This fall visitors to the Getty Center have the rare opportunity to experience the extraordinarily beautiful art of German master Hans Holbein the Younger, known today for his compelling, miraculously precise portraits of the wealthy and ambitious denizens of Switzerland and Renaissance England.
Holbein’s portrait drawings and paintings were not only admired in his own time, they were also coveted and passionately collected over the centuries.
The exhibition Holbein: Capturing Character in the Renaissance—running October 19–January 9 and organized by the Getty Museum and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York—assembles the artist’s most sophisticated portraits, along with his skillful designs for jewels and metalwork, to illuminate Holbein’s singular contributions to constructing identity through portraiture and allegorical compositions. The first major international loan exhibition of Holbein’s paintings in the United States, Holbein highlights the master’s artistic versatility and invites viewers to discover the many intriguing relationships between portraiture and other communicative art forms in the Renaissance, including jewels, portrait medals, and decorated book bindings.
From early commissions in Basel for one of his foremost patrons, the scholar and theologian Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), through two highly productive periods in London, the exhibition encompasses Holbein’s career and celebrates his exceptional ingenuity.
Eloquent Portraits
Holbein’s formidable skills enabled him to devise specific pictorial solutions for a variety of sitters—from Basel humanists to members of the English court, including prominent women. During his first trip to England (1526–28), he portrayed Anne Lovell (née Ashby) with the solemnity appropriate to the prominent status she and her husband Francis held locally and in court circles. Holbein animated her still form with sinuous linear elements, such as the edge of her folded silk shawl. Painting with a restricted palette of contrasts, he drew attention to the physical characteristics of the various materials that comprise her attire. His astonishing rendering of the plush white ermine fur softens the architectural form of her cap, while the weight of her pet squirrel, momentarily at rest, depresses the plush black velvet of her sleeve.
Despite Holbein’s remarkable precision, the identity of the sitter remained a mystery until 2004, when the significance of the squirrel and the star-ling were recognized and connected with the Lovell family. Both animals were important late additions by Holbein, probably made at the request of his patrons. Holbein painted the red squirrel, held gently by a silver chain and nibbling a hazelnut, over the sitter’s bodice. Squirrels are the primary motif on the Lovell family coat of arms, while “starling” puns on the name of the village near the Lovell’s Norfolk estate, East Harling.
The portrait exemplifies the artist’s penchant for mixing realistic elements with others that suggest timelessness and abstraction, disrupting the viewer’s relationship to the image. The vibrant green tendrils of the fig-vine are Holbein’s naturalistic invention and occur in two other portraits on display. The scrolling forms enclose the sitter and separate her from the enigmatic deep blue backdrop perhaps intended to suggest the sky.
Devices, Desires
The exhibition draws attention to Holbein’s participation in the Renaissance game of symbols, mottos, heraldry, and insignia, an often overlooked or under-valued aspect of Holbein’s art. All were crucial modes of communicating identity in the early 16th century.
The Getty Museum’s intriguing panel An Allegory of Passion provided the impetus for the exhibition. What role could it have played in Holbein’s oeuvre, we wondered, and what was its original meaning and function?
An Allegory of Passion, about 1532-36, Hans Holbein the Younger. Oil on panel. Getty Museum
The answers lie in the witty, playful, and eloquent milieu in which Holbein composed allegorical subjects as personal emblems (also known as devices) in painted form and as drawn designs for didactic jewels such as hat badges and medallions. Although the lozenge shape of the Getty panel is unique in Holbein’s surviving oeuvre, the circular central scene resembles Holbein’s smaller allegorical compositions accompanied by quotations from ancient sources or Italian Renaissance poets. The inscription derives from Francesco Petrarch’s 14th-century collection of poems Il Canzoniere, and the man in classical attire astride a galloping horse embodies the poet/lover’s quest to secure the heart of his beloved. An Allegory of Passion has recently been cleaned by Getty conservator Ulrich Birkmaier. It will be displayed near Holbein’s painting of one of the most famous personal emblems of the era, Erasmus’s Terminus, the ancient Roman god of boundaries, and the artist’s intricate designs for metalwork.
Tantalus, one of only two drawings by Holbein in the United States museum collections, is amongst his most beguiling compositions. This design for a hat badge or medallion, only two inches in diameter, delicately colored to guide the goldsmith, belies Holbein’s exquisite draftsmanship, a signature aspect of his art. In Greek mythology, Zeus punished Tantalus and forced him to suffer perpetual hunger and thirst—he was unable to drink from the pool in which he was submerged or eat the apples from the tree above him (and thereby provided the origins of the word tantalize).
Tantalus, 1535-40, Hans Holbein the Younger. Pen and black ink with watercolors, heightened in gold on laid paper. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of Ladislaus and Beatrix von Hoffmann and Patrons' Permanent Fund, 1998
Photo: Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington
In an era when dress was a potent form of communication, Holbein scrupulously attended to the details of an individual’s attire in his portraits. During his initial encounter with a sitter, he captured not only his or her features, but also noted the colors, materials, furs, and even the jewels worn by the patron in chalk and ink drawings that are amongst his most captivating likenesses.
In addition to Getty’s drawn study of a cleric or scholar, the exhibition includes several superb portrait drawings lent by Her Majesty The Queen from the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. The drawings in the Royal Collection have a long royal provenance originating with Henry VIII, whom Holbein served as court painter.
The depiction of the knight William Parr is an especially elaborate rendering. On a sheet of pink primed paper used for portrait drawings after 1532, Holbein conveys Parr’s features in delicate chalks. Expressive strokes in black ink describe his fur collar and the elaborate links of his chain. Parr’s hat badge, a scene of St. George and the dragon detailed in a separate drawing in the upper left corner of the sheet, signifies Parr’s status as a member of the order of the garter. In minute abbreviations on the chest and sleeve, Holbein noted the white and purple velvet and white satin of Parr’s garment.
Holbein painted one of his most arresting portraits for Simon George of Cornwall, about whom little is known. An abundance of meaningful attributes characterize Simon, although a single interpretation remains elusive. He offers a red carnation, traditionally associated with marriage. Enamel pansies, possible allusions to death, and a badge of the mythical lovers Zeus (in the form of a swan) and Leda, adorn his beret. Holbein attained an extraordinary sense of presence through the rendering of the decorated black silk on his shoulder, layers of color at the neck, and especially modeling of the flesh of the jaw and ear. The roundel format and profile presentation of the sitter reference the portraits on antique coins, as well as early-16th-century portrait medals on which they were based. For this fabulously attired gentleman, the artist created a brilliant, jewel-like modernization of these popular portable likenesses.
Simon George of Cornwall, about 1535-40, Hans Holbein the Younger. Mixed technique on panel. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Portraiture and Persuasion
With some of his sitters, Holbein engaged in the ancient yet still-popular debate among cultured individuals about the superiority of the written word or a painted representation to convey an individual’s character. Whether Derich Born, a young merchant from Cologne living in London, was a humanist or simply aspired to sophisticated erudition, matters little. Holbein portrayed him with youthful bravura, against a fig-vine backdrop, resting his arm on a stone parapet in a manner reminiscent of the Venetian painter Titian, but also of Flemish painters from a century earlier. Born’s black satin sleeve, an astonishing display of painterly skill, underscores his penetrating stare. Holbein was an expert letterer, and the inscription seemingly chiseled into the front of the stone parapet offers a convincing illusion of a different kind. The inscription reads: DERICHVS SI VOCEM ADDAS IPSISSIMVS HIC SIT / HVNC DVBITES PICTOR FECERIT AN GENITOR / DER BORN ETATIS SV AE 23. ANNO 1533. Translation: “If you added a voice, this would be Derich his very self. You would be in doubt whether the painter or his father made him. Der Born aged 23, the year 1533.”
The lines not only assert Born’s participation in the dispute, they also simultaneously celebrate the art of painting and boldly praise Holbein’s skill.
About the Artist
Holbein’s life unfolded during a vibrant period of cultural exchange and the religious upheaval of the Reformation, a religious and political challenge to the Roman Catholic Church. An ambitious artist, he sought opportunities commensurate with his prodigious talents outside the German territories, and forged his career during long stays abroad.
Holbein was born in Augsburg, southern Germany, during the winter of 1497/98, the second son of the eminent painter Hans Holbein the Elder. In 1515 he and his elder brother Ambrosius moved to Basel, Switzerland, a university town and center of the new book printing industry. Amongst his earliest works are lively pen drawings in the margins of a copy of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s satirical Praise of Folly.
Holbein entered the painter’s guild in 1519, married, and became a citizen in 1520. His remarkable output over the next several years consisted of portraits, altarpieces, and designs for woodcuts and stained glass. In his paintings and monumental decorative works, including house facades, he exercised his signature skill: his talent for generating illusion. None of his correspondence survives, but a later biographer described Holbein as “spirited.” While in Switzerland he was fined for fighting, but he also associated with humanist scholars in this period, and Erasmus became a crucial patron. Holbein visited France in 1524 to seek a position at the French court.
In August 1526, Holbein left Basel and traveled to London, stopping in Antwerp where he met the city’s leading painters and humanists. A letter of introduction from Erasmus to the statesman Sir Thomas More helped establish him in England. During two highly successful years, Holbein portrayed More and members of the English court in colored chalks and innovative paintings, and contributed to the festive decorations at Greenwich honoring the visiting French delegation. Holbein returned to Basel in 1528 and reunited with his wife Elsbeth and their children, Philipp and Katharina. He finished works begun before his English sojourn, executing new civic commissions, and acquired two houses. The Reformation had taken hold in Basel, however, significantly reducing opportunities for artists.
Holbein returned to England in 1532, again bearing a letter of support from Erasmus, and found the situation much changed; his previous patrons had died or were disgraced as political factions shifted and efforts advanced to secure King Henry VIII’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon. He quickly obtained new patrons and prospered, though, excelling at the varied activities of a Renaissance artist, including drawn and painted portraits of courtiers, prominent women, merchants, and diplo-mats, as well as designs for metalwork and jewelry. By 1536 he had become “the King’s painter” to Henry VIII. Holbein died in London in 1543, probably of the plague.
