Hans Holbein the Younger

• 1. Introduction

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  Hans Holbein the Younger died in London sometime between the 7th of October and the 29th of November 1543, at the age of 45. He made his will on the 7th of October, describing himself as "servant to the king's majesty", in his house in Aldgate. A goldsmith named John of Antwerp and a handful of German neighbours signed as witnesses. The site of his grave is unknown and may never have been marked.

  This quiet, uncelebrated end stands in stark contrast to what Holbein left behind. He had painted the face of Henry VIII so forcefully that no subsequent image ever dislodged it. He fixed the look of Erasmus, Thomas More, and Thomas Cromwell for all of posterity. The French poet and reformer Nicholas Bourbon called him "the Apelles of our time", comparing him to the greatest painter of classical antiquity. And yet he founded no school, trained no famous successor, and received no formal biography until Karel van Mander published one in 1604, more than sixty years after his death.

  How did a painter's son from Augsburg become the visual memory of an entire era? What drove him across the English Channel twice, into the orbits of men who would lose their heads? And what lies inside the paintings themselves, beneath the uncanny surfaces that seem to fix a living person in amber?

• 2. A Painter's Son in Basel

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  By 1515, Hans Holbein and his older brother Ambrosius had arrived in Basel as journeymen painters. Their father, Hans Holbein the Elder, ran a large workshop in Augsburg and had trained both sons in the late Gothic style. Basel was a centre of learning and the printing trade, and the brothers found steady work designing woodcuts and metalcuts for printers.

  That same year, the preacher Oswald Myconius invited the brothers to add pen drawings to the margins of a copy of The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus. The marginal sketches show Holbein's wit and his early humanistic leanings in a single concentrated exercise. He was apprenticed to Basel's leading painter, Hans Herbster, and he quickly built a working relationship with the city's mayor, Jakob Meyer zum Hasen, who sat for a double portrait with his wife Dorothea.

  In 1517, Holbein and his father traveled to Lucerne to paint murals for the merchant Jakob von Hertenstein. While there, Holbein designed cartoons for stained glass windows. City records note that on the 10th of December 1517, he was fined five livres for fighting in the street with a goldsmith called Caspar, who was fined the same amount. That winter, he probably visited northern Italy, where scholars believe he encountered the fresco work of Andrea Mantegna. He filled panels at Hertenstein's house with copies of Mantegna's Triumphs of Caesar.

  Returning to Basel in 1519, Holbein joined the painters' guild, took out citizenship, and married Elsbeth Binsenstock-Schmid, a widow a few years older than himself who was running her late husband's tanning business. Their first son, Philipp, arrived in the same year. He also painted the young academic Bonifacius Amerbach that year, a portrait that art historian Paul Ganz saw as marking a clear advance in style, notably in Holbein's use of unbroken colours.

• 3. Books, Death, and the Reformation

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  Johann Froben's Basel print shop was where Holbein sharpened his gift for the woodcut during his most productive early years. He designed the title page for Martin Luther's Bible, a series of twelve alphabets ornamented with Greek and Roman gods, and the haunting Dance of Death cycle, cut by the craftsman Hans Lützelburger.

  The Dance of Death, worked on from 1523 to 1526, takes the late-medieval Danse Macabre and turns it into something sharper. Holbein's skeletal figure of Death moves through every level of society without exemption: pope, emperor, merchant, peasant. His Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, painted in 1522, pushes the humanist view of Christ into challenging territory, showing a physically ravaged body with no trace of divine radiance. The reformist climate of Basel was pressing Holbein to think hard about what religious imagery could truthfully say.

  When Basel's iconoclasts carried out acts of destruction in the later 1520s, Erasmus felt compelled to leave the city in April 1529. Some of Holbein's religious work was probably destroyed, though the paintings on the organ doors of the Basel Minster survived. A city register recorded Holbein's own ambiguous position: "Master Hans Holbein, the painter, says that we must be better informed about the holy table before approaching it." In 1530, the authorities called him to account for failing to attend reformed communion. Shortly afterward, he was listed among those "who have no serious objections and wish to go along with other Christians."

  His answer to the tensions of the Reformation was not doctrinal commitment but artistic service on both sides. His woodcut Christ as the Light of the World attacked Rome; his Meyer Madonna remained an icon of traditional piety. The reformist council paid him a retaining fee of 50 florins and commissioned him to resume work on the Council Chamber murals, now on Old Testament rather than classical themes. Holbein completed his last commission in Basel in 1531: the decoration of two clock faces on the city gate.

• 4. Erasmus, More, and the First English Visit

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  Erasmus wrote to his friend Thomas More in 1526 to explain why he was sending his painter across the Channel. "The arts are freezing in this part of the world," he said, "and he is on the way to England to pick up some angels." The word "angels" referred to English coins, and the remark captures perfectly both the economic motive and the warmth Erasmus felt toward Holbein.

  Before reaching England, Holbein stopped in Antwerp, where he delivered a letter from Erasmus to Pieter Gillis and bought oak panels for painting. More welcomed him and found him a series of commissions. The famous Portrait of Sir Thomas More followed, and then a group portrait of More with his entire family. The group portrait survives only in a preparatory sketch and copies; art historian Andreas Beyer described it as "a prelude of a genre that would only truly gain acceptance in Dutch painting of the seventeenth century."

  Holbein worked for a humanist circle with close ties to Erasmus during this first stay. He painted William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury; Nicholas Kratzer, a Bavarian astronomer who tutored the More children; and courtiers including Sir Henry Guildford and his wife Lady Mary. In May 1527, working with Kratzer, Holbein painted a panorama of the siege of Thérouanne for visiting French ambassadors and helped devise a ceiling covered in planetary signs for the entertainment at Greenwich Palace. The chronicler Edward Hall described the effect as showing "the whole Earth, environed with the sea, like a very map or cart."

  Holbein returned to Basel in August 1528, buying a house in St.Johanns-Vorstadt and becoming the neighbor of Hieronymus Froben. In 1531, enriched by his English success, he purchased a second neighboring house. The portrait he painted in this period of his own family, showing Elsbeth with their two eldest children Philipp and Katherina, struck art historian John Rowlands as "one of the most moving portraits in art, from an artist, too, who always characterized his sitters with a guarded restraint."

• 5. King's Painter at a Dangerous Court

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  Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor in May 1532, and Holbein returned to England just as that shift was occurring. He distanced himself from More's circle and found favour instead with Anne Boleyn's family and Thomas Cromwell. It was a calculated survival instinct, but one that placed him at the center of the most turbulent decade in Tudor history.

  His early commissions in this second English period were portraits of Lutheran merchants of the Hanseatic League, who operated out of the Steelyard on the north bank of the Thames. Holbein rented a house in nearby Maiden Lane. His portrait of Georg Giese of Gdansk shows the merchant surrounded by meticulously painted objects that form a personal iconography of trade. His portrait of Derich Berck of Cologne takes the opposite approach: classically simple, possibly influenced by Titian. For the Steelyard's guildhall, he painted two monumental allegories, The Triumph of Wealth and The Triumph of Poverty, both now lost. The merchants also commissioned a street tableau of Mount Parnassus for Anne Boleyn's coronation eve procession of the 31st of May 1533.

  By 1536, Holbein was employed as King's Painter on an annual salary of 30 pounds, though he was never the highest-paid artist on the royal payroll. Lucas Horenbout, the royal "pictor maker," earned more. In 1537, Holbein painted the image that would fix Henry VIII's appearance for all time: the King standing with feet planted apart in a heroic pose. The original mural at Whitehall Palace, made from a cartoon of 25 pieces of paper, was destroyed by fire in 1698. It survives in engravings and in a 1667 copy by Remigius van Leemput.

  Jane Seymour, depicted in the Whitehall mural alongside Henry, died in October 1537 shortly after bearing Henry's only legitimate son Edward VI. Holbein painted the infant prince about two years later, clutching a sceptre-like gold rattle. No certain painted portraits of Anne Boleyn survive, likely because her memory was officially erased after her execution for treason, incest, and adultery in 1536, though Holbein did make a drawing of her from life in preparation for a portrait.

• 6. The Ambassadors and Its Hidden Skull

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  Jean de Dinteville was the French ambassador to Henry VIII's court in 1533, and Georges de Selve was the Bishop of Lavaur who visited London the same year. Holbein painted them life-sized, flanking a two-tiered table covered in astronomical instruments, a globe, a lute, and a Lutheran hymn book.

  The Ambassadors is, on its surface, a display of learning and worldly status. It is also something else entirely. Stretched across the lower portion of the painting is an anamorphic skull, which only resolves into its true shape when viewed from a sharp angle to the side. Art historians Oskar Batschmann and Pascal Griener read the painting as proposing that "Sciences and arts, objects of luxury and glory, are measured against the grandeur of Death." The Lutheran hymn book, the crucifix visible behind a curtain, and other embedded details create what scholars describe as enigmatic references to learning, religion, mortality, and illusion within the tradition of the Northern Renaissance.

  This layering of meaning was characteristic of Holbein's approach throughout his career. His 1532 portrait of Sir Brian Tuke, for example, alludes to the sitter's poor health by comparing his sufferings to those of Job. The depiction of the Five Wounds of Christ and the inscription "INRI" on Tuke's crucifix are, according to Batschmann and Griener, "intended to protect its owner against ill-health." Holbein embedded his portraits with a density of symbol and paradox that has kept scholars occupied for centuries, even as the surfaces appear almost photographically clear.

• 7. Legacy Without a School

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  Holbein's last known will was made on the 7th of October 1543, and John of Antwerp, one of his own portrait subjects, stepped in on the 29th of November to administer the estate. He presumably settled the debts, arranged care for the two infant children Holbein had with an unnamed woman in England, and dispersed the effects, including many drawings and preliminary designs that have since survived.

  The scope of what he left behind only became fully apparent over time. Nicholas Hilliard, the great miniature portraitist of Elizabeth I's court, wrote in his treatise Arte of Limning that "Holbein's manner have I ever imitated, and hold it for the best." The patterns Holbein made for jewellery and armour influenced English design for nearly half a century after his death. The intricate designs etched into suits of Greenwich armour, including Henry's own tournament harnesses, drew directly on Holbein's work.

  In Basel, his friend Bonifacius Amerbach and Amerbach's son Basilius collected his work. Their collection became the core of what is now the Holbein holdings at the Kunstmuseum Basel. A fashion for Old Masters in England after the 1620s drew the attention of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, who commissioned engravings of his Holbeins from the Czech artist Wenceslaus Hollar, including some of works now lost. The first formal catalogue of Holbein's work was published only in 1656, by Charles Patin and Sebastian Faesch, alongside Erasmus's Praise of Folly.

  Holbein founded no school. The only artist who clearly absorbed his technique was John Bettes the Elder, whose Man in a Black Cap of 1545 stands close to Holbein in style. Art historian Erna Auerbach nevertheless concluded that "Holbein's influence on the style of English portraiture was undoubtedly immense" and that the portrait type he created "became the prototype of the English Court portrait of the Renaissance period." The celebrated Holbein controversy of the 1870s, the "Holbein-Streit," revealed that the revered Meyer Madonna at Dresden was a copy and that the version at Darmstadt was the original. That dispute stripped away a number of false attributions and left a smaller, sharper body of work at the center of which stands the miniature portrait of Jane Small: a young woman of no particular beauty, painted with, in art historian Graham Reynolds's words, "remarkable objectivity" that makes it "one of the great portraits of the world."