Hans Holbein: worth seven earls

Hans Holbein (1497-1543) was born in Augsburg in southern Germany and worked for many years in Basel, Switzerland.  Like other children of painters who had the advantage of superb paternal training—Gentile Bellini, Lucas Cranach, Pieter Brueghel, Artemisia Gentileschi and Andrew Wyeth—Holbein surpassed his father.

In her book Holbein: Renaissance Master (Yale, 408pp, £40/$50), Elizabeth Goldring defines his gift for portraiture: “Holbein distilled the essence of the sitter’s nature and temperament in visual form.”  His startling and immediate portraits are so vivid that the subjects seem to jump right off the canvas.  The English miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard idolised “the most excellent painter and limner [of miniatures] Haunce Holbean, the greatest Master truly in both thosse arts after the liffe that euer was.”

Holbein also had an impressive character.  A congenial man who liked to drink, he took part — perhaps when drunk — in several street brawls.  He’d been keeper of the drinking rooms of his guild in Basel.  When placed in charge of beer stocks for the German guild in London, he was granted a lucrative license to buy and export six hundred tuns of beer, whose large casks contained a substantial 13,000 imperial gallons.

Holbein’s older painter-brother Ambrosius died in Basel, aged 23, of the plague.  His brother’s death, and father’s departure from Basel and return to his native Augsburg, left Holbein alone.  To fill the void, in 1519 he married a Basel widow, and had two sons and two daughters with her.  Holbein modeled the triangular composition of his family in Elsbeth, Philipp and Katharina Holbein on paintings of the Virgin, Child and John the Baptist.  Goldring claims that in this picture his wife looks “haggard, her eyes red and bleary.”  But he did not wish to portray negatively the gentle, maternal and Madonna-like Elsbeth, who seems sweet, calm and thoughtful.  Her reddish-brown hair is parted in the middle and matches the slight cleavage of her breasts.  She has ruddy cheeks and wears a delicate veil across her forehead.  She holds her baby girl on her lap and places her right arm around the shoulders of her standing son.  Painted in profile, the boy has a pageboy haircut and, like his sister, looks to the right as if expecting their father.  Philipp resembles his grandfather’s drawing of Hans as a young boy.  Able and enterprising as always, Holbein maintained two separate families, in Basel and in London.

An exceptionally hard-working, clearly focused and ambitious artist, Holbein had workshops in both cities.  The Swiss studio was efficiently managed by Elsbeth when he was away in England.  Sure-footed and always pragmatic, he skillfully handled many simultaneous projects.  He was able to work effectively in London during times of dangerous religious and political turmoil, after living through the iconoclastic riots in Basel.  Goldring shows that “throughout his long and successful career, he enjoyed the patronage of individuals and institutions on both sides of the religious divide”.

Henry VIII and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell felt Holbein could be trusted as a courier, when traveling abroad, with sensitive diplomatic missions requiring secrecy and discretion.  Goldring notes, with an important proviso, that if Henry “liked anyone, he clearly liked and admired the singular talents of Holbein”. When the artist lost his temper and struck an earl who had barged into his workshop and demanded that he instantly paint his portrait, the nobleman complained to Henry.  The king wittily replied, “I can make seven earls (if it pleased me) from seven peasants—but I could not make one Holbein, or so excellent an artist, out of seven earls.”

In Basel in August 1867, Anna Dostoyevsky described Holbein’s morbid portrayal of agonised suffering in Christ in the Tomb: “the whole form is emaciated, the ribs and bones plain to see, hands and feet riddled with wounds, all blue and swollen, like a corpse on the point of decomposition.”  Influenced by Mantegna’s Christ in the Tomb and Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, Holbein shows Christ’s gangrenous fingers extending over the edge of the austere bier.  Goldring writes, “the large profile painting of Christ’s bruised and bloody corpse is laid out on a stone slab in a claustrophobically narrow niche.  The extraordinarily visceral painting is striking in its anatomical correctness and in the unflinching realism with which it depicts Christ’s wounds, the putrefaction of His flesh and the onset of rigor mortis.”

Hans Holbein the Younger: The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, Between 1520 and 1522

Equipped with letters of introduction from Erasmus in Basel to Thomas More—his two greatest patrons—Holbein spent two separate periods in England from 1526 to 1528 and from 1532 to 1543.  Erasmus explained, “the arts are not appreciated here, so he is off to England in the hope of scraping together a few angels.”  Holbein aimed to earn money in a time of hardship and secure royal patronage.  His work was valued there, and as Thomas More wrote in Utopia: “Displaying the ymages of notable men was a means of ensuring that the glory and renowne of the auncestors may sturre and prouoke their posterite to virtue.”  Recognizing Holbein’s genius from the work he’d brought with him, More invited the artist to live in his home.

In Erasmus (“Thinking”), the humanist’s heavy black hat touches his right eyebrow, his grey hair reaches down to his left ear and he wears a black coat.  Holbein gives the viewer the illusion of being able to feel the softness of the shadowy fur on his coat.  The fur cuffs look like little animals sitting on his hands and about to crawl up his arm.  Erasmus’ fingers, one with a ring, rest on a heavy red-leather volume.  His prominent nose is sharp, his lips thin, his cheeks creased.  Pensive and contemplative, he looks far out and in deep.  The hint of a sly smile suggests his satiric response to the folly of the world.

After Holbein’s first visit to England, the anti-Catholic riots in Basel sent him back to the glittering rewards of the royal court in London.  Writing from Basel, Erasmus exclaimed, “Such a mockery was made of the images of the saints that neither pecuniary nor artistic value could save anything.”  This violent Protestant iconoclasm, which could have destroyed Holbein’s works along with all the others, led to his shift from religious art to portraiture.

In William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, the formidable prelate is framed on the right by a tall golden processional Cross with a sculpted Christ, and on his left by an equally tall, sharply pointed, bejeweled white archbishop’s mitre. Praying in his private chapel, Warham is seated behind a desk, his long fingers spread on a prayer cushion with an open book that has visible but illegible print.  His massive, forceful, half-length figure stares slightly to the left.  He wears a heavy white robe with fur on his cuffs and a long pelt that curves around his neck reaches down to the table.  His forehead is furrowed, his eyebrows thick, his dark face creased, his lips tight.  The leader of the Church in England radiates both ecclesiastical and political power.

Hans Holbein the Younger: Portrait of William Warha, 1528

In one of Holbein’s most famous portraits, Henry VIII, the king looks like a football fullback with huge shoulder pads, or like a sumo wrestler in fancy dress.  He has a high forehead, alert raised eyebrows, small mouth, pudgy face, heavy jowls, flowing moustache, trimmed beard, exposed chin, bulging calf muscle and sheathed dagger in his left fist.  He wears a tilted embossed hat, sable fur (permitted only to royals), a tunic and coat-sleeves plastered with gold and rubies, white tights and leather-strapped sandals.  (Henry’s taste for jewels was equalled only by Elizabeth Taylor.)  His corpulent Falstaffian figure, standing on a rich red oriental carpet, faces the viewer with his legs defiantly spread.  This aggressive, menacing and confrontational image of royal authority and power almost bursts out of the pictorial frame.  The embodiment of strength, action and virility, King Henry is meant to leave the viewer feeling annihilated in his presence.  He became even more dangerous when, after near-fatal jousting accidents, his mental and physical powers declined and he became prone to explosive fits of rage.

Hans Holbein the Younger: Portrait of Henry VIII, circa 1540–1547

A Spanish envoy in the court of Henry VIII warned, “We pass through difficult times in which one can neither speak, nor keep silent, without danger.”  Holbein closely observed Henry’s bloodthirsty regime and saw, first-hand, the tragic fall of powerful figures from great heights to sudden death.  He painted many people—Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher, Anne Boleyn, the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (Henry’s childhood friend), and Henry’s closest advisor Thomas Cromwell— all of them once intimate with and later beheaded by Henry.  On learning of More’s execution, the Emperor Charles V exclaimed, “I would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than have lost such a worthy counsellor.”

Hans Holbein the Younger: Portrait of Sir Thomas More, 1527

Holbein drew and painted Henry’s second, third and fourth wives—Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and the German Anne of Cleves.  During his drawing of Anne Boleyn, who was suffering from an inflammation of the lymph nodes, Holbein discreetly covered her swollen throat with a high collar.  Henry had been romantically attracted to the two virgins, Boleyn, who was executed, and Seymour, who died soon after childbirth.

A sketch by Hans Holbein the Younger, Anne Boleyn

In only a few hours Holbein could record all the precise details he needed to create a life-size picture, so he was sent abroad to paint Henry’s prospective brides and queens.  One of these was Christina of Denmark, whom Henry did not know.  She was the daughter of the king of Denmark and Norway, and the widow of the Duke of Milan.  A great beauty, only 16 years old but not a virgin, she was well educated, intelligent and lively, and enjoyed riding and hunting.  Tall, blond and Nordic, she was much more attractive than the three actual wives whom Holbein portrayed.  He painted Christina in Brussels, where she was visiting her aunt, wearing a black widow’s hat and robe, trimmed with fur, and punctuated by a tiny white collar and cuffs.  Her delicate fingers, holding gloves, are folded at her waist.  She has silky white skin, full red lips to match her ruby ring, and a gentle, charming expression.  But Christina, thinking of Anne Boleyn’s fate and unwilling to risk her life, wittily remarked, “If I had two heads I would happily put one at the disposal of the King of England.”  Another prospective candidate wisely concluded, “no woman could ever be happily married to a man like Henry.”

Hans Holbein the Younger: Portrait in mourning, 1538

Holbein was then dispatched to Germany to paint Hans Holbein the Younger,.  A disappointed emissary reported that he “heard no great praise neither of her personage nor beauwtie”.  Henry was attracted to Holbein’s over-idealised portrait, but was greatly disappointed when he actually saw his bride-to-be in person.  Repelled by Anne, Henry claimed the marriage was unconsummated, and it was annulled seven months after their wedding.

Hans Holbein the Younger: Portrait of Anne of Cleves, 1539

Elizabeth Goldring emphasises the life of the artist rather than detailed analyses of the works, and “sought to place Holbein and his oeuvre within the broadest religious, political and cultural contexts.”  Her handsome and superbly illustrated book is intelligent and well written, and scrupulously examines the documentary evidence.  In an odd stylish tic, she often begins a sentence with: “That said…”

Holbein is the greatest portrait painter in the history of art.  The Latin inscription on his portrait of Derich Born emphasises the subject’s living image: “If you added a voice, that would be Derich his very self.  You would be in doubt whether the painter or his father made him.”

Jeffrey Meyers has published Painting and the Novel, biographies of Wyndham Lewis and Modigliani, Impressionist Quartet and a study of the Canadian realist painter Alex Colville.

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