Holbein: The Renaissance Review by Elizabeth Goldring – A Great Portrait of the Artist | books

MMost of what we know, or think we know, about the court of Henry VIII comes directly from the paintings of Hans Holbein. There is the famous image of the king himself – bloated, phallic, hard, looking more like an assassin than a king. But there is also the ascetic Thomas More, who hides his hard streak behind fine bones, and the sly and thuggish Thomas Cromwell, with those sly eyes and the beginnings of a double chin. ‘Hans the Painter’ was also done by the wives – a fitting sketch of Anne Boleyn, a hagiographic portrait of Jane Seymour who died after giving birth to Henry’s heir, and a mounted copy of Anne of Clive.

It was this last image that caused an international incident in 1539 when Henry sent Holbein to the Low Countries to check whether Anne was beautiful enough to be his next wife. Based on Holbein’s portrait, Henry committed to the marriage in absentia, but was horrified when the actual Anne arrived on the Kentish coast, looking ‘not so beautiful a thing as had been reported’. The union lasted six months.

In this remarkable book, the first scholarly biography of Holbein in more than 100 years, the art historian Elizabeth Goldring calls the Cliffe affair a “disaster,” but also suggests that it was a rare mistake on the part of Holbein, whose pictures generally struck contemporaries as strangely lifelike. Although today we have no way of judging its authenticity, there is no mistaking its essential vitality: you could swear that Holbein’s people are blinking and breathing in front of you, ready to extend their hand and shake yours.

Consider his early portraits of the Dutch humanist Erasmus, commissioned in 1523 when the two men were living in Basel. The deeply chiseled face of the middle-aged scholar manages to convey both the general qualities of intellectual rigor and good humanity while remaining completely individual, with a wide, curved mouth and deep-set eyes. There is some cheeky humor in evidence too. In the background of the picture that now hangs in the National Gallery is a Latin tag, supposedly by Erasmus (Holbein had only a rudimentary education), drawing attention to the artist’s childhood vanity: “I am Johannes Holbein, whom it is easier to denigrate than to imitate.”

Erasmus was responsible for bringing Holbein to Britain in 1526, when he wrote a letter recommending the young man to his friend Thomas More. Moore, who was on his way to becoming Lord Chancellor, quickly commissioned a series of pictures. Holbein insightfully depicted Saint Maur as a Saturnian, with the beginnings of cruelty in his mouth. Here was a man who was devoted to God at the same time while he was busy installing a set of arrows in his Chelsea home to torture heretics. The fact that he opposed Henry’s most famous attempts to obtain a divorce and marry Anne Boleyn may explain why there are two large vertical splits in the picture that now hangs in the Frick Collection in New York. Famously, Boleyn was so angry with her enemy that she pulled a Holbein painting – Moore’s own next best thing – from the wall and threw it on the floor.

It all lies in the future. After the pictures, Holbein busied himself with painting the large Moor clan as an example of a happy Christian family. Elegantly dressed women dominate this painting, with More’s intelligent daughters and women’s wards consulting their prayer books, and Alice, his second wife, wearing an ostentatious cross. This mood of flourishing devotion contrasts strikingly with the picture painted by Holbein on his return to Basel the following year. The artist’s family portrait shows a red-eyed, bone-tired Elspeth Holbein looking like a bedraggled Madonna with her two peaked children. Having been left to work as a single mother and workshop supervisor while her husband gained fame in England, Mrs. Holbein cannot be blamed for not bothering to hide her exhaustion and dissatisfaction.

The chronology of Holbein’s life is complex and ambiguous, but Goldring does a good job of keeping things on track without feigning absolute certainty. It appears that Holbein did not remain in Basel long when the city became a religious war zone, with Protestant activists fanning the flames of Catholic vanity. Instead, he returned to the Henrician court, this time permanently, leaving Elspeth to fend for herself. To make matters worse, he apparently met a woman in London, with whom he had two more children.

But returning to England was no guarantee of political safety. Thomas More would soon be executed for refusing to recognize Henry as supreme head of the new Church of England, and it speaks volumes about Holbein’s survival skills that he did not go down with his former patron. Instead, on this second and final voyage, he focused astutely towards the new man, Thomas Cromwell, and the new queen, Anne Boleyn.

For Anne’s coronation in 1533, Holbein built an extraordinary triumphal arch out of papier-mâché painted to look like marble. (Goldring reminds us that “Master Hans,” like all Renaissance artists, could turn his hand to anything.) It would take another five years, however, before he finally got what he was seeking – a place on the royal payroll and the title of ‘King’s Painter’. What sealed the deal was a series of massive murals executed for the Palace of Whitehall. It was here that Holbein’s iconic staging of Henry, recognized throughout the world today, debuted.

Boasting a barrel-chested, pumped-up figure with padded shoulders and a massive chin, Henry stands radiant and tough, ready to take on all comers. According to a slightly later source, Henry’s presence in this Whitehall presence had a sense of annihilation, which was exactly the intended effect – since the real, flesh-and-blood Henry was in a much more grave state. A recent dueling accident has left him with a severe headache and his leg rotting so bad you can smell it. It was hard not to feel pity.

And all this is ironic, because no artist was better at confronting the brutal realities of the diseased body than Holbein. Fifteen years earlier, he had painted the dead body of Christ in the tomb, a gruesome display of Jesus’ decomposing body. In this life-sized image, the mouth and eyes are hanging open, the skin is already turning green and the fingers are beginning to stiffen due to rigor mortis. More than 400 years later, Fyodor Dostoyevsky found the painting so disturbing that his wife insisted on pulling it away, fearing it would trigger an epileptic seizure. However, Holbein’s profound painting made its way – almost as a character in itself – into The Idiot (1869).

In her introduction, Goldring is wary of describing her extraordinary book as autobiographical. This is undoubtedly due to long-standing scholarly skepticism about treating works of art as if they were merely culled anecdotes from the artist’s life, rather than independent creative objects. But in the case of Hans Holbein, it is impossible to see how one can do anything other than immerse oneself in a world of rich and vivid life experiences. His great achievement was to bring before us the living men and women who conspired, suffered, innovated and triumphed during the most terrifying decades of English history. It is Goldring’s achievement to show us the process by which this magic happens.