Living images: Holbein, Bronzino and the art of portraiture

Holbein: Capturing Character Ed. Anne Woollett. Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2021. 180 pp. $50

The Medici: Portraits and Politics. 1512-1570. Ed. Keith Christiansen and Carlo Falciani. NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021. 328 pp. $65

I

The first biographer of the German artist Hans Holbein (1497-1543) praised his “keen intelligence, quickness of spirit, audacity and dexterity,” which do indeed shine through his work. He adopted Flemish realism to achieve astonishing verisimilitude, and belonged to the tradition of razor-sharp portraits that runs from Mantegna and Dürer to Ingres and Lautrec. Anne Woollett writes that he “produced large, elegant likenesses of sitters in compressed interior spaces, illuminated by strong, even light and accompanied by carefully chosen attributes… Holbein not only depicted their physical features and indicators of occupation and wealth, but also expanded these expressions of individuality with humanistic literary quotations, personal mottos and inscriptions.”

His portraits were so lifelike that he was even sent abroad to check out potential candidates for a royal marriage. Henry VIII was attracted to Holbein’s over-idealised portrait of Anne of Cleves, but disappointed when he actually saw his German bride-to-be. Anne, who reigned for only six months, surrendered her maidenhead but (unlike two of Henry’s queens) kept her head.

Holbein first came from Basel to England in 1526 with letters of introduction from Erasmus to Sir Thomas More and lived for two years in More’s home. The six contributors to this catalogue do not appear to have noticed that Holbein portrays the close friendship of these two men by emphasising their similarities in his portraits. Both are seated in three-quarter view before heavy green drapery with their arms resting on a table. They wear similar garments: a wide black cap with their hair extending beneath it and a heavy black jacket trimmed with luxurious fur. Both have a long sharp nose, thin lips, firm chin and pensive expression.

Holbein’s Christ in the Tomb (1521, Kunstmuseum, Basel) presents a morbid contrast to his elegant portraits. The dead Christ is rigidly stretched out on a winding sheet and tightly confined inside a greenish marble tomb. His gangrenous fingers extend over the edge of the austere bier, and the darker colour of the head, hands and feet on the elongated but muscular body reveals the inexorable process of decay. The limbs are rigid, the cheeks haggard, the eyes sunken, the skin lifeless, the body emaciated. The dark matted hair falls on the white cloth, the mouth is twisted open, the beard juts rigidly up and the body is illuminated from below by an eerie light that casts shadows over the anguished features. By emphasising human mortality and the terrors of death, Holbein questions the possibility of Christ rising from the tomb.

Holbein’s painting The Artist’s Wife and Their Two Children (1529, Basel) is a triangular composition seen from below. His wife is a gentle, graceful, maternal Madonna, seated against a dark brown background, with her hair parted in the middle, a veil covering half her forehead, her wide white chest bared to a slight cleavage above her black bodice. Her cheeks are ruddy, her nose firm, eyes are lowered and her expression pensive. Her baby daughter, with broad forehead and chubby cheeks, sits on her lap and stares ahead. Her right hand protectively embraces her young son, who looks sweetly up at her. The charming portrait radiates tenderness and love.

The portrait of the French ambassador Charles de Solier (1535, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden) is “an image of power and magnificence that projects the sitter’s forceful personality and his embodiment of the French King,” François I. The massive soldier and diplomat fills the picture frame and, like a reigning monarch, radiates splendour and stern power. Standing in front of a wavy dark-green background, he wears a gold-decorated cap tilted on his forehead, has a grey-and-red square beard, with a fur stole draped over his broad shoulders and covering a black, gold-buttoned jacket. His gold chain of office hangs impressively from his chest and his widely slashed black-and-white sleeves are dazzling. He grasps an embossed dagger, tied to his belt with a gold and blue tassel, in his gloved left hand and clenches his other glove in his strong right hand. Staring straight out at the viewer, he seems ready to smite once and smite no more.

Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling (1528, National Gallery, London) portrays its subject, against a blue background, in four subtle shades of white: on her cloudy fur cap, her fringed and flowing mantle, the furled cuff that extends from her black sleeve and the diaphanous muslin above her gown, open in the middle and delicately buttoned at her throat. The reddish-brown, bright-eyed pet squirrel, resting on her right arm and secured by a grey chain, nibbles a nut while its furry tail delicately extends around her mantle and onto her muslin. The squirrel refers to the motif on her family crest; the speckled black starling at her right ear alludes to her village, East Harling, in Norfolk.

Sir Richard Southwell (1502-64) was a convicted murderer, pardoned after paying a substantial fine of £1,000. He helped incriminate Sir Thomas More, who was beheaded, and betrayed his childhood friend, the chivalrous poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, executed for treason. After Henry VIII broke with Rome, Southwell was instrumental in destroying the Catholic monasteries and confiscating church property for the king.

In Holbein’s portrait, Richard Southwell (1536, Uffizi, Florence), he sits before a dark green background with gilded letters that state in Latin: “10 July in the 28th year of Henry’s reign, at the age of 33” — though he looks older. Posed in a three-quarter view, looking to the left, he wears a wide black cap, partly covering his right ear, with a fringe of clipped hair showing below it, and decorated with a gold medallion. He has thick eyebrows, deep-set brown eyes, blunt nose, drooping mouth, dimpled chin and deep knife scar on neck. His heavy, black, four-button jacket opens to his chest to reveal a white shirt tied at the neck. The gold chain of his knighthood loops below his chest and an emerald ring appears on the right forefinger of his folded hand. He gazes into the distance with the severe expression of a Mafia enforcer.

I own a careful but less minutely detailed copy of the Uffizi Southwell, which was probably commissioned by his family, who wanted a less villainous appearance. Dated 1554 (18 years later), this portrait is enhanced by a handsome black elaborately carved seventeenth-century Dutch frame. Southwell’s clothes and the pose in my copy — seated in three-quarter view and with folded hands — are the same as in the original, though his medallion is not as clear. His face is coppery and thinner, moustache heavier, lips softer, expression gentler. His nose is less snouty, his double chin is gone and his neck scar from a knife wound — perhaps acquired during the murder — is brushed over.

This Holbein catalogue, for exhibitions at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in the fall of 2021 and the Morgan Library in New York in the spring of 2022, is disappointing. The chapters following Woollett’s useful introduction are extremely scholarly and specialised. The analysis of portraits of Erasmus by Holbein, Quentin Metsys and Lucas Cranach suggests that Erasmus influenced his proliferating images. The chapter on Holbein’s drawings shows that he traced them onto the wood panels and closely replicated them in the finished pictures.

Another chapter describes his creation of printed books and representations of them in his paintings. In one portrait, a bitter note quoting the Roman playwright Terence and protruding from a strapped, leather-bound book, reads: veritas odium parit (truth incites hatred). The chapter on calligraphy and inscriptions rather obviously states that the latter “conveyed different kinds of information about his sitters.” Holbein even imitated the actual handwriting of his subjects. The deadly dull piece on materials and technique in the unusual Allegory of Passion explores “questions concerning provenance, function and authorship,” and includes many leaden sentences: “the wooden support was first covered with a relatively thick calcium carbonate ground, and the absence of a barbe… suggests that the work had no engaged frame or other framing device during the gesso application.” Despite the author’s claim, he does not “shed light on Holbein’s creative process.”

The print, especially in the captions and notes of this book, is small, faint and hard to read. In a strange and inexplicable omission of crucial information, there are absolutely no comments on the catalogue entries, which have three useless blank pages. This book has the bridle and the bit, but not the bloody horse. But even without a proper text, the well-illustrated catalogue shows that Holbein is the greatest portrait painter in the history of art. As he proudly but justly inscribed on his picture of the handsome Cologne merchant Derich Born, “Add but the voice and you have the whole self, and you may doubt whether the painter or the father made him.”

II

The new book on The Medici, another handsome exhibition catalogue, extends from 1512 to 1570, when the Medici ruled Florence (except for a hiatus in 1527-30 when their political opponents took control), and their dynasty rose spectacularly from bankers to grand dukes. This book reveals how the Medici used art to glorify themselves in life, perpetuate themselves in death and sustain their political power. Carlo Falciani writes that art was a “political instrument capable of legitimising the sovereignty of the Medici in Florence; of idealising Cosimo as the exemplary prince; and rendering divine the duke and his entire progeny by indicating his predestination to govern Florence and Tuscany.”

The family needed exalted art to compensate for their insider trading of the papacy, their tyranny and their depravity. They established a new seat of dynastic power in Rome by appointing the 13-year-old Giovanni de’ Medici as the cardinal who eventually became Pope Leo X. His cousin Giulio, another nepotic cardinal, followed him as the politically inept and pathologically indecisive Pope Clement VII. Leo shamelessly declared, “since God has given us the papacy, let us now enjoy it.” He protected the illegitimate and oppressive Alessandro, Medici ruler of Florence, who was “infamous for his debauched, dissolute and libertine behavior.” Alessandro spared neither the daughters of patricians nor the nuns in convents and scattered his maker’s image though the land.

Two portraits of Clement VII by Sebastiano del Piombo, only six years apart, present a striking contrast. In the first he’s seated majestically and turns to the left. Handsome, virile and olive-skinned, he’s physically imposing and suggests arrogance and power. In the second, three years before his death, he’s suddenly aged. Wearing the same white gown, red cape and red cap as in the earlier portrait, he’s now grey-bearded, with heavy eyebrows, sharp nose and grim expression, and gazes wearily into the future.

The leading Medici painters were Jacopo Pontormo and his brilliant pupil Agnolo Bronzino, whose marmoreal idols combined painterly skill with psychological insight. They created three types of portraits: ideal images, naturalistic figures softened by ideal beauty and exact representations of the sitter. They all capture, with elaborate costume and jewellery, the appearance, character and social status of the subjects.

As with the portraits of Clement, comparisons illuminate these pictures. Bronzino painted several portraits of the Spanish Eleonora di Toledo, happily married to Cosimo de’ Medici and mother of eleven children, including a future pope and a future grand duke. In the hieratic Uffizi portrait, with her arm around her cherubic son Giovanni, she seems swathed in an elaborately decorated, tight-waisted, ruffled carpet. Encrusted with precious pearls, she sits before a subtly colored blue background that’s cloudy behind her majestic head and dark at the edges.

In the Prague portrait the child is absent and she’s even more heavily laden with dozens of pearls woven into her splendid costume. Her collar is clasped with a delicately tied baby-blue thread that echoes the darker blue background. Bronzino’s Young Woman with Her Little Boy in Washington is more maternal and even better. The woman’s headdress and bright red satin costume are stunning. Her attractive face, at once imperious and entrancing, has more expression than Eleonora’s. She holds a pair of gloves in her bejewelled hand, tenderly putting her arm around and linking hands with her more lifelike cuddly child.

Bronzino’s Allegorical Portrait of Dante (now owned by a Russian billionaire) shows the poet as a vital presence in Florence 200 years after his death. Seen in profile (above), dressed in a red cloak and crowned with laurel — symbol both of poets and the Medici — he has the familiar hooked eagle’s nose, narrow face and jutting chin, and holds a book open to his Purgatorio. One contributor describes the scene: “Seated on a rocky outcropping close to the picture plane, Bronzino’s monumental Dante gazes over his left shoulder into a fantastic landscape of his own creation: across the sea, dawn breaks over Mount Purgatory, crowned by the Earthly Paradise.” The dome and campanile of Florence, to which he would never return from political exile in Ravenna, appear over the blazing pointed flames of Inferno. Bronzino also painted the esteemed poet Laura Battiferri in sharp profile, exaggerating her aquiline nose, sharp chin and severe expression to link her to Dante’s unusual features and poetic tradition.

The naked court dwarf, a grotesque contrast to the beautiful portraits, was ironically nicknamed after the giant Morgante in Luigi Pulci’s poem “Morgante Maggiore.” This monstrous baby, shown recto and verso before and after a hunt, has flabby folds of flesh, snouty nose, thick stunted limbs, protruding belly, bulging buttocks and a bird flying serendipitously in front of his almost private parts.

The leading artists painted three weird young men, probably commissioned by their wealthy families. Pontormo’s Portrait of a Young Man, silhouetted against a black background, shows thick clumps of wiry hair cascading from under his hat and framing his curious, bewildered face. He’s sheathed in a gigantic rose-colored cloak, into which his left hand disappears. Another strange subject, in Francesco Salviati’s Portrait of a Young Man with a Dog, has a clipped fringe of hair, pale forehead, asymmetrical eyes, small ears, rosy cheeks, giraffe neck, sloping shoulders and quizzical expression. He strokes the head of a long-haired grey wolfhound, and the naked, diaphanously dressed angel floating above his head seems to represent his sexual fantasy. Bronzino’s Saint Sebastian is very different from the virile, muscular martyrdoms of Mantegna and Botticelli. This tranquil, insouciant saint has hair of curly knots and a dopey expression. He fiddles with an arrow as if it were a toy, and shows no sign of ecstasy or pain from the dart that pierces his torso. He merely seems to be passing the time before he’s clubbed to death by order of the Roman emperor.

The catalogue includes the misleadingly titled Portrait of a Halberdier, whose subject has raised eyebrows, cupid’s mouth and unmartial baby face. He wears a red hat with a feather and medal; high green collar, puffed out white buttoned jacket with gold chain, tightly belted waist, ruffled cuffs, red trousers matching his hat and sword hanging from his leather belt. Cut off at the crotch, he holds on to a pole — the metal axe blade and pick of the halberd are not shown — that resembles a stage prop in an opera. Completely different from the ferocious and armed-for-combat Cosimo I de’ Medici in Armor, he looks like a courtier elegantly dressed to appear in a fashion show.

The soi disant halberdier closely resembles Bronzino’s most impressive male portrait, Young Man with a Book. The stylish, arrogant aristocrat stands within a narrow, empty-walled domestic interior, one hand fingering open a book, the other spread near his narrow waist. Dressed in somber black except for his wavy white collar, he wears a velvet cap adorned with decorative worm-like aglets that reappear at the bottom of his elaborately ruffled jacket. His wandering strabismic left eye, like the two grotesques carved in the furniture (a third appears hidden in his clothing), lend unusual interest to his commanding presence.

The contributors do not recognize that Bronzino’s delicate chalk portrait of Pontormo reappears in Pontormo’s Portrait of a Man with a Book, which is actually Pontormo’s Self-portrait. In both works (painted c. 1540), Pontormo wears a mantle over a blouse belted at the waist, and has the same gaunt body, long narrow head, arched nose, moustache, clipped beard showing a bit of chin, elongated fingers and intense, melancholy expression.

The catalogue of this magnificent exhibition, which ran at the Met from June to October 2021, has a deeply flawed text that wobbles precariously between pointless banalities and opaque pronouncements, and does not do justice to the marvellous art. The style swerves from “a drawing is a resonant art carrying multiple associations” and the portraits “took up many forms and diverse formats” to the ugly “polymorphic aggregate of different linguistic aspirations” and “prioritising the imperative to bolster.” (There’s a typo of “lezioni” on p266.)

The style, including a confusing mélange of unfamiliar proper names, is scholarly and soporific, turgid and dull. There’s far too much speculation about unidentified artists and subjects, and pointless accounts of rejected interpretations. The obvious descriptions of radiography show, as always, that all artists revised their work before creating the final version. There are scores of tedious repetitions by eleven different authors in the two opening chapters, the small-print, double-column introductions to each section and the catalogue entries. The hundreds of detailed citations, of no interest to most readers, clog the text and should have been placed in endnotes. On page 240, for example, there’s a torture-to-read nine line sentence, with five citations and 20 numbers. One longs for the clarity and eloquence of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark.

The authors often mention but never describe many significant events, including the sack of Rome in 1527 and the Medici victory in the battle of Montemurlo in 1537. They frequently refer to but never quote Bronzino’s poetry. They never explain Michelangelo’s supposed attack on his biographer Giorgio Vasari, a former pupil who worshipped him. This book desperately needs a chronology of the unfamiliar historical background, the progress of the Medicis throughout the century and the leading artists in Florence.

Much more could be said about Bronzino’s Lucrezia Panciatichi, which illuminates the character of the heroine and the meaning of Henry James’ novel The Wings of the Dove (1902). Lucrezia’s cold, melancholy look of almost Byzantine severity is tempered by her luxurious red silk gown with violet undersleeves and white guimpe. Her splendid red hair is parted in the middle and coiled tightly around her head. She has a fine marble forehead, and soft appealing features, and the skin on the long column of her neck is whiter than the pearls that adorn it. A golden chain rests on her breast and carries the inscription Amour dure sans fin, and another chain circles her waist. Her slim fingers extend elegantly along the arm of her chair and spread across the open pages of a devotional book bound in red leather. Bronzino’s portrait is decorative, sharply observed and severely disciplined; and his erect and immobile subject, though magnificently detached, has a cool worldliness. Lucrezia — the wife of a poet, ambassador and patron of Bronzino — was later forced to test her motto when she and her husband were accused of heresy, imprisoned in Florence and compelled to make a public recantation.

This catalogue enhances the reputation of Bronzino and shows how the Medici have survived in his work. As the fifteenth-century architect Leon Battista Alberti observed, portraits bestow eternal life and fame by preserving the image, memory and virtues of the subjects: “Painting contains a divine force which not only makes absent men present, but also makes the dead seem alive. Even after many centuries they are recognised with great pleasure and the painter with great admiration.”

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Painting and the Novel, Modigliani: A Life, Impressionist Quartet and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real