hans holbein - the younger

8/3/2019 Hans Holbein - The Younger

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HAROLD 1BRIGHANPRO. Rsm


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HANS HOLBEINTHE YOUNGER


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HANS HOLBEINTHE YOUNGERA CRITICAL MONOGRAPH BYFORD MADOX HUEFFER

CHICAGO NEW YORKRAND, McNALLY & COMPANY


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PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN ATTHE BALLANTYNE PRESSLONDON

HRIGHAM siTY


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LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURESFacing p,HENRY VIII. Chatsworth. Frontispiece

SKETCH FOR PORTRAIT OF MEIER'S WIFE. Basle. 24Photography Braun, Clement 13 Cie., Dornachy Paris, andNew York

HOLBEIN'S PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF [PUTATIVE]. Basle. 32Photograph, Brawn, Clement 13 Cie., Dornach, Paris, and

New YorkTHE DEAD MAN [HEAD ALONE]. Basle. 40

Photograph, Brawn, Clement 13 Cie., Dornach, Paris, andNew York

ST. ANNE WITH THE VIRGIN [DESIGN FOR GLASS].Basle. 42

Photograph, Brawn, Clement & Cie., Dornach, Paris, andNew YorkCHRIST BEARING THE CROSS [LATER PASSION

SERIES]. Basle. 44Photograph, Brawn, Clement 13 Cie., Dornach, Paris, and

New YorkTHE KNEELING KNIGHT [DESIGN FOR GLASS].

Basle. 46Photograph, Brawn, Clement 13 Cie., Dornach, Paris, and

New York5


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LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURESFacing pPORTRAIT OF A MAN [CALLED SIR THOMAS MORE].

Brussels. 56Photography Hanfstaengl

STUDY FOR THE MEIER MADONNA. Basle. 58Photograph, Braun, Clement 5? Cie., Dornach, Paris, and

New YorkTHE MEIER MADONNA. Darmstadt. 60

Photograph, Braun, Clement \3 Cie., Dornach, Paris, andNew fork

BISHOP STOKESLEY OF LONDON. Windsor. 64Photograph, Hanfstaengl

ARCHBISHOP WARHAM. Windsor. 66Photograph, Hanfstaengl

THE GODSALVES. Dresden. 66Photograph, Hanfstaengl

SIR HENRY GUILDFORD. Windsor. 68Photograph, Hanfstaengl

ROBERT CHESEMAN, THE ROYAL FALCONER. TheHague. 68

Photograph, Hanfstaengl

SIR BRIAN TUKE. Munich. 70Photograph, Hanfstaengl

ERASMUS [MINIATURE]. Basle. 70Photograph, Braun, Clement & Cie., Dornach, Paris, and

New York6


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LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURESFacing p.GEORGE GISZE, MERCHANT OF THE STEELYARD.

Berlin. 72Photograph, Braun, Clement i$ Cie., Dornach, Paris, and

New YorkA MERCHANT OF THE STEELYARD. Windsor. 72


JOHN CHAMBERS, THE PHYSICIAN. Vienna. 74Photograph, HanfstaenglHENRY VIII. Windsor. 74


JANE SEYMOUR. Vienna. 76Photograph, Hanfstaengl

ANNE OF CLEVES. The Louvre. 76Photograph, Hanfstaengl

DERICK BORN. Windsor. 76Photograph, Hanfstaengl

CHRISTINA, DUCHESS OF MILAN. The NationalGallery, London. 78

Photograph, Braun, Clement & Cie., Dornach, Parisy andNew YorkROBERT SOUTHWELL. The Uffizi Gallery. 80


THE DUKE OF NORFOLK. Windsor. 80Photograph, Hanfstaengl


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LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURESFacing p.PORTRAITS OF MAN AND WOMAN. Vienna. 82


THE AMBASSADORS. National Gallery, London. 82Photograph, Hanfstaengl

THE SIEUR DE MORETTE. Dresden. 84PORTRAIT STUDY FOR RESKYMER OF CORNWALL.Windsor. 86PORTRAIT STUDY OF THE LADY PARKER. Windsor 86

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DURER and Holbein : Holbein and Durer :the two for most of mankind stand up likelighthouses out of the sea of Germanic

painters that one knows barely by name or that onemay know perhaps fairly well by their works. Thereare Martin Schongauer, Burgkmair, Conrad Vitz,Hans the German, Nicolas the German, the UpperGerman School, the Unknown Masters, and how manymore ?

It is at least convenient roughly to consider inone's mind that the two greater masters are for theGermanic nations the boundary stones between theold world and the modern, between the old faithand the new learning, between empirical, charmingconceptions of an irrational world and the moderntheoretic way of looking at life. Durer stood for thegreat imaginers who went before. He seems to sumup the Minnesingers, the Tristan cycles, the greatfeudal conceptions. Holbein commences the age ofdoubts, of merchants, of individual freedoms, ofbroader ideals, of an opening world and new hopes.Of course the moment one begins to consider thefacts of the case very closely, the differences growless and one sees that the two great peaks are partof one and the same chain. But the differences areconvenient pegs on which to hang one's arguments,and these one may emphasize first. Holbein, forinstance, was a fresco painter. But the fresco painters

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HOLBEINwho went before him were decorative workmen.Their frescoes were either subservient to the archi-tecture (that is to say, they were frankly decorative),or at least they filled in spaces, they aided the architect.For the coming of Holbein it was necessary that archi-tecture itself should disappear. He demanded parallel-ogramsas it were canvases set up before him on whichto paint pictures. Thus the house became a squarebox with as few as possible square windows. So itremains to-day.Holbein, again, painted decorations straight on tohis pictures. That is to say, he painted on his canvas,his panel, or his paper either a frame of Renaissancecherubs and grape vines, or he introduced into hissubject-compositions exotic decorative architecture ofa Renaissance style. In this of course he was a long wayfrom coming first. The Renaissance influence hadcome upon him as a child in his father's studio : thehabit of painting decorative (i.e. not realistic) back-grounds to historic subjects had existed long enoughbefore. Thus in a series of Biblical and historicsubjects Conrad Vitz, a Suabian painter, who died inBasle in the first half of the fifteenth century, paintsthe figures of Abishai, Julius Caesar, or Joachim withan astonishing realism ; they march before flat,gilded, and patterned walls which represent Bethlehem,the battlefield of Pharsalia, or the landscape behindthe Temple of Solomon. That Conrad Vitz did thiswe may put down rather to his lack of ability to paintbattlefields or landscapes than to any decorativeleanings. He simply hung up a cloth behind hisfigures as did the Elizabethan actors who in front oftheir blank wall displayed the legend, " This is thePalace of the Capulets," and left the rest to theimagination of the spectator.Hans Fries, however, a Freiburg painter of the

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HOLBEINgeneration immediately preceding and overlappingthat of Holbein, did actually paint perfectly realisticpictures : he then superimposed right across the topof the landscape-background thin decorations derivedfrom Renaissance vine patterns in brownish red.Through the interstices one sees mountains, trees,figures, and what not. Thus alike from his fatherand from his age Holbein drank in the spirit of theRenaissance in its Germanic form.From his father he inherited a gift far more valuable,a gift that has survived the Renaissance itself, a gift

that leaves Holbein still far enough ahead of the mostmodern of the modernsa gift of keenly observing hisfellow-men, and of rendering them dispassionately.And indeed I am tempted so far to digress from myimmediate line as to interpolate the remark thatmedievalism stands for the love of outdoor nature,whilst the Renaissance revelled in the human form andin natural objects conventionalized. " Convention-alized " means humanized, your decorator taking anacanthus leaf and treating it so arbitrarily that it willfill any space on the inside or the exterior of a humandwelling-house. Holbein, as far as we know, caredcomparatively little for what to-day we call Nature.He was the painter of men and cities, and inasmuch asmodern life is a matter of men and cities, he was thefirst painter of modern life.

His landscapes are very few and not very significant.The one that most immediately occurs to one is thatin the design of Death and the Ploughman in the Danceof Death series. On the other hand, his renderingsof interiors, of implements, of carpets and musicalinstruments are not only innumerable, they areinstinct with that pure love of the objects themselvesthat Diirer gave to his renderings of landscapes.The life which Diirer's art seems to close was an

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HOLBEINout-of-door life, or at least it was a life that was passedoutside of great cities. His lords ride hunting in fullsteel from small castles on ragged and rather Japanese-looking crags ; his Christ upon the Mount of Oliveskneels beside a stunted crag ; his Samson slays the lionin a Rhineland landscape.The flesh of his figures is hardened, dried, andtanned by exposure to the air ; his whole conceptionof the external world was more angular, more as ifin early youth he had got into his mind that feelingof rocks, of broken trees, or of a luxuriant vegetation.When, as in the Melancholia design, he renders imple-ments, tools, shaped stones, and other symbolicobjects, he renders them not because he loves themfor themselves, but because they are parts of hisdesign.

Holbein's lords no longer ride hunting. They areinmates of palaces, their flesh is rounded, their limbsat rest, their eyes sceptical or contemplative. Theyare indoor statesmen ; they deal in intrigues ; theyhave already learnt the meaning of the words, " Thebalance of the Powers," and in consequence they wieldthe sword no longer ; they have become sedentaryrulers. Apart from minute differences of costume,of badges round their necks, or implements whichlie beside them on tablesdifferences which for ushave already lost their significanceHolbein's greatlords are no longer distinguishable from Holbein'sgreat merchants. Indeed the portrait of the Sieur deMorette has until quite lately been universally regardedas that of Gilbert Morett, Henry VIIPs master-jeweller.

Holbein obviously was not responsible for thischange in the spirit of the age ; but it was just becausethese changed circumstances were sympathetic tohim, just because he could so perfectly render them,12


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HOLBEINthat he became the great painter of his time. Diirerwas a mystic, the last fruit of a twilight of the gods.In his portraits the eyes dream, accept, or believein the things they see. Thus his Ulrich Varnbuler,Chancellor of the Empire, a magnificent, fleshy man,gazes into the distance unseeingly, for all the worldlike a poet in the outward form of a brewer's drayman.The eyes in Holbein's portraits of queens are halfclosed, sceptical, challenging, and disbelieving. Theylook at you as if to say : " I do not know exactly whatmanner of man you are, but I am very sure that beinga man you are no hero." This, however, is not acondemnation, but a mere acceptance of the fact that,from Pope to peasant, poor humanity can never bemore than poor humanity.

It is a common belief, and very possibly a very truebelief, that painters in painting figures exaggeratephysical and mental traits so that the sitters assumesome of their own physical peculiarities. (ThusBorrow accuses Benjamin Robert Haydon of paintingall his figures too short in the legs, because Haydon'sown legs were themselves disproportionately small.)One might therefore argue from the eyes of Holbein'spictures that the man himself was a good-humouredsceptic who had seen a great deal of life and tookthings very much as they came. On the other hand,Diirer, according to the same theory, must have beena man who saw beside all visible objects their poeticsignificance, their mystical doubles. But perhapsit is safer to say that the dominant men of Diirer 'sday were really dreamers, whilst those who employedHolbein were essentially sceptics, knowing too muchabout mankind to have many ideals left. For Holbeinflourished and Diirer was already on the wane in thedays of the Humanists and of the New Learning. Andwas it not that bitter, soured, and disappointed Duke

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HOLBEINof Norfolk whom Holbein painted like a survival fromthe olden times, standing up rigid and unbending ina new world that seemed to him a sea of errorswhohad been a great captain, to become later a miserableand trembling Catholic politician in a schismaticcourtwas it not that Duke of Norfolk who first said :" It was merry in England before this New Learningcame in " ?

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II

HANS HOLBEIN the younger, the son, thenephew, and the brother of painters, wasborn in 1497-98 in Augsburg, a town in those

days world-famous, in which there flourished notonly the spirit of commerce, but the spirit of adventureand the spirit of the arts. Its great merchantstravelled, the first idea of the New World acrossthe water having already reached them ; the Fuggerswere there ; Peutinger had been to Italy unnumberedtimes, and it is even recorded that his four-year-olddaughter could make a speech in Latin upon suchstate occasions as when the Emperor visited thecity.There were, moreover, great monastic establish-

ments, great convents, and great churchmen. It was,in fact, Augsburg, a world-city in the modern senseof the term ; not only was it prosperous, but underthe influence of the commerces and the cultures of anewly awakening world, it was growing almost asrapidly as the great modern cities began to grow inthe opening years of the nineteenth century. It wasconstantly visited by the then Emperor Maximilian,who brought with him in his train more men of greatlearning, of great influence, and of great taste. Smallwonder, then, that the plastic arts flourished.They flourished because in the first place there waswhat we call nowadays " a great demand," and inthe second place because the new influence that was

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HOLBEINabroad in the world, the new leaven, a sort of newimpatience, the eternal aliquid novi ex Italia whichexercised and always exercises so potent and so dis-turbing an influence upon the Germanic racesthisgreat new impatience that we call the Renaissancehad set, in Augsburg, all sorts of fingers itching todo great things with the reed-pen of the scholar,the brush of the painter, the style of the engraver.There was in Augsburg a Painters' Zunft, a. sort ofpainters' and glaziers' guild, that had offered to it asmuch work as its members could well compass. Ithad its own Guild Hall in the market-place, where itsmembers could meet, discuss and learn from the newwood-engravings, the new printed books, and all thenew things that came to them so plentifully. Themembers of this guild designed windows, decorationsfor houses, dagger-sheaths, and costumes for pageants.Those of them who were more purely painters paintedsacred pictures, Stations of the Cross, Apotheoses,and scenes from the lives of patron saints of the greatabbeys. When, a little later, the Emperor took up anearly permanent residence in Augsburg, he employednot only most of the Augsburg painters, but manyforeign artists, even Diirer himself, to make historicaland religious designs for him.The father of Holbein was a member of the Zunftand no doubt enjoyed a certain share of the patronagewhich fell upon it. But, if we may hazard inferences,he was not among the most popular of the painters ;he was not employed by the Emperor, though hiscomrade Hans Burgkmair worked along with Diirer.He seems, however, to have had his fair share ofreligious paintings to execute. Thus in St. Catherine'sConvent towards 1509 he painted the Basilica desheiligen Petrus, beside Burgkmair's Basilica des heiligenKreuzes. Nevertheless the few records that we have16


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HOLBEINof his life in the town records in Augsburg point tothe fact that he was in chronic poverty. Thus hewas frequently more than a year in arrears with histown-rates ; he was sued for butcher's meat. Andthe last sad record that we have of him was that hisfurniture was sold at the suit of his brother SigismundHolbein for non-payment of a small debt.

Perhaps we may comfort ourselves with the thoughtthat he was ahead of his time. The few pictures ofhis still extant, such as the St. Sebastian in Munich,show him to have been a painter of no small skilland an observer of the very highest. And the mar-vellous collection of portraits of his comrades andcolleagues in his sketch-book, now in the BerlinNational Gallery, is in no sense inferior to the WindsorCastle series of sketches for portraits of his son. Thereare the same firmness of line, the same perfection ofdrawing, the same intense individuality, the samefree and consummate putting of a head on paper,and an even greater insight into character. One istempted to theorize too far ; but it would seem as ifthe comparatively obscure father had had granted tohim by reason of his misfortunes a greater sympathy, agreater insight, as if by tribulation he became more ofa poet than his son who grew prosperous and had,as was the lot of painters in those days, the citiesand the potentates of the earth contending for hisfavours.

His sympathy for Renaissance decorations appearsto have been a zest as childlike and self-abandonedas that which his son showed in his early years. Andit is probable that this taste rather than much actualskill in painting was all that Holbein the youngerlearned directly of his father. He inherited, however,his father's temperament, to which he added anincomparable skill in painting that was all his own.

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HOLBEINWhen he was seventeen, or eighteen at any rate, heleft his father's house, and eventually reached Basletowards 15 15.1

' He made his wander-year apparently with his elderbrother Ambrosius, himself a painter of no mean order.Of where they went we have no trace, but that theydid not come straight to Basle is apparent enough.For in 15 14 a Domherr of the Minister at Constanceordered from him a Madonna and Child, which,after having lain undiscovered until 1876 in the villageof Rickenbach near Constance, is now in the HolbeinCollection at Basle.This charming and naive little picture shows us

what were the attainments of Holbein when he hadleft his father's studio and had not yet come underthe influences that were then to be felt in Basle. Hepainted it probably in payment for his lodging, orreceived in return a few small coins, just as wanderingorgan repairers, wandering tailors, shoemakers, andtinkers have in Germany, for so many centuries since,kept themselves going from town to town, picked upa knowledge of the world, and learned new secrets oftheir crafts. It shows us a Holbein who was alreadyat seventeen a consummate Renaissance decorator.The little cherubs who climb upon the paintedframe, who blow instruments, who offer votivetablets, the painted frame itself, and the garlands oflaurel leaves which hang down behind the Virgin'shead, these are done with a perfectly sure touch anda wonderfully grasped knowledge of what it is possibleto do with conventionalized babies' figures. Butthe moment the boy came to paint the real baby inits mother's arms he grew timid, uncertain, and whatnowadays we call " amateurish." The head is toolarge, the eyes out of line, and the flesh paintedwith a curious little woolly touch. The conception18


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HOLBEINand pose of the Madonna are, as I have said, naiveand tender, and the feeling of the whole picture isexcellent. It is mostly perhaps in the feet of theChrist-child that we see any foreshadowing of thegreat draughtsman and the great realist that he wassubsequently to become. So equipped, then, didHolbein leave his father's house. He had learnedwhat it is open to most boys of genius to learntheattractive and perhaps flashy conventionalities thatwere available. Possibly his father cared more forthis side of his own influence, and neglected, as manyartists neglect, his own real genius. He may, in fact,never have influenced his son towards Realism, or,on the other hand, his son may not have cared for it.At any rate, as far as we can judge, Holbein maturedmuch more slowly in the direction of the gift for whichto-day we most honour him.

[It must be remembered that biographical detailsregarding Holbein are largely conjectural and morethan largely controversial. It is perfectly possiblethat Holbein did not make, strictly speaking, a " wanderyear " at this time, for there is very good evidence tosupport the idea that his father, and indeed hiswhole family, moved at about this time from Augsburgto Lucerne. Confusion constantly arises at aboutthis time between Holbein the younger and his father.For instance, it is difficult to be certain whether theHans Holbein who became a citizen of Lucerneand a member of the Painters' Guild there, and theHans Holbein who in the same year was fined forbrawling in Lucernewhether that Hans Holbeinwere the elder or the younger. Some theorists holdthat the younger Hans aided his father in the greatSt. Sebastian picture. But there is little evidence,either historic or plastic, to support this. I am,

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HOLBEINhowever, scarcely concerned with the historic factsof Holbein's career. It may be taken as fairly certainthat Holbein the younger did paint this Madonna,and probably at Constancefor it is unlikely that theDomherr Johann von Botzenheim would have sentto Lucerne a commission to a boy of seventeen oreighteen. At any rate we may accept the picture assome sort of evidence of what at that date was Holbein'stechnical ability. We may infer that he had then lefthis father's studio, whether at Lucerne or Augsburg,and that very probably he was on his way to Basle.]

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WE find Holbein next for certain at Basle,where in the year 15 15 Leo X's " Breve adErasmum " appeared in the third edition,published by Johannes Frobenius with a title-pagedesigned by Holbein.The Switzerland that Holbein first knew resembledthe Japan of the day before yesterday. It was justreceiving the new tidethe tide equivalent to that ofthe Japanese Western civilization. Basle itself wasessentially a Germanic town, though by this time onlyofficially a city of the Empire.

Its institutions, its faith, its art, and its literaturewere still generally Gothic or Teutonic. But the othertide which we call the Renaissance had already begunto reach Basle, if not to affect the laws, the institutions,or the people of the city.The tide was, as it were, definitely attracted to herby the artists, and more particularly by the great

printers, who were themselves assuredly great artists.Frobenius and Amerbach were already what we mightcall the official printers of the Humanists. Thegreatest of them all, Erasmus, a man of universalfame, had at that time just left France. He hadappeared at the printing-house of Frobenius, and in15 15 was already sharing with him the house " ZumSessel am Fischmarkt" to which the young Holbeinsmust have gone as designers seeking work.But when Holbein first came to Basle, the New

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HOLBEINLearning was still a thing existing mostly for the letteredclasses, and the new faith, if it had there made progressat all, manifested itself mostly in an uneasy discontentamongst the lowest people.

Holbein's first visit to Basle appears to have been ofquite short duration ; possibly it lasted for a year anda half. The most usual German theory is that, withthe idea of qualifying himself for a member of theBasle Guild " Zum Himmel" he apprenticed himselfto a Basle painter. He then, the theory proceeds,executed various pieces of supervised painting. Sup-posing this to have been the case, he would merely havesupplied colour to designs made or generally indicatedby his master. The extreme German theorists goso far as to identify the master with Hans Herbster,the painter ; this on the strength of the fact that oneof the Holbeins painted a portrait of Herbster in1516.We may accept these theories or not, but the pointis, to what extent, if any, the teaching of this suppositivemaster affected Holbein's technical abilities ? In theBasle Museum there is a series of pictures of the Passionof Christ, which presents one with serious problems ofthought. In the first place there appears to be com-paratively little doubt that the pictures are actuallyby Holbein. Holbein's friend Bonifacius Amerbach inafter years made a careful collection of all the Holbeinpictures and drawings that he could lay his hands on.This collection forms the nucleus of the fine seriesof Holbeins now in the possession of the town ofBasle.

In Amerbach's own catalogue The Last Supper ofthis series is called : Hans Holbeins erster Arbeiten eine,meaning roughly " This is one of H. H.'s first works."A precisely similar note is appended to the entryregarding the picture of the scourging of Christ.22


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HOLBEINThese two works both belonged to Amerbach. TheBasle authorities have since added to them three otherworks, obviously by the same painter, and obviouslyof the same series Christ on the Mount of Olives, TheBetrayal of Christ, and Pilate Washing his Hands.These large, ugly, but very forcible and verydramatic paintings on linen do not fit in very easilyinto the sequence of Holbein's other paintings. Imean that supposing we take the first Virgin and Child(15 14) and the portrait of Amerbach (1519) as definiteand assured landmarks in the progress of Holbein'stechnique, the painter must have made a very seriousdeviation to arrive at the peculiar region of coarsepainting, harsh colour, and abrupt and violent atti-tudes in which there could have existed these concep-tions of a Passion. It is as if he must have been drawnout of his straight course by some peculiar attraction.Dramatic as some of his later designs may have been,not one of them is so violent, or so brutal, as theScourging, not one of them so vividly representsarms in the actual swing of their descent. Thus bothin conception and in execution Holbein would appearto have been under an influence that was not hisfather's, that was not a product of his own evolution.On the strength of Amerbach's notes, then, we mayaccept the Passion series as Holbein's work ; on the

strength of the works themselves we may well believethat in these years he did actually work in the studioof some Basle artist of a considerable personality ofhis own. As far as the paintings themselves areconcerned, we may also actually believe that Holbeinmerely completed the designs of a master who reachedconsiderably further back into the regions of style.

For the Scourging at the Pillar has no exuberantRenaissance decorations of any kind : there are a barebrick wall, a bare pillar, a bare tiled floor, a naked

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HOLBEINfigure. The scourgers are dressed in contemporarycostume ; their breeches are slashed, their shoesenormous, their hair cut after the fashion of Holbein'sown time. There does not in fact appear to have beenany room in this design for the peculiar personalityof Holbein. It is, as it were, a rather barbaric concep-tion that draws its being from an older generation.This Scourging is the first of this series. In thesubsequent pictures Holbein seems gradually to asserthimself. In the Last Suffer the figures of the Saviourand the Apostles may well have been indicated byanother master. But the decorations at the back ofthe table are already once more Renaissance improvisa-tions. There are the bases of marble columns, andan arched door decorated with the inevitable cherubs.It is as if the master had left at the back of his designa blank space which the pupil filled up with fanciesafter his own heart.The fact that these pictures are painted on linenindicates that they were not intended for permanentpreservation. They were probably ordered for someChurch feast in the neighbourhood, and this mayaccount for their slapdash painting.They were in fact journey-work, and it was tojourney-work that Holbein devoted himself duringthese years of his first stay in Basle. He designedtitle-pages, such as that to the " Breve ad Erasmum,"and that to the Basle edition of Sir Thomas More's" Utopia." He painted the tops of tables and thesmall heads of saints to fill in niches in houses. Twoof these last are also in the Amerbach Collectionat Basle. In Amerbach's catalogue they are describedas being next to the Passion pictures " die fruhestenWerke des jilngern Holbein" and these indeed wouldseem to show us the young Holbein getting back intowhat was later so very much his own country. The24


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By permission of Messrs. Braun. Clement


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HOLBEINone, a Head of a Virgin, crowned, naive, and not veryskilfully painted from some model, is much moreactual in conception than any of the Passion pictures,and it is much more within the limits of its painter'scapacity. It is a more personal work. And if theHead of a Saint commonly called St. John the Evan-gelist is somewhat sentimentalized, there is no reasonwhy a boy, painting in piously Catholic times, shouldnot sentimentalize the most mystical of the evangelists.What one would wish to emphasize is the factthat there were three or more definite strains of

influence at work in the pictures of this date. Therewas the extreme violence of The Scourging. Thiswe shall find later again in the series of designs forstained glass, also a Passion series. This violence mayhave been part of Holbein's exuberant youth, or itmay have been part of the inheritance of his agean age which desired to see violent scenes renderedviolently. We see the same sort of brutality of con-ception, tempered, however, by a decorative qualitythat Holbein's early pictures had not, in the works ofthe Augsburg master, Jorg Breu the elder. Thecommon people demanded violent renderings of sacrednarratives : the priests were ready to supply thedemand by commissioning such paintings.Holbein himself, as we shall see later, was neverabove doing his best to supply a demand. He wasmuch more a craftsman in our modern sense of theterm than a self-denying " artist " such as we nowclamour for. His business was to obtain work first,and for this reason he strove to please his customers.That he had any more mystical ideals of the functionsof an artist we have no means of telling.We know, too, that what delighted him was Renais-sance decoration, and this was a plastic delight, a per-sonal taste, rather than an influence from without.

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HOLBEINAnd, deeper down in the boy, at the very heart ofthe rose as it were, there was slumbering the deep,human, untroubled, and tranquil delight in the outwardaspect of humanity, in eyes, in lips, in the form ofhair, in the outlines of the face from ear to chin.This delight in rendering produced the matchlessseries of portraits of his later years which for us to-dayare " Holbein."

Personally I seem to see these strains very clearlyin the work of that date. Thus at the one extremewe may put the Passion pictures of 1515, and at theother the portraits of Jakob Meier and his brideDorothea Kannegiesserand in between them anAdam and Eve, of 15 17. The Passion pictures areviolent ; the heads of saints are timidly idealized, butpainted direct from models. The portraits of theBurgermeister and wife are simply portraits. But theAdam and Eve is, as it were, dramatic portraitureit forms the stepping-stone between the Passion seriesand the portraits. The look upon the face of theEve, as if, having tasted the fruit, she had foundit very bitter, the contorted attitude of the Adam, hiseyes gazing upwards as if cringing before omnipotentwraththese are at once dramatic in the sense ofhaving been invented, and real in the sense ofhaving been observed. One cannot ask more of asubject-pictureexcept that it should be well drawnand painted.

In this sense, too, the Adam and Eve lies betweenthe Meier portraits and the Passion pictures. It isnot so coarsely painted as the big pictures, it is not soflatly " washed in " as the portraits, which latter arepainted as if Holbein were trying to develop forhimself a method of painting portraits in oil whichwas simply the same as that of his first sketches for theportraits themselves.26


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HOLBEINThis method he had certainly learned from his

father, and it is as if he had preserved his precioussecret beneath all the noise and display of his Baslemaster's teaching, or of the demands made upon himby the Basle crowds.

In his portraits his method was the same throughouthis life. He made a silverpoint outline of his sitterput in light washes of colour on the face ; just indi-cated the nature of ornaments ; made pencil notesof furs, orders, or the colour of eyebrows ; and thentook his delicate sketch home with him to work out theoil picture probably from memory.The Meier portraits we may thus regard as beingthe first of the great Holbeins. The sketches and thepaintings themselves may both be seen in the BasleMuseum, and it is interesting to see how Holbeinelaborated the costume of Dorothea, whilst hesimplified the painting of her face. And in theseportraits once more the Renaissance decorations fill inthe picture and complete the composition.

In his latest and greatest portraits Holbein dispensedalmost entirely with these decorations. The figurewas there, and nothing else. And it is a matter forspeculation whether the young Holbein paintedthem to satisfy himself or his customer. He had, asI have said, his customer always very clearly beforehis mind's eye, and even so late in life as on his secondvisit to England he painted the celebrated " display "portrait of George Gisze to show the German mer-chant of the Steelyard what he could do. Thus, nodoubt, we may regard the elaborated painting of FrauMeier's jewelled smock as being in the nature of anattempt to get further orders.

Outside the realm of pure painting, Holbeincertainly did do his best to get further orders. Thuswe may account for the celebrated production called

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HOLBEINHans Bar's Table. Here not only are all manner ofpainted quips and cranks, such as a depiction of that" nobody " who does all the mischief, but variousobjects are supposed to lie on top of the picturesthemselves, so that the beholder may be tricked intopicking them up. The work is not of any particularimportance, but the Schoolmaster*s Signboards of 15 15are naive and rather charming serious attempts atpainting. If they are not as good in their way as theMeier portraits, they arethese two little designsquaint and actual in a high degree : a proof, if anywere needed, that Holbein observed very closely thelife of the people around him. They are like littleHogarths in their bareness, their selection of towels,handwashing fountains, andif one cares to read inthese pictures a storyin their portrayal of the Indus-trious and the Idle Scholar.Thus at the end of his first visit to Basle we may

regard Holbein as having done a certain amount ofjourney-work ; as having come in the capacity of aprinter's workman into connexion with the greatHumanists ; and as remaining most probably a followerof the Old Faith along with the greater portion ofthe population of this city of Basle. He appears tohave returned to Lucerne in 15 16-17, and there, asI have said, either he or his father entered the Guildof Painters, and either he or his father had to pay afine for brawling.

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IV

HEreappears only intermittently until the year1519, when he is once again to be found atBasle, and has by that time become a real

master. Of what happened in the meantime the greathistorians can do little more than conjecture. Weknow that in Lucerne in 15 17 he decorated both theinside and outside of Jakob von Hertenstein's house.It is conjectured that he settled in Altdorf, becausein the background of one of his designs there appearbuildings somewhat resembling those of Altdorf.It is conjectured also that he travelled in Italy, becausethe fagade of the Hertenstein house is copied directfrom Mantegna's Triumph, whilst his Last Supper ofa certainly later but uncertain date is copied almostas directly from Leonardo's. None of these threetheories can be supported by evidence that would bein the least good in a court of law, for Mantegnaengravings were extremely common in Switzerland atthat time ; Leonardo's works were frequently copied,and the copies distributed about the world, whilstAltdorf is near enough to Lucerne for Holbein to havemade a sketching journey so far. On the other hand,the intercourse between Switzerland and Italy wasextremely close ; the Swiss poured down from theirmountains in considerable numbers and very frequently,and Holbein's own patron, Meier, had led Swiss troopsdown into the Lombard plain. Thus Holbein maywithout the least stretch of probability have gone into

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HOLBEINItaly either on his own account or at the desire of somepatron.The extent to which the Swiss preoccupied the minds

of the Italians is proved by the fact that Machiavelli,in writing of the ancient Roman military genius,modelled his accounts of their evolutions on theexploits of the Swiss invaders. On the other hand,the influence of the Italian painters on the Swissand German masters is extremely easy to trace andfrequent of occurrence at this date. The earlierBasle masters, such as that great man Conrad Vitz,were more directly under the influence of the VanEycks, of the Meister von Flemalle, and of the Flemishmasters generally. But such painters as Hans Friesand Jorg Breu the elder in the Samson series to whichI have already referred were very obviously inspiredby Italians.Thus in the Samson series whole motives, figures,and incidents are " lifted " directly from Italian

engravings and nielli. In this they followed the fashionof their age, just as our own Elizabethan sonneteerstranslated directly from Petrarch. And Holbein, incopying Mantegna, was no doubt perfectly justified inhis own mind.He was no doubt perfectly justified too by the customof his age in decorating, as he did, the nouses of histime. He painted sham porticoes, sham steps, shamgarden walls, and an innumerable quantity of shamarchitectural devices, both internal and external,filling up the interstices with pictures of the Seasons,of the Greek divinities, or of dogs and peasants. Wemay nowadays accept Sapor the King of the Persians,or Leaia biting out a tongue : we may accept in fact thepictures. But the sham architecture we must needscall bastard, holding that a wall must look like a wallof honest brick if it be made of brick ; or stone, not3


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HOLBEINmarble, if it be made of stone ; or wood if it be wood.The artist in fact has to respect his materials and mustconsider that a painted pillar, however much it maylook like a pillar, is an unspeakable sin.

Holbein took the world as he found it, did what hewas asked to do, and did it a great deal better thananyone else, and to condemn him would be as unprofit-able and as unjust as to abuse Sir Thomas More formaking it his proudest boast, for having it inscribed onhis tomb, to flaunt in the face of all posterity, that hewas hcereticis molestus.Taking it, then, for granted that Holbein, with the

innocence of a child doing what it sees others do, tookpart in a movement that was to lead architectureeventually down into the unsoundable Avernus thatit has at present reached, we may concede to thecartoons for these fresco-designs merits which on thestrength of their achievements alone would placeHolbein among the great masters. Their compositionis forcible, the line is flowing, the drawing of figuresnearly always exactly observed and vigorously rendered,whilst they are still conventional enough to be verylargely decorative. It is while he was in the full floodof producing these and similar designs for coloured glassthat we take him up once more in the city of Basle.Going back there he must have found the state of

affairs in externals very similar to that of the Baslehe had left. Only the shadows of the approachingchanges were deepening. He found his brotherAmbrosius still at work designing initials and title-pages for the printers, or designing dagger-sheathsand gold bands for goldsmiths. One of these gold-smiths, George Schweiger, himself, like the youngHolbein, from Augsburg, had been Ambrosius' sponsorinto the Guild which included painters, surgeons, andbarbers, " Zum Himmel"

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HOLBEINHis portrait by Ambrosius has in its way merits

as great as those in any of the earlier portraits ofHolbein himself ; that is to say, that what it lacksin depth of painting it makes up in a sort of flatdecorative look and in a poetic rendering that suggeststhe influence of Durer. But on the whole we knowvery little of either the career or the talents of Holbein'selder brother. There is another small painting inthe Basle Museum which suggests the influence ofDurer. This is called Christus als FurbitterChristinterceding before God the Father. In this not verywell composed design the figure of the Saviour iscopied directly from the title-page of Diirer's GreaterPassion, whilst the ring of angels above the head ofthe Christ appears to have been suggested by the littleDurer drawing called A Dance of Monkeys whichformed part of the Amerbach Collection, and is nowin the Basle Museum. If this be the case Ambrosiusmust have lived till 1523.

Ambrosius, and no doubt Holbein himself, belongedto a little group of Suabians of whom there were thena considerable number in Basle itself. They weremostly artists who were attracted thither by the workoffered. The books decorated with woodcuts andinitials, for which Basle was so celebrated, wereexposed for sale in great quantities in the yearly markets.And it should be remembered that Amerbach theprinter was himself a Suabian. If we take into accountthe fact that the most intimate Basle friend of Holbeinwas Bonifacius Amerbach, the son of the printer, wemay conjecture that it was to Amerbach the Suabian,rather than to Frobenius, that the two Holbeins firstapplied in coming to Basle. At any rate, through oneor the other printer, Holbein came under the noticeof the great Erasmus and under the influence of theHumanists. He was admitted to the " Zunft zum32


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HOLBEINHitnmel" in September 1519, and in July 1520 hebecame a citizen of Basle in order to qualify himselffor practising there as a master. And probably atabout the same date and for the same reasons hemarried a widow with two children.He was then aged twenty-three. Some doubtshave been thrown upon the portrait of himself, achalk drawing of about this date, which is at presentNo. 66 in the catalogue of the Basle Museum. Itdescends from the Amerbach Collection. The inscrip-tion at present underneath it runs : " Imago Pict.celeberr. Johann Holbein, ejusdemque opus" But thisinscription is of later date. The objection taken tothe picture is that the note in Amerbach's cataloguemay be taken to mean " a likeness " either " of " or" by " Holbein, the German word von having bothmeanings. Tradition, however, translates the von " of,"and tradition is frequently of enough weight to senddown an equal balance.The likeness, which is a masterly piece of pastelwork, is so like the mental image of the man that oneforms from his works, that one may accept it as aportrait and retain it privately in one's mind as animage. It is the head of a reliable and good-humouredyouth, heavy-shouldered, with a massive neck and anerected round headthe head of a man ready to doany work that might come in his way with a calm self-reliance. The expression is entirely different fromthat in, say, Durer's portrait of himself ; from thenervous, intent glare and the somewhat self-consciousstrained gaze. Holbein neither wrote about his artnor about his religionnor, alas ! did he sign and dateevery piece of paper that left his hand. He was nota man with a mission, but a man ready to do a day'swork. And the intent expression of his eyes, whichcalmly survey the world, suggests nothing so much as

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HOLBEINthat of a thoroughly efficient fieldsman in a game ofcricket who misses no motion of the game that passesbeneath his eyes, because at any moment the ball maycome in his direction.

Diirer signed each of his works, because a friend inearly life suggested that in that way he should followthe example of Apelles. He added to his drawingsinscriptions such as : " This is the way knights werearmed at this time," or " This is the dress ladies worein Nuremberg in going to a ball in 15 10," as if he wereanxious to add another personal note to that whichthe drawings themselves should carry down to posterityas if he were anxious to make his voice heard as well asthe work of his hands seen. Holbein once in paintinga portrait of one of his supposed mistresses impliesthat he himself was Apelles. He calls her LaisCorintbiaca, and Lai's of Corinth was the mistress ofthe great Greek painter. But he scarcely ever addednotes to his designs, and he never seems to have troubledabout his personality at all.The eyes of his own portrait are those of a good-humoured sceptic, the eyes of Diirer those of a fanatic.Diirer attempted to amend by his drawings the lifeof his day ; Holbein was contented with renderinglife as he saw it. Diirer, after having plunged intothe waters of the Renaissance, abandoned them self-consciouslybecause it was not right for a Christianman to portray heathen gods and goddesses. Holbein,if he gradually dropped Renaissance decorations outof his portraits, did it on purely aesthetic grounds.He continued to the end of his life to make Renaissancedesigns for goldsmiths, for printers, for architects, orfor furniture makers. Diirer identified himself pas-sionately with Luther, in whom he found an emotionalteacher after his own heart. Holbein, in one and thesame year, painted the Meier Madonna and designed34


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HOLBEINheadpieces for Lutheran pamphlets so violent andscurrilous that the Basle Town Council, itself morethan half-Lutheran, forbade their sale.

Holbein probably was endowed with the savinggrace of humour. It is suggestive to find these twogreat artists as it were entangling their arts, meetingfor a moment, and parting. Holbein, to while awaysome winter evenings in 1515, made a number ofrough pen-drawings commenting upon rather thanillustrating Erasmus' " Praise of Folly." Thesedrawings were made in the margin of the book itself.Durer had made a number of similar drawings in themargin of a copy of the New Testament. Thesedrawings of Durer's present striking resemblances tothe others of Holbein's. Thus Durer's Folly in capand bells might well have formed the model forHolbein's Folly leaves her pulpit. And one of Holbein'ssketches of a stag bounding through a wood appearsto have been actually copied from Durer's NewTestament. Now Durer was in Basle in 15 15. Thusthese two great men appear to touch hands for a secondand, significantly enough, the one under the bannerof the Lutherans, the other of the Humanists. Theselittle drawings make Holbein, in 15 15, touch handstoo with the third very great man of his time.The figure of Erasmus dominates of course thoseof all other associates of Holbein in the Swiss city ofearly days. His doctrine of gentleness and his humour,that extremists reasonably enough found trying, ulti-mately caused him to leave Basle. That city indeedresembled a hornet's nest by the year 1529, and hissharp and sardonic tongue had rendered him unpopular,as all observers must be unpopular amongst men ofaction. He hit off salient points too sharply ; aquiet man, he resented the violent outcries of theLutherans who ultimately became dominant in Basle.

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HOLBEINHe called, indeed, these outcries " tragedies," usingthe word in no complimentary sense, and, upon theoccasion of the marriage of CEcolampadius theReformer, he let fall the remark that " Lutherantragedy always ends happily in weddings." Neverthe-less it must have been an age that we may well envyan age in which gentle irony, or irony of any kind,could make a man world-famous. For that was thefate of Erasmus. And, if Basle ultimately became toohot to hold him, it speaks nevertheless for the tolera-tion of the Reformers that he should have been ableto remain for so long amongst them, just as it speaksfor the toleration of the upholders of the old faiththat he should have been able with impunity to refuseat the end of his life a cardinal's hat.

His tongue appears to have spared no manand,indeed, the earliest trace that we find of his associationwith Holbein is his little note against the drawing of agross and fleshly character portrayed in the marginof the " Praise of Folly." Holbein had " labelled "another character " Erasmus " : Erasmus set againstthe figure of a drunken boon companion the nameof Holbein. I do not know that we need accept thefact as registering authentically the painter's drunkenhabits. In those days, when sages assailed each otherwith epithets of the most vile during learned quarrelsof the most trivial dimensions, the mere hinting thata man was not extravagantly ascetic was little morethan a friendly pat on the shoulder. We may indeedregard it as gratifying to those of us who are interestedfor Holbein that so immeasurably great a man as wasthe Erasmus of those days should, in that familiarvein of tu quoque, have acknowledged companionablythe existence of a boy of eighteen who had made roughscrawls of genius in the margin of a book.

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HOLBEINsuch subjects as to what degree did Holbein owe hisclassical education to his friendship with the authorof the "Encomium Moriae." Indeed we have novery valid evidence that any close friendship existedbetween the two men at this early date, and one's apriori ideas would seem to deny the probability.Later, of course, Holbein made several portraits ofErasmusportraits of which that great man approvedto the extent of sending them to friends by whom hewished to be remembered. But, for the rest, we mustimagine that, in early days at all events, Holbein pickedup merely such rule-of-thumb acquaintance withclassical legends as must have been easily attainable inevery alehouse and painters' guild of the Basle of thatday. And, as far as his personal character is concerned,we may regard it as being satisfactory testimony thathis friends, whatever the degree of their intimacy,remained friendly enough to patronize himsince theHumanist Erasmus who gibed at him in 1 5 1 5 sufferedhimself to be painted until 1529, and the earnest andCatholic Burgomaster Jakob Meier who went to theboy for a portrait, commissioned, a decade or so later,the great Meier Madonna from a master whose ortho-doxy must, by that time, have been rather less thansuspect.

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V

THE years from 15 19, when Holbein returnedto Basle, until 1526, when he first came tothis country, must have formed a period offairly steady and uninterrupted work. During thattime he produced the following works which, for thesake of clearness of reference, I tabulate :

PaintingsPortrait of Bonifactus Amerbach, 15 19.The Last Supper.The Freiburg Altarpiece (only wings remain).The Basle Museum Altarpiece (Passion series).Designsfor organ- case.Diptych : Mater Dolorosa and Christ the Man

of Sorrows.The Dead Man, 1521.Two Saints (SS. George and Ursula), 1522.The Zetter Madonna of Solothurn, 1522.Portrait of Erasmus, 1523.Venus \ sLais Corinthiaca J >

w TP TT vTThe [putative] Portrait of himself. Coloured chalks.(Circa 1520-21.)Various studies and drawings in the Basle Museum,many designs for stained glass, and the designs for

wood-engravings, like the Table of Cebes (1522), the38


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HOLBEINDance of Death series, an enormous number of initialletters, and the Dance ofDeath alphabet. And, amongworks of his which we know to have disappeared, therewas, to mention one alone, the decoration of the BasleRath-haus which occupied him for a considerableportion of the year 1521.

*Jf ?? *f? "JP ^

If Holbein had deliberately set himself to prove,in some one piece of painting, that he returned toBasle a master of portraiture, he could have offered tothe citizens no better a proof than the portrait ofBonifapus Amerbach : and for its sweetness andcharm the little picture might say to Holbein himself,Ne excedas ! It may well have been his first paintingon his return, for it is dated a.m.d.xix. prid. eid. oct.14th October. His reception into the " Zunft zumHimmel " had taken place on the 25th September.It offers, in its painting, more than any other fact ofwhich we can get hold nowadays, an inducement tobelieve that Holbein had travelled, during the intervalof his absence, in Italy, the land of friendly and brilliantcolour.

I know of no more just epithets to apply to the blues,the reds, the whites, and the chestnuts of what is asmall gem. If it have not the cherry red and the greenof Botticelli, it has a gaiety in its scheme of contrasts,an, as it were, diaphanous effect of atmosphere, thatneither Mantegna nor Da Vinci could much havebettered in the direction of light-heartedness. Such asentence is perhaps gratuitous, but one is temptedto the utterance. For, when you compare the Meierportraits and this one, you are at once sensible that theHolbein who painted Amerbach has taken an immensestride in the direction of confidence. The Meierheads are still flattish in effect : indeed the oil paintings

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HOLBEINare, as I have said, flatter even than the tinted sketches,as if the painter were a little afraid of his medium andwere working within a convention, or a limit ofhis powers that he had perhaps learned from hisfather. But there is an end of that in the portrait ofAmerbach.

I must leave it to the reader's preference to decidewhat exactly was the " eye-opener "to use a vulgarword that is precisely justHolbein had receivedin the interval. I do not myself see any particularevidence of the influences of Mantegna and Da Vinci :but, all the same, the sight, say, of the Last Supper mayhave " given him furiously to think." It may, I mean,have given him a shock that would prove a very definiteimpulse towards working out his own salvation, ifnot necessarily in terms of imitation of its painter.Hard work, the sight of new skies, and a newatmosphere, the influence of foreign masters, or themere desire to do his very best in a kind of " diploma "workwhatever it was that made this little work soluminous, made it also a touching record of a friendshipwith a very charming man. Perhaps, indeed, it wassimply the glow of the friendship that communicateditself to the painting. This is not mere rhapsody :for the picture, if we did not know it to be the portraitof an intimate friend, would self-reveal itself as such.As a rule, Holbein cannot be called one of those painterswho can claim to have painted the " soul " of hissitters. For there are some painters who make thatclaim : there are many who have it made for them.The claim is, on the face of it, rendered absurd by theuse of the word " soul." One may replace it by thephrase " dramatic generalization," when it becomesmore comprehensible. What it meansto use aliterary generalization of some loosenessis thatthe painter is one accustomed to live with his subject40


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HOLBEINfor a time long enough to let him select a characteristicexpression ; one which, as far as his selection can bejustified, shall be the characteristic, the dominantnote, the " moral " of his sitter. The portrait thusbecomes, in terms of the painter's abilities, an emblemof sweetness, of regret, of ambition, of what you will.The sitter is caught, as it were, in a moment ofaction.

Holbein hardly seems to have belonged to this class.He appears to have said to his sitter as a rule : " Sitstill for a moment : think of something that interestsyou." He marked the lines of the face, the colour ofthe hair, a detail of the ornamentand the thing wasdone. It was done, that is to say, as far as the observa-tion went.

If he wished to " generalize " about his subject, hedid it with some material attribute, giving to LaisCorinthiaca coins and an open palm, to George Giszethe attributes of a merchant of the Steelyard. I amnot prepared to say whether the method of Holbeinor that of the painters of souls is the more to be com-mended, but I am ready to lay it down that, in thegreat range of his portraits, Holbein, as a painter ofwhat he could see with the eye of the flesh, waswithout any superior. Occasionally, as in the por-traits of Erasmus in the Louvre, he passed over intothe other camp and, without sacrificing any of hismarvellous power of rendering what he saw, added atouch of dramatic generalization, or of action. This wasgenerally a product of some intimacy with the sitter.And it is perhaps this that makes the portrait ofAmerbach so charming. It is as if Holbein had had,not the one sitting that was all so many of his latersubjects afforded him, but many days of observationwhen his friend was unaware that he was under theprofessional eye.

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HOLBEINIn the course of a summer walk along the flowery

meadows of the Rhine near Klein Baselas the Germanhypothetic biographers are so fond of writingperhapsHolbein glanced aside at his companion. Amerbach'seye had, maybe, caught the up-springing of some lark,and the sight suspended for a moment some wise,witty, slightly sardonic, and pleasantly erudite remark.Between the pause and the speech Holbein lookedand the thing was done.

Hypothesis or not, that is the general suggestionthat the portrait makes, and its actuality, its accidentaldramatic effect, lifts it up, just a little, above muchwork that he did after. That and the magnificentpower of rendering that he had, lifted him above anylevel that he would have attained as a painter of" subject " pictures. For in the best of his subjectpictures he showed a magnificent invention such asis characteristic enough of his race : in his finestportraits he showed an artistic insightan imaginationsuch as I am tempted to say has been given to noGerman before or since.

It shows itself next, most strongly, in the Dead Manof two years later (15 21). As painting and drawing,this must remain one of Holbein's most masterlyworks. It is practically his sole important renderingof the nude, which otherwise seems little to haveattracted him. But, carefully drawn and observed,dramatically lighted and rendered, it remains a per-manent testimony to the fact that Holbein couldobserve and render anything. If he only very occa-sionally rendered the nude figure, it was because onlyvery occasionally he had the opportunityjust as,though he seldom rendered animals, his little drawingsof bats and lambs in the Basle Museum prove whatmasterly renderings of animals he was capable of ;and just as the drawing of Lanzknechts fighting42


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HOLBEINwhich assuredly is one of Holbein's most wonderfulconceptionsor the design for the decoration in theBasle Town Hall, Samuel declaring the anger of the Lordto Saul, proves that he could observe what to-day wecall " men of action " and render them realistically ordecoratively.The Dead Man is a frank piece of realism. Theagonized, open mouth and the opened eyes add some-thing to the horror of the visual conception, but theyare all that Holbein added for the purpose of drama-tization, and one may doubt to what extent they servethat purpose. Otherwise it is just a dead man. Its" literary " genesis and what it " means " remainmysteries. No doubt Holbein meant that eachbeholder should interpret it for himself ; each beholdermust, at least, so interpret it. The inscription on therock and the pierced side rudimentarily convert thisdead man into a counterfeit presentment of the Manwho died that death might cease. Nevertheless itremains open to us to doubt whether these attribu-tions were more than an afterthought.The subject of Death was one that very much pre-occupied Holbein and his world. There were then,as it were, so many fewer half-way houses to the grave :prolonged illnesses, states of suspended animation,precarious existences in draught-proof environmentor what one will, were then unknown. You were alive :or you were dead ; you were very instinct with life :the arrow struck you, the scythe mowed you down.Thus Death and Life became abstractions that wereomnipresent, and, the attributes of Death being themore palpable, Death rather than Life was thepreoccupation of the living.

In his most widely known designs Holbein, choosingthe line of least resistance, shows us this abstractionwith its attributes. Employing little imagination of

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HOLBEINhis own, he has lavished a felicitous and facile inventionalong with a splendid power of draughtsmanshipupon an idea that could be picked up from the wallsof almost every ale-house of his time. In the DeadMan, however, he takes a higher flight, showing us,not a comparatively commonplace abstraction, butnothing less than man, dead. It is the picture of thehuman entity at its last stage as an individual : thenext step must inevitably be its resolution intothose elements which can only again be broughttogether at the beginning of the next stage. It isthe one step furtherthe painting of the inscriptionupon the rock and of the wound in the sidethatidentifies this man, dead, and trembling on the vergeof dissolution, with that Man, dead, who died thatmankind might go its one stage further towards aneternity of joy and praise. And, by thus turninga dead man into the Dead Man, Holbein performs, inthe realm of literary ideas, a very tremendous factwith a very small exertionfor it is impossible toimagine a human being who will not be brought toa standstill and made to think some sort of thoughtsbefore what is, after all, a masterpiece of pure art. Itwas that, perhaps, that Holbein had in his mind.

It may well be that he had nothing of the sort, andthat having, as it were, exhausted, in the search fordramatic and melodramatic renderings of episodesin the life of Christ, every kind of violence that hecould conceive of, he here comes out at the other endof the wood andjust as the Greeks ended theirtragedies, not in a catastrophe, but upon a calm toneof one kind or anotherso Holbein crowns his versionof the earthly career of the Saviour with an unelaboratedkeystone. Or it may have been merely a product ofhis spirit of revolt. He may have been tired of sup-plying series after series of Passion pictures meant44


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HOLBEINto satisfy the hunger of his time for strong meat inreligious portrayals.

It was this appetite that caused the existence of thenumber of works in the Basle Museumworks whichmust make one a little regret that the Holbein whopainted the portrait of Amerbach and the Dead Manhad not a greater leisure, since, vigorous and splendidas so many of these conceptions are, they are yetupon a plane appreciably lower, whether we regardthem as products of art or as " readings of Life," touse a cant phrase. In its present disastrously restoredstate it is difficult to regard, say, the early Last Sufferas other than a rather uninspired piece of journey-work. Without the early Passion series on linen onewould feel inclined to say that it was of doubtfulascription. It is interesting because it is one more ofHolbein's designs that has been " lifted " from anItalian master, and because it shows Holbein pursuinga sort of pictorial realism to supply the craving forstrong meat that I have mentioned. But in thedemand for designs for coloured glass he found arefuge which tided him over dangerous years. Itcalled forth, too, qualities which, if they were notamongst his very greatest, were yet sufficient to placehim among the rare band of very great decorativeartists. It is impossible to stand, in Basle Museum,before the series of designsof Madonnas ; of St.Anne with the Virgin and the infant 'Jesus ; of thecharming little, short-legged St. Katharine with theimmense sword ; of scenes from the life of Christ ;of armorial bearings for a family or for a city ; or ofdrawings that, apparently, were made in speculationto form part of the glass-worker's " stock " designsit is impossible to consider this immense outpouringof facile and wonderful work without saying that herewas a great and vivid personality, carrying on, side by

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HOLBEINside, within himself two opposed but overpoweringstrains of artistic tendencyand carrying them to-gether to ends so high that at the last they seem hardlyto conflict.

In his later portrait work he attained to a regionmore serene and more valuable : but then he trodupon ground less dangerous. Speaking from theoutside and in the language of such abstract principlesas we have, we might say that to introduce realisticparts into decorative designs was to commit theunspeakable sin against first principles. Yet almostevery drawing of the Passion Series has a decorative" look " of its own. It is, firstly, a thing pleasant forthe eye to rest onwhich is the final end of decoration,however attained. It is only secondarily that onebecomes aware that each drawing is an even violentportrayal of scenes in the life of a man, despised,rejected, and given up to the brutalities of a mobwhose vilenesses Holbein no doubt had ample meansof observing in the streets around. But, as I havesaid, the men brandishing whips, the men shakingfists, shouting, and pulling their faces into grimacesof vomiting disgusteven the naked figure at the pillar,the blindfold figure with its bound hands, and thethorn-crowned man staggering beneath the heavycrossall these observed and rendered actualities arethe secondary matter : the design in its entirety isthe thing.How, exactly, it is done is easy enough to say ; theRenaissance architecture dwarfs the figures, sub-ordinates them, brings them into place and gives " thelook " to the design. But how the conception couldhave come into the master's head is not so easy todiscovernor yet to say how great a master it was thatcould subordinate so magnificent a power of actualobservation and realistic renderinga thing that46


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By petmission of Messrs. Broun, Clement.


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HOLBEINweaker men of the one sort would have ridden to deathto a power so great of conceiving decorative sur-roundings, a power that weaker men of the other sortwould have ridden to a death even worse. Yet Holbeinkept his teams wonderfully in hand, and the grotesquepeasants of the Holdermeier Arms or the men in theboat of the Arms of the City of Basle are no less partsof an harmonious and beautiful design than are, say,the intrinsically " pretty " Virgin and child of thewoodcut Patron Saints of the City of Freiburg. It isonly very occasionally, as in the Nailing on the Cross,that a figurein this case that of the Christeverseems to " stick out " of the design. It does thisprobably because of a certain crudeness of realization,just as, in the direction of prettiness, the charminglittle figure of St. Katharine or the charming littlegroup of St. Anne and the Virgin " stick out " oftheir respective designs. Nevertheless, none of thesedrawings are " realistic " in the sense that the drawingsof the bat, or the Lanzknechts, are actual. They have,very admirably, an effect of being drawn, as it were,from highly " realistic " bas-reliefs ; the wash-drawingsgiving robes and even faces a sort of general look ofbeing carved in marble. And this, also, gives them atouch of aloofness ; it renders them convincinglydecorative.How admirably these designs were suited to theirpurpose anyone may see who will take the troubleto visit the church of St. Theodore in Klein Basel,where the Kniender Ritter designoddly enoughwithout the Ritteris carried out in coloured glass.This absence of the design's particular Hamlet, thededicator, gives one a certain amount of matter forthought. For, admirable as the designs are, they showhow once more, in the realm of decorative art, Holbeinstood at the parting of the ways and initiated practices

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HOLBEINthat, if they were saved from viciousness by his owntranscendant genius, yet pointed the way downwardstowards a slough of despond that we have not yet cometo the other side of.

For, just as in frescoing houses Holbein placedhimself above the architect, so, in the matter ofstained glass, he divorced himself from the glass-maker. The earlier designers had been the actualmakers of the glass, and, later, they had at leastworked in the shadow of the church that they intendedto decorate. Their designs were made for thatchurch and for a definite window in that church.Holbein made merely " stock " designs that any glass-maker might buy and set up in any building. Thushis shields on designs for armorial windows were leftbareand thus the Stifter of the Ritter design was justa dummy figure that might be put in or left out.

It is no doubt the case that the mediaeval guildsystem, which in the time of Holbein had reachedits sternest developments, was largely responsible forthis. No one, save members of the glaziers' guild,might meddle with stained glass, and thus the designerbecame of necessity alienated. The same was true ofwood-engraving in an almost more lamentable degree,and we have bitter reasons to regret that the Holbeinwho made many and excellent designs for wood-engravings did not himself cut the blocks, so that itis only occasionally, as when an engraver of geniuslike the mysterious Liitzelberger was set to cutpart of the designs for the Dance of Deathit is onlythus occasionally that we can see what wood-engravingsafter Holbein's designs might have been. Exceptaccidentally we cannot, of course, see the designsthemselvesbut from the results we can judge thatHolbein the designer, either by study or by nativegenius, had mastered the essentials of such design and48


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HOLBEINknew just what a good wood-engraver could do, andjust what his limitations must be. And, of course, wemay shudder to think what we should have lost hadLiitzelberger never existed.

I will return to the subject of wood-engravingswhen, later, I treat of the Dance of Death series, thepublication of which was by accident deferred for adecade or so. I have found it convenient to mentionthe designs for coloured glass, which must haveoccupied at least the odd moments of many years.And it is not very easy to place them with any chrono-logical exactness or to let them fall into place in betweenthe oil paintings as if they were the palings of a fencebetween the heavier uprights. Indeed chronology isa thing of no great avail to anyone dealing with thework of Holbein in these particular years of his career.It is far easier to divide his works up into compart-ments according to their " look." In that way we getthe portrait of Amerbach (1519) and the Dead Man(1521) as the supporting parts of the fence. Withouttroubling too much as to their relative sizes or valueswe may class the Freiburg Altarpiece and the BasleAltarpiece, the Diptych, Mater Dolorosa, and Man ofborrows, and the designs for the organ-case of BasleMinster as being, along with the designs for colouredglass, the rails that make up the fence. Furtheralong the r0ad to 1526 the fence is supported by theLetter Madonna, the portrait of Erasmus of ic 2


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HOLBEINform of a good reproduction, it is difficult to get anyreal pleasure from it. In such a reproduction therestand out at once the remarkable vividness of therealization and the skilful way in which, compositionblending into composition, unity and balance aresecured for the whole work. The figure of the Christon the Mount of Olives seems to lead the eye naturallyto the Judas, who delivers his kiss in the centre of acrowd, beneath the shadow of lances and pikes ; thearmed crowd passes again, as if it were part of the sameprocession, into the crowd, still armed and toppedwith pikes and lances, before Pilate's seat ; and thisonce more melts into the comparative solitude of thescourging. Almost precisely the same effect is carriedout in the designs of the lower panels.No doubt the exigencies of shape in the altarpieceaccount considerably for the line of these designs.The central picture of the Freiburg Altarpiece ismissing, so that we have no means of judging whetherin this work too Holbein followed out the same plan,but the tilted moon of the Nativity and its lighting,that proceeds apparently from the new-born child,prove how inveterately and how skilfully Holbeintempered the realism of his designs for the sake ofdecorative effect : the broken arches of the palaceprove, in their case, how he modified his decorativeconventions to some extent in order to suit his" literary " subject.

Paintings of such subjects must inevitably havebeen very much what musicians would call variationsupon a given theme. The essential pointthe themewas the mother and child ; the rest was free fantasia,and it was hardly practicable for any artist to attemptto drive out of the spectator's mind all other renderings.That, in a " subject picture," is what the painter asa rule seeks to do. But there are too many Nativities,5


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HOLBEINso that the artist was driven to desire that the beholdershould exclaim, not "How true ! " but " How beauti-ful ! " We have ample reason to believe that Holbein'sidea of the beautiful was, at that date, a pricelesslyornamented Renaissance temple or palace: thus, inthis Nativity, he welds together subject and beauty,producing the picture of a child born in a manger thathas been set up in a ruined palace. And we may wellexclaim : " How beautiful ! "We may equally well exclaim " How true ! " beforethe little diptych (No. 13 of the Basle Museum),Christ the Man of Sorrows and Mater Dolorosa, twosmall paintings in shades of brown which have de-scended to the city of Basle from the collection ofAmerbach. Here there is no attempt made to recon-

cile the two currents. The Man of Sorrows is evenmore forcibly set there than is the Dead Man, and it isas if in his vaster frame there had been more room foragony. We may, if we like, go out of our way toanalyse the literary side of the picture ; but whetherwe evolve the theory that this is Christ in the hallsof Pilate before or after the scourging, or whetherwe regard the columns and arches as merely creationsof Holbein's fancy to fill up the background and accountfor the glancing lightin whatever way we satisfyourselves as to these details of small importance, thisfigure of the man must remain for us the one readingthat we can carry about with us of that one side ofone incident of a tremendous legend. Holbein does,when he addresses himself to it, drive home almostmore than any other preacher the fact of the humanityof Christ. It is with him a man who suffers, not anamiable and distant divinity whose physical ills wemay neglect to the pleasing sound of church hymns.A busy man, Holbein was under the necessity ofworking quickly, and being neither a mystic nor a

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HOLBEINsentimentalist, he struck swift and sure notes. Therewas in him very little of what Schopenhauer callsChristo-Germanische Dummheit ; he came before itand before the date of angels who are conceived aslong-haired, winged creatures in immaculate gownsbefore the date of prettification, in fact. But, beinga busy man, he was naturally unequal in his work,so that the figure of the Mater Dolorosa is neither soarresting nor so convincing as that of her son ; andtwo such figures as the SS. George and Ursula ofCarlsruhe, having been rather terribly overpainted,are hardly even interesting as conceptions, though theface and upper part of the body of the Ursula have acertain, almost mediaeval charm. The curious obtru-sion of the hips and bend of the knees suggest theattitudes of the ladies in Holbein's design for costumes,and would seem to prove that even so great a masterhad, at times, to let his taste be perverted so as tofollow a fashion of the day or year. I mean that thecitizens' wives of Basle, walking all round Holbeinwith a curious, distorted gait, seem, in this instanceat least, to have persuaded him that this was an idealattitude for the human form. It is interesting tooto observe in these two figures that shortness ofthe legs which is so pronounced a characteristic ofthe master's earlier work.

I am inclined to regard the Hampton Court paintingof the Risen Christ as being unjustly attributed toHolbein. The attitude of the Christ is, at the least,uncharacteristic of the painter, and the right arm ofthe Magdalen, the clumsy line of her shoulder, thestiffness of her draperythe stiffness indeed of the wholedesignare out of sympathy with any other paintingsof the master's manhood, in which he distinguishedhimself almost invariably by a flow of line and com-position of masses that carry the eye from side to side52


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HOLBEINof a picture. You do not, I mean, anywhere elsesee a rather clumsily outlined, stiff parallelogram oflight in the centre of a composition, such as is hereto be seen between the salient figures, nor indeeddo you elsewhere get such another stiff parallelogramof light as is formed by the tomb with its slab rolledaway. Holbein, however, was so extremely variousin his conceptions, and the authorities who acceptthe painting as his work are so formidable in weight,as to make me speak with some diffidence ; neverthe-less, the longer I look at the rigid lines of the picturethe more reluctant do I feel to accept it.How various Holbein could be is proved immediatelyin 1522, the year which saw the production of theSS. George and Ursula. It saw also the birth of theVirgin of Solothurn, a picture so beautiful in itself that,when all the glamour of its recovery from a dishonouredruin beneath painter's floor boards is allowed for, andwhen too all has been allowed for in the very carefuland well-intentioned restorations that it necessarilyunderwentwhen, in fact, everything that need beis allowed for, it remains one of the finest ofHolbeins.The germ of this design is to be found in thebeautiful little woodcut on the reverse title-page ofthe " Stadtrechte und Statuten der loeblichen StadtFreiburg" This was published in 1520 and seems toprove that Holbein carried about with him the ideasof favourite designs, and that, having, as it were,wasted this lovely little conception on an obscurewoodcut, he wished once more to bring it gloriouslyinto the daylight. This is perhaps merely a romanticway of putting the fact that, as many other busypainters have done, Holbein sometimes elaboratedrough designs into finished pictures and that here weare able to identify a first designto catch him in the

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HOLBEINact. The woodcut I am inclined to think morecharming in its spontaneity than is the design of thepicture. It has at least a greater unity and morebalance ; for in the Solothurn Virgin the figure ofSt. Ursus of Thebesa somewhat stiff and conventionalcreationstands somewhat apart from the entwinedgroup of the Virgin and St. Martin. The sinuous linesof their robes flow one into another ; the up-and-downfigure of the knight is slightly discordant in the wholecomposition. But, apart from this, and from the headof the suppliant which Holbein introduces as discreetlyas is feasible, the picture is one of those very lovelyconceptions about which it is difficult to say very much.There it is : you may look at it for an hour, for amorning, or for a day or so on end, and always withincreasing satisfaction. It belongs, like all the best ofHolbein's work, to a special class of picture. It isnot immediately very striking either in lighting or incolour, either in dramatic gesture or astonishingpainting. But there is no false drawing, as there is noexaggerated drawing, and there is neither false lightingnor false painting.The whole mood of the picture, in inception as inexecution, is one of entire tranquillity, so that thepainted Virgin seems to be as sure of achieving asuccessful motherhood as was Holbein of turning outa masterpiece. That he was a very wonderful man isproved by his so wonderfully overcoming the con-ditions of the painting, since the vaulted and barredniche points to the fact that the picture was intendedto fill a given and unlovely place, whilst the head ofthe suppliant would seem to prove that the picture wascommissioned by some wealthy person with somethingon his conscience. And it must have meant eithersome skill in argument or some convicting power ofpersonality that the artist should have been able to54


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HOLBEINsave the unity of his little Freiburg designthat, infact, he should have been able to persuade the donorto make so unobtrusive an appearance in the work.The surprising adventures of the picture, identi-fications of the donor and even of the model for theVirgin, the strange circumstances of the discovery,of the never to be sufficiently praised industry of therecovererall these things are part of the legendsof art, and add to the hopefulness of those romanticsouls who dream of one day discovering inestimableart-treasures beneath the floors of their bedrooms or indeserted granaries. Inasmuch as such things preventmost of us from looking at a picture as a picture, makingus produce mouths round with astonishment as if theobject gazed at were a captive released from Barbaryor some similar wonder, I dislike recounting them.But the faith and gallant doggedness of Mr. Zetter,who nosed out the picture from beneath dishonouringrubbish, are so worthy of celebration that I cannotrefrain from referring such of my readers as care aboutthe matter to Mr. Zetter-Collin's " Die Zetter'scheMadonna von Solothurn : Geschichte und Originalquellen.Solothurn, 1902." Here will be found recorded all thepossible ana of the subject.During this periodto be precise, from June 1521

until October 1522Holbein was engaged upon oneof those tasks which, along with the Hertensteinfrescoes, the Bar table, and the " Dance of Death,"remained for some subsequent centuries wonders of theworld. This was the decoration of the council chamberin the Basle Rath-haus. The frescoes themselves havevanished, so that no man living has seen more thanpatches of colour upon the walls : the pictures are inthat heaven of lost masterpieces where, perhaps, wemay one day see the campanile of Venice, the armsof the Venus of Milo, or the seven-branched candle-

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HOLBEINstick of the Temple of Solomon. Vigorous and splendidsketches remain, some copies and many descriptionsbut these afford us very little idea of what may havebeen the actual effect of the decorations, as decorations.Regarded theoretically they cannot have been

perfect or even desirable : here again plain walls weremade to look like anything else but walls. But no doubtthey were very wonderful things whilst they still existed.

Nevertheless I cannot resist a feeling of private butintimate relief that these tremendous tours de forceare left to our imaginings. We lose thembut wegain a Holbein whom we can more fearlessly enjoy.For, supposing these things with their nine days'wonder of invention that Holbein shared with manycommoner men and set working for the gratificationof every commoner mansupposing these extremelywonderful designs still existed, the far greater Holbeinthe Holbein of the one or two Madonnas and ofthe innumerable portraits in oil or in silverpointthe Holbein whose works place him side by side withthe highest artists, in that highest of all arts, the artof portraiturethat tranquil and assured master musthave been obscured. Those of us who loved hisgreater works must, in the nature of things, have beenaccused of paradox flinging : the great Public must havecalled out : " Look at that wonderful invention :that compassionate executioner with the magnifyingglass, seeking to take out his victim's eye with as littlebrutality as might be ! " And beside that attractionthe charms of Christina of Milan or all the sketchesat Windsor would be praised in vain. We should havegained another Shakespeare rich in the production ofanecdote, we might have lost some of our love for anartist incomparable for his holding the mirror up tothe men and women of his wonderful age.

So that, one way with another, we may at least56


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HOLBEINconsole ourselves for the loss of these decorationsin the thought that they no longer obscure what wasthe real and true greatness of a many-sided man.The decorations came to an end late in 1522, whenonly part of the council chamber was finished.Holbein, it is recorded to the honour of the city ofBasle, had contracted to complete the work : buthaving been paid all the money due to him and havingput into the room as much work as he deemed fittingor reasonable, he petitioned to be released from hisbargain or granted a further sum for its completion.The councillors recognized his claims and, having atthat date little money to spare, released the painterwithout giving a further commission.The career of Holbein for the next year or sotakes one of its characteristic dips into the sands ofoblivion. Except for several portraits of Erasmuswe have l

hans holbein - the younger

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