Journal of the History of Ideas, liii (1992), pp. 553–60. 65 Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 2204 to 2356, August 1529–July 1530, Collected Works of Erasmus, xvi (Toronto, 2015), no. 2274, p. 195.

5 Patrons, Status, Court 1 Jeffrey Ashcroft, Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography, 2 vols (New Haven, ct, and London, 2017), vol. i, pp. 224–5. 2 Maryan W. Ainsworth, Gerard David: Purity of Vision in an Age of Transition (New York, 1998), ch. 6; Larry Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market (Philadelphia, pa, 2006); Filip Vermeylen, Painting for the Market: Commercialization of Art in Antwerp’s Golden Age (Turnhout, 2003), esp. ch. 1 and 6. 3 Gunnar Heydenreich, Lucas Cranach the Elder: Painting Materials, Techniques and Workshop Practice (Amsterdam, 2007), pp. 279–301. 4 Gunnar Heydenreich, ‘“ . . . That You Paint with Wonderful Speed”: Virtuosity and Efficiency in the Artistic Practice of Lucas Cranach the Elder’, in Cranach, ed. Bodo Brinkmann, exh. cat., Städel Museum, Frankfurt, and Royal Academy, London (London, 2008), pp. 29–47; Fritz Koreny, ‘Albrecht Dürer oder Hans Schäufelein? Eine Neubewertung des “Benedictmeisters”’,

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7 8

9 10

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Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft, lvi/lvii (2002/3), pp. 144–61; Christof Metzger, ‘“From the Renowned Good Masters”: Albrecht Dürer’s Workshop’, in Albrecht Dürer: His Art in Context, ed. Jochen Sander, exh. cat., Städel Museum, Frankfurt (Munich, 2013), pp. 194–201. Jochen Sander, Hans Holbein d.J.: Tafelmaler in Basel, 1515–1532 (Munich, 2005), pp. 224–41. Maryan Wynn Ainsworth and Joshua P. Waterman, eds, German Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1350–1600 (New York, 2013), p. 139. Eleri Lynn, Tudor Fashion (New Haven, ct, and London, 2017), p. 111. Stephanie Buck and Jochen Sander, Hans Holbein the Younger: Painter at the Court of Henry viii, exh. cat., Mauritshuis, The Hague (London, 2004), no. 8; Dale Hoak, ‘Godsalve, Sir John (b. in or before 1505, d. 1556), Administrator and Landowner’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008), www.oxforddnb.com. Ashcroft, Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography, vol. i, p. 214. Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven, ct, and London, 2004), pp. 65–71; Susan Foister, ‘The Production and Reproduction of Holbein’s Portraits’, in Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630, ed. Karen Hearn, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London (1995), pp. 21–6; Tarnya Cooper et al., ‘Making Art in Tudor Britain’, www.npg.org.uk, accessed 15 August 2019. Ainsworth and Waterman, eds, German Paintings, no. 18; Carl C. Christensen, Princes and Propaganda: Electoral Saxon Art of the Reformation (Kirksville, mo, 1992), ch. 3. Peter Cornelius Claussen, ‘Holbein’s Career between City and Court’, in Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532, ed. Christian Müller, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel (Munich and London, 2006), p. 47. Freyda Spira, ‘Between Court and City: Artistic Productions in Renaissance Augsburg’, in Imperial Augsburg: Renaissance Prints and Drawings, 1475–1540, ed. Gregory Jecmen and Freyda Spira, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc (2012), pp. 39–65 (pp. 53, 61–2).

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14 Many of those whom Holbein did not portray rarely came to court; Susan Foister, ‘Holbein and his English Patrons’, PhD thesis, University of London (1981), p. 116. 15 For the portrait of the Duke of Norfolk, see Kate Heard and Lucy Whitaker, The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein, exh. cat., Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh (London, 2013), no. 80; for the Surrey portraits, see K. T. Parker, The Drawings of Hans Holbein in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle (London, 1983), nos 17 and 29, and Rowlands, Holbein: The Paintings, no. 76. 16 Roy C. Strong and V. J. Murrell, Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered, 1520–1620, exh. cat., London, Victoria & Albert Museum, 1983. 17 Heard and Whitaker, The Northern Renaissance, nos 84–5. 18 Foister, Holbein and England, pp. 241–4; Heard and Whitaker, The Northern Renaissance, nos 70–71; Buck and Sander, Hans Holbein the Younger, no. 6. 19 Jo Kirby, ‘The Price of Quality: Factors Influencing the Cost of Pigments during the Renaissance’, in Revaluing Renaissance Art, ed. Gabriele Neher and Rupert Shepherd (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 19–42 (pp. 21–6). 20 Tatiana C. String, ‘Henry viii and Holbein: Patterns and Conventions in Early Modern Writing about Artists’, in Henry viii and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb (Farnham, 2013), pp. 131–41 (pp. 140–41). 21 See Elisabeth Foucart-Walter, Les Peintures de Hans Holbein le Jeune au Louvre (Paris, 1985), pp. 52–64. 22 Foister, Holbein and England, pp. 13–23. 23 Foister, ‘Holbein and his English Patrons’, ch. 3–4. 24 Robert Morris, Clothes of the Common Man, 1480–1580 (Bristol, 2003), pp. 39–43. 25 Foister, Holbein and England, pp. 174–5. 26 Egbertus Van Gulik, Erasmus and his Books, ed. James K. McConica and Johannes Trapman, trans. J. C. Grayson (Toronto, Buffalo, ny, and London, 2018), pp. 116–17. 27 Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art, pp. 178–80.

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28 Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1356 to 1534, 1523 to 1524, Collected Works of Erasmus, x (Toronto, 1992), no. 1488, p. 365. 29 On Erasmus’s long-standing relationship to Warham, see Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 142 to 297, 1501 to 1514, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. ii (Toronto, 1975), no. 188, p. 107. 30 J. J. Scarisbrick, ‘Warham, William (1450?–1532), Administrator and Archbishop of Canterbury’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2015), www.oxforddnb.com. 31 Hilmar M. Pabel, Conversing With God: Prayer in Erasmus’ Pastoral Writings (Toronto, 1997), pp. 7–15. 32 Elisabeth Foucart-Walter, ‘Un chef-d’oeuvre de Holbein au Louvre’, L’Oeil (1985), pp. 28–33; Foucart-Walter, Les Peintures, pp. 27–36. 33 Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries (New Haven, ct, 1990), pp. 30–34. 34 Katharine Baetjer, ‘A Portrait by Holbein the Younger’, Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, lvii (1979), pp. 24–9. Also compare the similar clothing, if much more expensive fur hat, worn by the National Gallery’s lady with a squirrel and a starling, plausibly identified as Anne Lovell, whose husband was knighted a couple of years after the portrait was made; see David J. King, ‘Who was Holbein’s Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling?’, Apollo, clix (2004), pp. 42–9. 35 Buck and Sander, Hans Holbein the Younger, no. 27. 36 Foister, Holbein and England, pp. 175–91. 37 Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, p. 95. 38 C. R. Chalmers and E. J. Chaloner, ‘500 Years Later: Henry viii, Leg Ulcers and the Course of History’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, cii (2009), pp. 514–17; also see Graeme Rimer et al., eds, Henry viii: Arms and the Man, 1509–2009 (Leeds, 2009), no. 39. 39 Foister, Holbein and England, pp. 184, 186. 40 Buck and Sander, Hans Holbein the Younger, nos 26, 28; Button, ‘The Portrait Drawings’, pp. 298–9. 41 Rowlands, Holbein: The Paintings, nos 61, 67, 70, 78, M6, L14c. 42 See, for example, the stylistic shift across the works catalogued in Karen Hearn, ed., Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London (1995).

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43 Buck and Sander, Hans Holbein the Younger, p. 114. 44 See Christian Müller, ed., Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel (Munich and London, 2006), no. 125. 45 Button, ‘The Portrait Drawings’, p. 174. Although the possibility of wear and fading needs to be taken into account, Button’s research indicates that Holbein deliberately used different shades of pink paper for his portrait drawings. I thank Susan Foister for further discussion of this issue. 46 L. Barrett Beer, ‘Jane [née Jane Seymour] (1508/9–1537), Queen of England, Third Consort of Henry viii’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), www.oxforddnb.com. 47 Katrin Petter-Wahnschaffe, Hans Holbein und der Stalhof in London (Berlin, 2010), pp. 62–5. 48 Thomas S. Holman, ‘Holbein’s Portraits of the Steelyard Merchants: An Investigation’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, xiv (1979), pp. 139–58. 49 Buck and Sander, Hans Holbein the Younger, no. 18. 50 Nils Jörn, ‘“With money and bloode”: der Londoner Stalhof im Spannungsfeld der englisch-hansischen Beziehungen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 2000), pp. 441–4. 51 Ulf Christian Ewert and Stephan Selzer, Institutions of Hanseatic Trade: Studies on the Political Economy of a Medieval Network Organisation (Frankfurt am Main, 2016). 52 Foister, Holbein and England, pp. 222–6; Harald Marx, ‘Das Bildnis des Charles de Solier, Sieur de Morette, von Hans Holbein dem Jüngeren’, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, lv (1998), pp. 263–80. 53 Victoria Button, ‘The Portrait Drawings of Hans Holbein the Younger: Function and Use Explored Through Materials and Techniques’, PhD thesis, Royal College of Art, London (2013), pp. 214–15. 54 Molly Faries, ‘Reshaping the Field: The Contribution of Technical Studies’, in Early Netherlandish Painting at the Crossroads: A Critical Look at Current Methodologies, ed. Maryan W. Ainsworth (New York, 2001), pp. 70–105; Ashok Roy and Martin Wyld, ‘The Ambassadors and Holbein’s Techniques for Painting on Panel’, in Hans Holbein:

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60 61 62 63

64

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66

References

Paintings, Prints, and Reception, ed. Mark Roskill and John Oliver Hand (New Haven, ct, and London, 2001), pp. 97–107. Foister, Holbein and England, pp. 59–61. Ibid., p. 23. Maryan W. Ainsworth,‘“Paternes for Phiosioneamyes”: Holbein’s Portraiture Reconsidered’, Burlington Magazine, cxxxii (1990), pp. 173–86; Button, ‘The Portrait Drawings’, pp. 205–15. Stanford Lehmberg, ‘Elyot, Sir Thomas (c. 1490–1546), Humanist and Diplomat’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008), www.oxforddnb.com. Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 2204 to 2356, August 1529 –July 1530, Collected Works of Erasmus, xvi (Toronto 2015), nos 2211 and 2212, pp. 35–42. Parker, Drawings, nos 1–8. Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, p. 214. Jeanne Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric (University Park, pa, 2011), pp. 151–8. Philippa C. Maddern, ‘Social Mobility’, in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. Rosemary Horrox and W. M. Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 113–33. Paul N. Siegel, ‘English Humanism and the New Tudor Aristocracy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xiii (1952), pp. 450–68; Natalie Mears, ‘Courts, Courtiers, and Culture in Tudor England’, Historical Journal, xlvi (2003), pp. 703–22; Fiona S. Dunlop, ‘Mightier than the Sword: Reading, Writing and Noble Masculinity in the Early Sixteenth Century’, in Representing Medieval Genders and Sexualities in Europe: Construction, Transformation, and Subversion, 600–1530 (Farnham and Burlington, vt, 2011), pp. 161–72. Michael A. R. Graves, ‘Howard, Thomas, Third Duke of Norfolk (1473–1554), Magnate and Soldier’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008), www.oxforddnb.com; S. J. Gunn, ‘Brandon, Charles, first Duke of Suffolk (c. 1484–1545), Magnate, Courtier, and Soldier’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2015), www.oxforddnb.com. Keith Dockray, ‘Guildford, Sir Henry (1489–1532), Courtier’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2009), www.oxforddnb.com.

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67 For example Richard Southwell and Thomas Le Strange; Buck and Sander, Hans Holbein the Younger, nos 21–3. 68 Susan Brigden, ‘Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey (1516/17–1547), Poet and Soldier’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008), www.oxforddnb.com. 69 Seymour Baker House, ‘More, Sir Thomas [St Thomas More] (1478–1535), Lord Chancellor, Humanist, and Martyr’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008), www.oxforddnb.com. 70 For the later copies see Lesley Lewis, The Thomas More Family Group Portraits after Holbein (Leominster, 1998). 71 Howard Leithead, ‘Cromwell, Thomas, Earl of Essex (b. in or before 1485, d. 1540), Royal Minister’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2009), www.oxforddnb.com. 72 Michael Everett, The Rise of Thomas Cromwell: Power and Politics in the Reign of Henry viii, 1485–1534 (New Haven, ct, and London, 2015), pp. 83, 161–2, 185, notes that Master of the Jewel House was actually a more important office for Cromwell (and earned a higher salary) than Chancellor of the Exchequer, to which he was nominated in April 1533 and which has sometimes been interpreted as a more significant role, thus a terminus ante quem. 73 This general tendency in Holbein’s work has been discussed in Christian Müller, ‘It is the Viewpoint that Matters: Observations on the Illusionistic Effect of Early Works by Hans Holbein’, in Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, ed. Mark Roskill and John Oliver Hand (New Haven, ct, and London, 2001), pp. 17–35. 74 Clark Hulse, ‘Reading Painting: Holbein, Cromwell, Wyatt’, in Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England, ed. Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse (Philadelphia, pa, 2000), pp. 148–77 (pp. 151–2). 75 Augustus Wollaston Franks, ‘Discovery of the Will of Hans Holbein by W. H. Black, with Remarks on the Same’, Archaeologia, xxxix (1863), pp. 1–18.

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Conclusion: The Individual and the Type 1 Jeffrey Ashcroft, Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography, 2 vols (New Haven, ct, and London, 2017), vol. i, p. 168. Previous English translations have usually given ‘parasite’ for Dürer’s schmarotzer. 2 Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein, trans. Cecilia Hurley and Pascal Griener, 2nd edn (London, 2014), pp. 299–301; Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven, ct, and London, 2004), pp. 11–12; Augustus Wollaston Franks, ‘Discovery of the Will of Hans Holbein by W. H. Black, with Remarks on the Same’, Archaeologia, xxxix (1863), pp. 1–18 (p. 2). 3 London, British Library, Add. Ms. 5498, fol. 1–2. 4 Rudolf Riggenbach, ‘Die Wandgemälde des Rathauses zu Basel aus dem xv. und xvi. Jahrhundert’, in Die Kunstdenkmäler des Kantons Basel-Stadt, ed. C. H. Baer (Basel, 1932), vol. i, pp. 517–608 (p. 592). 5 Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven, ct, and London, 2000); Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven, ct, 1998), pp. 15–23. 6 Ashcroft, Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography, vol. ii, p. 875. 7 Hans Reinhardt, ‘Nachrichten über das Leben Hans Holbeins des Jüngeren’, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, xxxix (1982), p. 261; Beatus Rhenanus, In C. Plinium. Repurgatur hoc libro non solum praefatio Pliniana a multis mendis, & ipsi naturalis historiae libri infinitis locis castigantur, ac tanquam scholiis alicubi illustrantur (Basel, 1526), pp. 29–30; trans. in Bätschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, pp. 297–8. 8 Bätschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, Ch. 1; Susan Foister, ‘Humanism and Art in the Early Tudor Period: John Leland’s Poetic Praise of Painting’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Woolfson (Basingstoke and New York, 2002), pp. 132–42. 9 Eric Ives, ‘A Frenchman at the Court of Anne Boleyn’, History Today, xlviii/8 (1998), pp. 21–6. 10 Holbein appears at the end of the list of people Bourbon met in England, right after Kratzer, in Nicolas Bourbon, Παιδαγωγειον [Paidagogeion] (Lyon, 1536), p. 28; it is omitted in Nicolas Bourbon,

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12 13

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16 17 18

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Opusculum puerile ad pueros de moribus, sive Παιδαγωγειον [Paidagogeion] (Lyon, 1536), p. 28. Andrew W. Taylor, ‘Between Surrey and Marot: Nicolas Bourbon and the Artful Translation of the Epigram’, Translation and Literature, xv (2006), p. 13; the original Latin is in Nicolas Bourbon, Nugarum libri octo: ab autore recens aucti et recogniti cum indice (Lyon, 1538), p. 338. Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, p. 81. Taylor, ‘Between Surrey and Marot’, p. 13; the original Latin is in Nicolas Bourbon, Tabellae elementariae, pueris ingenuis pernecessariae (Lyon, 1539), fol. 46 verso. Christian Müller, ed., Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515– 1532, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel (Munich and London, 2006), no. d.21; Ulinka Rublack, The Dance of Death (London, 2016). Nicolas Bourbon and Gilles Corrozet, eds, Historiarum veteris Instrumenti icones ad vivum expressae. Unà cum brevi, sed quoad fieri potuit, dilucida earundem et Latina et Gallica expositione (Lyons, 1539), Aii recto–verso. Franz Egger, Basler Totentanz, 2nd edn (Basel, 2009). Müller, ed., Holbein: The Basel Years, no. d.25. Peter Parshall, ‘Hans Holbein’s Pictures of Death’, in Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, ed. Mark Roskill and John Oliver Hand (New Haven, ct, and London, 2001), pp. 83–95 (pp. 84–8). G. W. Bernard, ‘The Tyranny of Henry viii’, in Authority and Consent in Tudor England: Essays Presented to C.S.L. Davies, ed. G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn (Aldershot and Burlington, vt, 2002), pp. 113–29.

selected reading

Ackroyd, Peter, The Life of Thomas More (London, 1998) Ainsworth, Maryan W., ‘“Paternes for Phiosioneamyes”: Holbein’s Portraiture Reconsidered’, Burlington Magazine, cxxxii (1990), pp. 173–86 Ames-Lewis, Francis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven, ct, and London, 2000) Ashcroft, Jeffrey, Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography, 2 vols (New Haven, ct, and London, 2017) Baltrušaitis, Jurgis, Anamorphic Art (New York, 1977) Bätschmann, Oskar, and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein, trans. Cecilia Hurley and Pascal Griener, 2nd edn (London, 2014) Buck, Stephanie, and Jochen Sander, Hans Holbein the Younger: Painter at the Court of Henry viii, exh. cat., Mauritshuis, The Hague (London, 2004) Cameron, Euan, The European Reformation, 2nd edn (Oxford and New York, 2012) Campbell, Lorne, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries (New Haven, ct, 1990) Dackerman, Susan, ed., Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, exh. cat., Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, ma (2011) Debus, Allen G., Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1978) Dekker, Elly, and Kristen Lippincott, ‘The Scientific Instruments in Holbein’s Ambassadors: A Re-examination’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, lxii (1999), pp. 93–125 Everett, Michael, The Rise of Thomas Cromwell: Power and Politics in the Reign of Henry viii, 1485–1534 (New Haven, ct, and London, 2015)

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Foister, Susan, Holbein and England (New Haven, ct, and London, 2004) —, ‘Humanism and Art in the Early Tudor Period: John Leland’s Poetic Praise of Painting’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Woolfson (Basingstoke and New York, 2002), pp. 129–50 —, Ashok Roy and Martin Wyld, Making and Meaning: Holbein’s Ambassadors (London, 1997) Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago, il, 1980) Heard, Kate, and Lucy Whitaker, The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein, exh. cat., Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh (London, 2013) Hearn, Karen, ed., Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530– 1630, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London (1995) Holman, Thomas S., ‘Holbein’s Portraits of the Steelyard Merchants: An Investigation’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, xiv (1979), pp. 139–58 Jardine, Lisa, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print, revd edn (Princeton, nj, 1993) Knecht, R. J., Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis i (Cambridge, 1994) Lester, Toby, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map that Gave America its Name (London, 2009) Lynn, Eleri, Tudor Fashion (New Haven, ct, and London, 2017) Mears, Natalie, ‘Courts, Courtiers, and Culture in Tudor England’, Historical Journal, xlvi (2003), pp. 703–22 Michalski, Sergiusz, The Reformation and the Visual Arts (London and New York, 1993) Müller, Christian, ed., Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel (Munich, 2006) North, John D., ‘Nicholaus Kratzer, the King’s Astronomer’, Studia Copernicana, xvi (1978), pp. 205–34 Nuechterlein, Jeanne, Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric (University Park, pa, 2011) Oberman, Heiko A., Luther: Man between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven, ct, and London, 1989) Rawlinson, Kent, ‘Hall’s Chronicle and the Greenwich Triumphs of 1527’, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (Oxford, 2012), pp. 402–21

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Selected Reading

Rex, Richard, Henry viii and the English Reformation, 2nd edn (Basingstoke and New York, 2006) Roskill, Mark, and John Oliver Hand, eds, Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception (New Haven, ct, and London, 2001) Rowlands, John, Holbein: The Paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger (Boston, ma, 1985) Rublack, Ulinka, The Dance of Death (London, 2016) Scribner, Bob, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford, 1994) Smith, David R., ‘Portrait and Counter-portrait in Holbein’s “The Family of Sir Thomas More”’, Art Bulletin, lxxxvii (2005), pp. 484–506 Wandel, Lee Palmer, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge and New York, 1995) Woods-Marsden, Joanna, Renaissance Self-portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven, ct, 1998)

photo acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of artworks are also given below, in the interests of brevity: From Johannes Rhagius Aesticampianus, ed., Tabula Cebetis philosophi socratici (Frankfurt, 1507), courtesy Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich: 28; from Biblia: The Bible, that is, the Holy Scripture of the Olde and New Testament (Antwerp, 1535), courtesy Mary Baker Eddy Collection: 41; bpk/ Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, on loan from Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich/photo Jürgen Musolf: 33; bpk/Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: 2 (photo Jörg P. Anders), 10 (photo Volker-H. Schneider); photo bpk/ Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Staatsgalerie in der Katharinenkirche, Augsburg: 32; Detroit Institute of Arts, Bequest of Eleanor Clay Ford/Bridgeman Images: 63; from Desiderius Erasmus, Hyperaspistes diatribae adversus Servum Arbitrium Martini Lutheri (Basel, 1526), courtesy Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin: 30; from Desiderius Erasmus, In hoc libello continentur Querela pacis undique gentium eiectae profligataeque (Basel, 1518), courtesy Universitätsbibliothek Basel: 18; from Desiderius Erasmus, In Novum Testamentum Annotationes (Basel, 1521), courtesy © Trustees of the British Museum, London: 26; from Desiderius Erasmus, Moriae Encomium (Basel, 1515), courtesy Kunstmuseum, Basel/photos Martin P. Bühler: 24, 25; © The Frick Collection, New York: 68; Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden: 57 (photo © artothek), 67 (photo bpk); from Graduale speciale noviter impressum (Basel, 1521), courtesy Universitätsbibliothek Basel: 31; Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig: 12, 66; from Hans Holbein, Historiarum veteris Instrumenti icones ad vivum

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Photo Acknowledgements

expressae (Lyon, 1538), courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris: 19; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna, photo khmMuseumsverband: 56, 64; Kunstmuseum, Basel/photos Martin P. Bühler: 4, 6, 7, 8, 13, 15, 16, 20, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 43, 45, 46, 53, 70; Kunstmuseum Solothurn: 39; Longford Castle collection, on loan to The National Gallery, London/photo © Bildarchiv Foto Marburg: 61; from Aldus Manutius, Quae hocce libro contenta Lexicon Graecum (Basel, 1522), courtesy Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich: 27; photo © Eckhart Matthäus, with permission from the Fugger Foundation: 23; Mauritshuis, The Hague: 44; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 17; from Sebastian Münster, Horologiographia (Basel, 1533), courtesy Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich: 52; © The National Gallery, London: 50; National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc: 71; © National Portrait Gallery, London: 65; © Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hannover/artothek: 3; from Claudius Ptolemy, Geographicae enarrationis libri octo (Strasbourg, 1525), courtesy Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich: 48; © rmn – Grand Palais (musée du Louvre, Paris): 11 (photo Michèle Bellot), 49 (photo Tony Querrec), 62 (photo Hervé Lewandowski); Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ii 2019: 1, 9, 42, 58, 59, 69; Saint Louis Art Museum, mo: 60; Städel Museum, Frankfurt, photo © U. Edelmann/artothek: 54; Tiroler Landesmuseen Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck/photo Jeanne Nuechterlein: 14; © The Trustees of the British Museum: 5, 21, 22, 29, 37, 47, 51, 55.

index

Illustration numbers are indicated by italics. Adler, Philipp 24 portrait by Holbein the Elder 24, 59, 62, 4 Agricola, Georgius 177 Bermannus 177 Alexander the Great 191 The Ambassadors 157, 159–62, 213, 216, 50 Amerbach, Bonifacius 27, 40, 120, 227 portrait by Holbein 27–30, 8 Amerbach, Johann 40, 42 Angelroth, Balthasar 50 Anne of Cleves 191, 207 portrait by Holbein 192 Antwerp 145–6 Apelles 191, 228, 230, 232 Apollo 73–4 Apt, Ulrich 19 aristocracy see social hierarchies Aristotle 115 astrology 116, 168, 172 astronomy 65, 139, 140, 148, 161, 164, 168–70, 172–3 Augsburg 8, 17–19, 60, 63, 65, 97, 100, 145, 186–8, 228

St Anna 60 St Katherine 18, 20, 97–100, 188 Baldung, Hans 228 Barbous, Jean 230 Barrow, Sir Maurice 217 Basel 8, 39, 42, 52, 53, 88, 94, 96, 105, 109, 112, 129, 136, 145, 177, 186–8, 227, 233 Carthusian monastery 120 Dominican cemetery 233 Haus zum Tanz see Haus zum Tanz Holbein’s first period in 7, 17, 24, 34, 39–40, 46, 60, 65, 72, 102, 125–6, 194, 228, 232, 238 Holbein’s second period in 7, 126–7, 130, 140, 155, 162–3, 169 Klingental convent 233 St Martin 121 town hall 73, 102 University 164, 165 Basel Cathedral (Münster) 103, 127–8

275

wings for the organ of 127–9, 40 Battle Scene 149–52, 46 Berry, duke and duchess of 14, 130 Binzenstock, Elsbeth 163 Bohemia 177 Boleyn, Anne 74, 131, 230 book decorations 8, 39–49, 75 alphabet initials 46, 85–94, 177, 233–6, 29, 30, 31, 70 title borders 46, 75–83, 94, 133–5, 146, 18, 27, 28, 41 Bourbon, Nicolas 14, 229–32 portrait by Holbein 331–2, 69 Bourges 130, 145 Brandon, Charles 189 Brandon, Charles, 1st Duke of Suffolk 189, 220 Brandon, Henry, 2nd Duke of Suffolk 189, 58 Braunschweig 210 Breu, Jörg 62 Burgkmair, Hans the Elder 18, 24, 62, 98 Cadamosto, Alvise 167 Calvin, John 125 Cambrai, Jean de 130 Catherine of Aragon 131, 222 Catholicism 8, 95–7, 105, 112, 115, 118, 120, 123, 125, 127, 130, 131, 199, 229 Cebes Tablet 75–83, 86, 140, 27, 28 Chapuys, Eustace 207 Charles v, Holy Roman Emperor 12, 13, 124, 131, 132, 149

Index

Christ as the True Light 115–16, 133, 37 Christ at Rest and the Virgin Mary diptych 106–9, 114, 118, 121, 129, 135, 35 Clement vii 132 Clouet, Jean 130 Colet, John 14 Copp, Johann 116 Court Attendant to Henry viii 183–4, 192, 194, 201, 221, 56 Coverdale, Miles 132, 135 Cranach, Lucas the Elder 14, 114, 182, 185, 186, 228 Cratander, Andreas 80, 86, 87 Cromwell, Thomas 222, 224–5, 229 portrait by Holbein 222–5, 68 Curio, Valentin 80 Dance of Death 42, 48, 181, 232–3, 236–8, 71 Daucher, Adolf 19 Daucher, Hans 62 Dead Christ in the Tomb 119–21, 38 design for a belt 54–5, 56, 21 Diana 74 Diesbach, Nikolaus von 127 Diet of Worms 124 Dinteville, Jean de 159–61, 213 see also The Ambassadors Dobraw, Jan van 62 Dürer, Albrecht 8, 14, 23, 62, 72, 140, 148, 181, 182, 185–6, 227, 228 Ptolemy’s third projection of a world map 152–5, 48

hans holbein

The Self Tormenter (Heauton Timouroumenos) 40–43, 44, 15, 16, 17 treatise on measurement 90, 92–3 Edward iii, king of England 209 Edward vi, king of England 132, 201, 205, 215, 221 portrait by Holbein 207 Eggenberger, Radegundis 100 Elizabeth of York 202 Elyot, Margaret, Lady 217 portrait by Holbein 29–30, 194, 217–18, 9 Elyot, Sir Thomas 217 England 7–8, 12, 53, 126, 130–32, 140, 145–6, 148, 149, 155, 159, 160, 163, 183, 186, 188–98, 210, 212, 221–2, 227–30 English language 133, 148 Erasmus, Desiderius 33, 46, 64–5, 106, 125, 126, 129–30, 145–6, 148, 156, 198, 209, 218 Bermannus preface 177–8 Commentary on the New Testament 80, 83, 85 Hyperaspistes 88, 91 portrait by Holbein 30, 33, 85, 194–6, 199–201, 206, 209, 216, 228, 61 Praise of Folly 66–75, 115, 173, 327, 24, 25 Querela pacis 46

276

Studies for the Hands of Erasmus 30, 32–3, 215, 11 Erhart, Gregor 18–19 Faber, Jacob 78, 80, 87, 109 Fine, Oronce 166 Fleckenstein, Hans 34 Design for a Stained-glass Window for Hans Fleckenstein 34–8, 63, 121, 177, 12 France 26, 109, 123, 129–30, 148–9, 159, 189, 227, 229 Francis i, king of France 12, 129, 132, 230 Franck, Sebastian 173 Frankfurt 18, 78, 173 Freiburg 105 Froben, Johann 39–40, 65, 71, 75, 78, 80, 86, 87, 88, 125, 146, 164, 236 Fugger Chapel 60–64, 23 Fugger family 17, 60, 62 Galen 87 Geneva 125 geography 138, 139, 146, 152–5, 164–7, 177 German 65, 92, 95, 109, 124, 147–8, 210 Germany 7, 12, 18, 34, 59, 64, 124, 145, 146, 160, 164, 177, 210, 228 Gerster, Hans 121, 123 Gilles, Pieter 126, 145, 146, 148 Godsalve, John 184–5, 194, 221

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Godsalve, Thomas 184–5, 194 Thomas and John Godsalve 184–5, 189, 191, 192, 194, 57 Goldsmiths 50, 53, 56, 58 Gossenbrot zu Hohenfreyberg, Georg 100 Greek 75, 78, 80, 85, 87, 90–91, 92, 133, 165, 196 Greenwich revels 149–55, 190 Grynäus, Simon 165 Gryphius, Sebastian 230 Guildford, Sir Henry 190–91, 194, 199, 220–21, 59 Guildford, Mary, Lady 190–91, 207, 60 guilds 125, 126, 188 Guldinknopf, Barbara 121 Gundelsheim, Philipp von 127 Hall, Edward 151 Hanse see steelyard merchants Haus zum Tanz 50–52, 63, 102, 20 Hebrew 133, 164 Heller, Jakob 181, 185 Henry vii, king of England 198, 206 see also Whitehall Palace Cartoon Henry viii, king of England 8, 12, 53, 55, 131, 133, 135, 146, 149, 155, 159, 191, 194, 198, 201, 202, 206, 220, 221, 222, 230, 238 see also Whitehall Palace Cartoon Hercules 85, 91, 196 Hermann, Hans 80

Index

Hertenstein, Jacob van 50 Holbein, Ambrosius 17, 20, 21, 39, 71, 146, 186 see also Holbein, Hans the Elder, Ambrosius and Hans, the Sons of the Artist Holbein, Hans the Elder 7, 17, 18–24, 30, 33–4, 59, 64, 96, 187 Ambrosius and Hans, the Sons of the Artist 17, 21–3, 29, 2 Hands 30, 10 Kaishaim Altarpiece 18, 105 San Paolo fuori le mora 97–100, 107, 108–9, 113, 32 Santa Maria Maggiore 98 Sigmund Holbein 23, 5 St Sebastian Altarpiece 103 Virgin and Child 100–102, 106, 108, 114, 123, 33 Holbein, Hans the Younger distortion in images 108, 120, 142–3, 156–7, 161–2, 175–6, 216, 224, 226 drawings 14, 16, 20, 24–30, 32–8, 44, 49–58, 63, 66–75, 103, 130, 140–42, 147–50, 173–9, 194, 202, 205, 207, 213, 214–19, 226, 231 education 60, 64–6 family of 7, 17–23, 39–40, 53, 65–6, 67, 71, 75, 97, 123, 145, 146, 163 patrons 11, 34, 37, 53, 96, 102, 105, 114, 117, 118, 127, 130, 173, 176, 179, 182, 185–94, 218, 225, 226

hans holbein

technique 11, 16–17, 20, 24–30, 32–9, 44–58, 189, 213–17 Holbein, Jacob 53 Holbein, Philip 53 Holbein, Sigmund 18 see also Holbein, Hans the Elder, Sigmund Holbein Holy Roman Empire 17, 124, 130, 149 see also Charles v Horace 73 Horenbout, Lucas 192 Hortulus animae 109–12, 113–14, 181, 36 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey 189 Howard, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk 188, 220, 221, 238, 1 humanism 11, 15, 58, 59, 64–6, 72, 83, 94, 125, 139, 145, 146, 198, 228, 230, 231 humanist publications and publishers 39, 46, 71, 75, 78, 80, 90, 102, 165, 181 Hüttich, Johann 165 Hyginus 168, 172 Icones 42, 48–9, 181, 232, 17 Iselin, Ludwig 227 Italy 8, 59, 64, 66, 120, 121, 130, 145, 174 Kabbalah 74 Kale, Cyriacus 210–13, 66 Kannengiesser, Dorothea 24 portrait drawing by Holbein 26, 27–8, 7

278

Jacob Meyer and Dorothea Kannengiesser 24, 26, 194, 6 Karlstadt, Andreas 125 Kratzer, Nicolaus 140, 148, 152, 155, 157, 161, 163, 229 portrait by Holbein 155–7, 161, 162, 168, 196, 216, 224, 49 Last Supper 127, 182 Latin 13, 46, 48, 65, 66, 67, 71, 78, 85, 87, 95, 109, 125, 148, 164, 177, 230, 232 inscriptions in Holbein portraits 13, 156, 196 letter forms 87, 90, 92–3 Latona 74 Law and Grace 114–15 Leland, John 13, 14, 231 Leonardo da Vinci 26, 140 Lister, Gerhard 71–4 London 7–8, 53, 159, 173, 210, 212, 213, 227 Holbein’s first period in 126, 127, 145–6, 163 Holbein’s second period in 29, 74, 164, 210, 225 Low Countries 23, 109, 181, 182 see also Antwerp Lucerne 34, 40, 50, 125 Luther, Martin 13, 88, 95, 96, 112–15, 117–18, 124–6, 131, 186 Lützelburger, Hans 48, 88, 115, 116, 233, 236–7 Lyon 42, 48, 230

279

Manutius, Aldus 80 maps see geography; world map (Typus Cosmographicus Universalis) Marguerite of Navarre 130 Mary i, queen of England 221 Master cv 87, 109 Maximilian i, Holy Roman Emperor 17 Melanchthon, Philip 13 portrait by Holbein 12–15, 72, 225, 3 Metsys, Quentin 146, 156 Meyer zum Hasen, Jacob 24 see also Kannengiesser, Dorothea, Jacob Meyer and Dorothea Kannengiesser Mining 173–9, 55 More, Sir John 222 More, Sir Thomas 145, 146–7, 221–2 family portrait by Holbein 147–8, 215, 218–19, 221–2, 45 portrait by Holbein 147 Utopia 146 Munich 156 Münster, Sebastian 140, 163–72 Myconius, Oswald 67, 71–5 Netherlands see Low Countries New Instrument of the Sun and Moon 169–73, 53 Niobe 74–5 Nobleman with a Hawk 143–5, 44

Index

Norfolk 184–5 Duke of see Howard, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk Nuremberg 40, 154, 227 Oberried, Hans 105 Oecolampadius, Johannes 125 Ovid 74–5 Oxford 56, 148, 198 Paris 130, 166 Parrhasius 232 Passion of Christ 103–5, 114, 118, 127, 34 Passion Series (stained glass) 37–9, 111, 13, 14 Pirckheimer, Willibald 130, 227 Plato 75, 115 Pliny the Elder 228, 232 Portrait of a Woman 201–2, 205–7, 209, 223, 63 Portugal 165, 175 Praise of Folly see Erasmus, Desiderius printing see book decorations Protestantism see Reformation Ptolemy 139, 152, 154 Reformation 8, 11, 12–13, 49, 60, 95–6, 105–6, 112–38, 161, 164, 179, 222 Rhenanus, Beatus 75, 228 Ricci, Michele 46 Romain, Philippe 230 Selve, Georges de 159–60, 160 see also The Ambassadors

hans holbein

Sertorius, Quintus 72–3 Seymour, Jane 53, 201, 205, 209 design for a cup for Jane Seymour 55–8, 147, 22 portrait by Holbein 201–2, 205–7, 209, 215, 63 Ship with Sailors 173–6, 54 Silenus 87, 91 social hierarchies 8, 53, 65–6, 125, 136, 143, 183–213, 217–25 Solier, Charles, Sieur de Morette 210, 213 portrait by Holbein 210, 213, 216, 67 Solomon and the Queen of Sheba 135–6, 42 Solothurn Madonna 121–4, 39 Spain 175 Specklin, Veit 48, 172 Stabius, Johannes 155 Steelyard merchants 173, 176, 210, 212, 224 Studies of a lamb and the head of a sheep 141–2, 43 Suffolk see Brandon, Charles, Duke of Suffolk Swiss Confederation 7, 8, 34, 115, 121, 124, 125, 177, 186 Switzerland see Swiss Confederation Thérouanne, siege of 149, 47 Painting by Holbein 149–52, 155 travel 7, 23, 99, 145–6, 164–7, 187, 230 Trechsel, Johann 42, 48

280

Trechsel, Melchior and Gaspar 48, 232, 236 Triumph of Wealth and Triumph of Poverty 173 Varthema, Ludovico 167 Venice 80, 168, 227 Venus and Cupid 182 Vienna 78, 201, 205 Warham, William 33, 194–9, 209 portrait by Holbein 194, 198–201, 206, 207, 209, 216, 62 Welser, Veronica 21, 98 Whitehall Palace Cartoon 52–3, 202, 205, 206, 210, 214, 216, 65 Wittenberg 95 Wolff, Thomas 94 workshop practice 16–20, 49–50, 66, 181–3, 185–6 world map (Typus Cosmographicus Universalis) 164–7, 169, 51 Zeuxis 232 zodiac 152, 155, 168, 172 Capricorn 168–9, 52 Zscheckenbürlin, Amalie 105 Zscheckenbürlin, Maria 103, 105 Zurich 116, 125 Zwingli, Huldrych 125