Words Before Art
How useless words are before any work of art! By its nature every art refuses to be translated and interpreted through anything other than itself; art has an inborn, inseparable quality by which it must either express its state alone and in itself or say nothing at all. History can only record the masters and the masterpieces; it cannot convey them to understanding. To sit silent before the picture that Holbein the Younger made of his wife and children is better than reading a biography. Still...
Training and the Basel Years
In genealogy he was more fortunate than in his personal life. His father was one of the famous painters of Augsburg. Hans Holbein learned the rudiments of painting from him, and later from Hans Burgkmair he picked up something of the delicate technique and relief-modeling of the Italians. In 1514 he made four wooden panels for a church altar, now in the Augsburg Gallery, works of mixed elements but admirable for a boy of fifteen (the book's age; with the birth year 1497 he would be seventeen). Two years later he and his brother Ambrosius, also a painter, moved to Basel; perhaps because his father had too much faith in his own style, which was still Gothic, and pressed it too hard in teaching; or perhaps because in Augsburg "cultured" money was not yet plentiful enough to encourage many artists. At any rate, youth and genius are seldom kept at home. In Basel the two brothers found that freedom was a torment. Hans illustrated various books, among them Erasmus's Praise of Folly, painted a few minor pictures, drew a sign design for a schoolmaster, and decorated a table top with the adventures of "Saint Nobody," the imaginary self-sacrificing being who was accused again and again of sins without name and never said a word in his own defense. The skill shown in this work brought him a profitable commission: portraits of the mayor Jakob Meyer and his wife (1517). The fame of these portraits spread everywhere. Jakob Hertenstein called Holbein to Lucerne; there the young artist painted frescoes on the facade and walls of his patron's house and made a fine portrait of Benedikt Hertenstein, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Hans may have gone from Lucerne to Italy, after which the influence of Italian painting is reflected in his work: precision of anatomy, splendid architecture in the backgrounds of his pictures, and the handling of light. When he returned to Basel at twenty-two he set up a workshop of his own and married a widow (1519). The same year his brother died, and in 1524 his father.
Religious Pictures
In the religious pictures that now came from Holbein's hand German realism was merged with Romanesque architectural setting and classical ornament. The realism in Christ in the Tomb, reminiscent of Mantegna, shakes the viewer: a body all skin and bone, eyes terribly open, tousled hair, and a mouth dried half-open in a last struggle for breath. These bring before the mind a natural and unavoidable death, and it is no wonder if Dostoevsky is said to have remarked that this picture could destroy a man's religious faith. About this time Holbein turned to painting the walls of the "Great Council Chamber" in Basel. The council members liked his work, and one of them commissioned him to make an altarpiece for a Carthusian monastery. The result was the Passion of Christ, damaged in the iconoclastic riots of 1529, though two wings survived and were presented to the church at Freiburg im Breisgau. The influence of Baldung Grien shows in these paintings in several ways, but the play of light radiating from the child's face is wholly personal and masterly. In 1522 the town clerk of Basel commissioned a new altarpiece from the painter; for this beautiful and soothing Madonna, now in the museum at Solothurn, Holbein used his wife and son as models. Probably at about this time he made the masterpiece of his religious pictures, the Virgin and Child with the Family of Mayor Meyer, a work that gathers sharp, penetrating feeling together with masterly line, color and composition; and when we remember that at the time it was painted the two sons shown at the mayor's feet, and one of the two women kneeling in prayer at the right, had died, we understand the mayor's prayer to the Virgin with greater sympathy.
But the pay for such religious pictures was small compared with the care and effort they took. Portraiture brought the artist more profit, and the families wanting it grew steadily more numerous.
Portraits and Erasmus
In 1519 Holbein painted the young scholar Bonifacius Amerbach, with a noble face in which idealism shows behind a penetrating look at the material world. About 1522 he made a portrait of the great publisher Froben: a man devoted to his work, with an agitated temperament and a creative talent worn by life.
Through Froben Holbein met Erasmus, and in 1523 he painted two portraits of that melancholy scholar. In the three-quarter view of Erasmus (collection of the Earl of Radnor, at Salisbury), the artist, now at the full strength of his talent, entirely grasped and recorded the spirit of a man who had carried the burden of a long life, whose illness and the weight of Luther had deepened the furrows of his face and the sorrow of his eyes. The profile of Erasmus preserved in the "Basel art collection" shows him calmer and more charming; in this picture what first strikes the eye is the projecting nose, ready to attack like a gladiator's sword; and perhaps the manuscript Erasmus has under his pen is the draft of On Free Will (1524), by writing which Erasmus too placed himself in the camp of Luther's opponents. Probably in 1524 Holbein again made a portrait of Erasmus, now on the wall of the Louvre, counted among his best portraits; seeing that deep, refined face, one recalls the shrewd remark of Desire Nisard, who counted Erasmus among those "whose greatness lay in understanding much and proving little."
About 1523 Holbein painted his own portrait, when he was twenty-six and apparently prosperous; but in fact his cold gaze speaks of a combative hatred of life's adversities. Tradition describes him as somewhat fond of wine and pleasure and unhappy in his married life. Evidently he agreed with Luther in some opinions, for a set of his woodcuts, the Dance of Death (about 1525), was a satire on the clergy; though in that age even the clergy mocked other clergy. In this series we see Death stepping behind every man and woman of every rank: Adam and Eve, the emperor, the nobleman, the physician, the monk, the priest, the pope, the millionaire, the astrologer, the duchess, the jester, the gambler and the thief, all turned toward the Last Judgment. This series was equal in power of line to what Durer had made on the subject. Apart from this masterpiece of design and the Meyer Madonna, Holbein showed no special religious feeling in his works. Perhaps he too was infected with the skeptical philosophy of Erasmus and the humanists of Basel. Holbein was more drawn to anatomy than to theology.
To England
Though Holbein apparently favored the Reformation, the movement ruined his market in Basel. He was no longer commissioned for religious pictures. Payment for the pictures he had made for the "Great Council Chamber" stopped. The wealthy, afraid of the Peasants' War, tightened their social life and purse strings, and found the times very unfavorable for having personal portraits made. Erasmus wrote from Basel in 1526: "Here the arts are freezing." He gave Holbein letters of introduction recommending him to his friends in Antwerp and London; Holbein left his family in Basel and set out north for better fortune. At Antwerp he met Quentin Massys, and no doubt the two wrote to each other about Erasmus. From Antwerp he went to England. Erasmus's letter assured him of a warm welcome from Thomas More, and in fact More lodged Holbein in his house at Chelsea. There Holbein made the portrait of Thomas More (1526), now in the Frick Gallery in New York. To the historian, the passionate, half-sad eyes of that face tell of the steadfastness and self-sacrifice of a martyr, and under the inquiring eye of an artist the miracle of painting appears in the rendering of the fur and the great folds of the sleeve. In 1527 Holbein painted Thomas More and His Family, the earliest known group portrait in secular art beyond the Alps.
The Painter's Own Family
At the end of 1528, having saved a little in pounds and shillings, Holbein returned to Basel, gave a copy of the More family picture to Erasmus, and rejoined his wife. Then he made one of his greatest and most honest works, a portrait of his own family. In this picture, made in perfect realism and without flattery or courtesy, all three members of the family have sad faces: the daughter has bowed her head in submission and seems almost despairing; the son gazes imploringly at his mother; and the mother, with deep sorrow and affection mirrored in her eyes, looks at the two of them, the sorrow of a wife who has lost her husband's love, and the affection of a mother whose children are her only tie to life. Three years after making this masterpiece, which was an accusing document against himself, Holbein left his family again. During this stay in Basel he left another portrait of Froben, and six more portraits of Erasmus, not as penetrating or deep as the works of 1523 and 1524. The city council renewed his commission for the interior frescoes of its hall, but in the same period the triumph of the iconoclasts forced the council to reject and abolish all religious pictures and to declare officially that "God has cursed all who make religious pictures." Commissions were cancelled and in 1532 Holbein returned to England.
Portrait Painter of the English Court
There he made portraits in abundance, and as a result most of the figures who played a part on the stage of English politics in those turbulent years are still alive through the magic of Holbein's brush. In the "Queen's Library" at Windsor Castle there remain eighty-seven line drawings by him in charcoal or chalk, some intended as caricatures, most for likenesses; apparently the painter sat people in front of him, made these sketches, and then made oil likenesses from them. The merchants of the Hanseatic League in London sought his art, though they did not inspire his best works. For the "Hall of the Hanseatic Guild" he painted two murals, one showing the triumph of poverty and the other the triumph of wealth; both are wonders of individual characterization, lively movement and firm drawing. These two works in fact present the trading motto of the League: "Gold is the father of pleasure and the child of prudence; he who lacks it lives in sorrow, and he who has it, in anxiety." Thomas Cromwell, the embodiment of this advice, gave his hard face and soft body to Holbein's brush in 1534. Through that figure our artist reached out his hand to the skirts of the highest men of Henry VIII's court.