Hans Holbein was one of the greatest portraitists of the Northern European Renaissance and one of the greatest German-born painters in the history of art. Holbein enjoyed rewarding personal and professional friendships with some of the boldest of boldfaced names of the 16th century: Desiderius Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and, most famously, King Henry VIII. For an artist of such fame and immense artistic gifts, it is hard to believe that there has never been an exhibit dedicated solely to the work of Holbein in the United States until now, with the Morgan Library & Museum’s “Holbein: Capturing Character” exhibit in New York, on view through May 15.
Hans Holbein the Younger was born into a family of artists in Augsburg, Germany, in 1497. His father, Hans Holbein the Elder, was an established local artist, as were young Hans’s uncle and grandfather. Although there are conflicting reports regarding his early years, it is generally believed that Holbein the Younger trained in his father’s workshop in Augsburg before moving to Basel, Switzerland, where he began to achieve the kind of recognition that would win him vastly more fame and success than his father had ever achieved.
Holbein the Elder was an artist of the late-Gothic period and style, focusing largely on altarpieces and religious works. He did, however, begin to move toward more Renaissance-style humanism in his portraiture, his choices of color, and his depiction of human faces. Holbein the Younger carried his father’s artistic innovations another giant step forward, bringing German and Northern European art fully into the Renaissance, the artistic rebirth that had already begun to revivify painting, sculpture, and architecture in Italy and Southern Europe.
Indeed, it is also believed that after Holbein the Younger left Augsburg he traveled to Northern Italy and likely also to France, exploring the art of early Renaissance Europe, before relocating to Basel in 1517. Basel was an exciting artistic city at this time and is still an important center of world art to this day, with exhibit A of its artistic prominence being the growth and global spread of the Art Basel art fair in modern times. It is thus no coincidence that it was in Basel where Holbein’s career path toward the top of the world of art was set in motion, though Holbein owed much of his success less to the importance of Basel in the 16th century art world and more to his good fortune of having come into contact with the Dutch humanist philosopher and Catholic theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam, who was living in Basel at the time. It is here in Basel that “Holbein: Capturing Character” begins.
Erasmus was one of early modern Europe’s first genuine public intellectuals, renowned for his pioneering religious tolerance and antiwar stances at a time when such views were new. It is estimated that up to 20% of the books that circulated in Europe at that time were authored by Erasmus. Erasmus was not only concerned with the distribution and opinion of his books and ideas but with the distribution and opinion of his physical image as well. Erasmus commissioned the young Holbein to illustrate what would become his greatest book, In Praise of Folly, and also commissioned Holbein to paint his portrait. It is this strikingly small three-quarters portrait that would become the enduring image we still have of Erasmus to this day. In this tiny roundel, or rounded frame, completed in 1532, we see the famed Dutch humanist sitting at ease, wearing the sartorial hallmarks of a wealthy scholar — elegant robes trimmed with light brown and dark black sable furs. Holbein, however, does not give Erasmus the traits of a scholarly superhero but rather those of a very real, aging, middle-aged man — gray hairs on his head and beard, wrinkles on his cheeks and forehead, sagging skin around his chin, and lines underneath his eyes. Holbein likely chose the plain blue background upon which to set his portrait of Erasmus rather than a more complex landscape or interior domestic background in order to make the portrait easier to be copied by the apprentice artists in his Basel workshop. It is hard to know how Erasmus would have reacted to such an unbeautified image of himself, but given his humanism and comfort with irony and satire, we have to imagine that his first inclination likely was not to destroy the portrait in the way that Winston Churchill infamously destroyed the portrait that John Sutherland painted of him in 1954.
Erasmus seems to have enjoyed Holbein’s work, giving Holbein a letter of recommendation when the painter traveled to London. It was through Erasmus that Holbein met his next great patron and the next great outstanding humanist scholar of 16th century Northern European culture: Sir Thomas More. At the time that Holbein met More, More had not yet reached the apogee of his political career, but he was well on his way toward it. More at the time was chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and on the verge of being appointed lord chancellor of England. Holbein’s 1527 oil portrait of More, on display at the Morgan on loan from the nearby Frick Collection, portrays More at the height of his political grandeur. Holbein depicts More as a politician who is in the process of acquiring near-aristocratic, almost royal status — wearing rich, vibrant, black and red velvet robes and a badge dangling from the golden chain draped around his neck. The badge More wears is a golden rendering of the Tudor rose, a symbol of King Henry VIII’s Tudor dynasty, which More would soon be serving as chancellor, the closest adviser to the king.
More would prove to be very loyal to the king, but he was even more loyal to the Catholic Church — a loyalty that precipitated his storied split with the king and eventual execution when he declined to recognize Henry as the head of the new, non-Catholic Anglican church. In contrast to Erasmus’s more relaxed, liberal-looking demeanor, Holbein appropriately depicts More as dour, with a stern, grave expression on his intently focused face — a man of great, occasionally excessive principle with no room for tolerance in his politics. In addition to the highly detailed features of More’s resolute face, such as his pursed lips and salt-and-pepper five o’clock shadow, what is most remarkable about this portrait are More’s sleeves, perhaps the most gushed-over sleeves in the history of Western art. Holbein highlights each fold and crease of the rich red velvet sleeves like the petals of a rose. These justly celebrated sleeves, the soft brown fur around his shoulders, the cascading green drapery behind him, and the natural, lifelike quality with which Holbein endows More combine to make Holbein’s depiction of the great man one of the most iconic portraits ever made, rivaling those of Rembrandt and Velazquez.
While Holbein was receiving commissions from More and other powerful patrons in London, he was supporting his wife and two children in Basel. He did go back to Basel on at least one occasion, spending enough time back on the continent to father two more children, but he ultimately chose to return to England, turning down several lucrative commission offers in Switzerland. He seems to have chosen wisely because, upon his return, he was named official court painter to the king. Holbein now moved from painting humanists to painting aristocrats, wealthy merchants of the Hanseatic League, a group of German merchants who had settled in London, four of Henry’s six wives, and Henry himself.
Holbein’s famous portrait of Henry VIII is not on view here because it is not on view anywhere — in one of the great tragedies in art history, it was destroyed in a fire roughly a hundred years after Holbein completed it and only survives today by virtue of the many copies that had been made of it at the time. Neither is one of Holbein’s other most distinguished paintings, The French Ambassadors (1533), on view at the Morgan, as London’s National Gallery does not lend it out. What is on view here, however, are many more of Holbein’s less recognized but still eminently intriguing portraits, such as A Lady With a Squirrel and a Starling (1526), which the National Gallery did agree to lend out for this exhibit, and the meticulously restored Portrait of Simon George of Cornwall (1535), which shows a young, dandyishly dressed man in profile, as opposed to the more conventional three-quarters form of most portraits, against an azure blue background wearing a feather-capped hat and holding a red carnation, a symbol of love. Little is known about the sitter, but the visual evidence Holbein provides us in the portrait indicates that Simon George was likely a young man from a wealthy merchant family who wished to have an image of himself painted that he could use to send to prospective marriage partners — a 16th century version of a dating profile picture. After having spent so much time and effort painting royals and aristocrats, we can only imagine how relieved Holbein must have been to have been given a chance to paint someone who didn’t have the power to chop off his head if he was dissatisfied with the portrait.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
