The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

HANS HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER

Vol. I., Frontispiece

HANS HOLBEIN
Self-Portrait
Drawing in Indian ink and coloured chalks, washed with water-colour
Basel Gallery

HANS HOLBEIN

THE YOUNGER

BY

ARTHUR B. CHAMBERLAIN

ASSISTANT KEEPER OF THE CORPORATION ART GALLERY, BIRMINGHAM

WITH 252 ILLUSTRATIONS, INCLUDING 24 IN COLOUR

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1913

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.

at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh

TO MY WIFE

PREFACE

IN this book the writer has endeavoured to give as complete an account as possible of the life and career of the younger Holbein, together with a description of every known picture painted by him, and of the more important of his drawings and designs. The earlier books devoted to the subject—such as Wornum’s Life and Works, 1867, and Dr. Woltmann’s two volumes—although they must always remain of the utmost help to the student, are now in some respects out of date. The second edition of the latter’s great work, in which he modified and corrected many passages in the earlier issue, has never been fully translated into English; while the latest book of importance on the subject published in this country, Hans Holbein the Younger, by Mr. Gerald S. Davies, M.A., 1903, is mainly devoted to the art of the painter, and does not profess to give complete biographical details of his life. In recent years many new facts as to Holbein’s career have been discovered, and fresh pictures by him unearthed, while modern criticism has reversed some of the earlier conclusions respecting the authorship of a certain number of works at one time attributed to him. Much valuable information upon the subject has been published at home and abroad, largely in periodicals devoted to such matters and in the transactions of artistic and learned societies, by various well-known students of the master in Germany and Switzerland, chief among whom must be mentioned Dr. Paul Ganz, the director of the Public Picture Collection in Basel, now recognised as the leading authority on Holbein, together with Dr. Hans Koegler, Dr. Emil Major, H. A. Schmid, and other writers too numerous to mention here; while in England equally valuable contributions to our knowledge have been made from time to time by such critics as Mr. Lionel Cust, M.V.O., Sir Sidney Colvin, Mr. Campbell Dodgson, Sir Claude Phillips, Miss Mary F. S. Hervey, and a number of others, in the pages of the Burlington Magazine and elsewhere. Much valuable information is also to be found in two recently-published volumes—Dr. Curt Glaser’s Hans Holbein der Ältere, 1908, and Dr. Willy Hes’ Ambrosius Holbein, 1911.

The writer has availed himself as fully as possible of the newer facts and conclusions embodied in such papers and communications, the source of information in all cases being fully acknowledged. A very careful study of the Calendars of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, extending over a number of years, has enabled him to add some fresh items of information about the painter and certain of his sitters, and of several of the artists who were his contemporaries in England. He has dealt at some length, though necessarily in a condensed form, with the chief painters and craftsmen, both English and foreign, who were at work in London under Henry VIII, much of the information thus brought together having been hitherto scattered about in a variety of publications not always conveniently accessible to the student. He thus hopes that the book will to some extent serve the purpose for which it is primarily intended—the provision, in as concise a form as possible, of a complete biography of the painter, embodying all the more recent discoveries; and he trusts that it may be of some small service to those who are interested in Holbein, but have neither the time nor the opportunity to avail themselves of the many scattered sources of information which he has attempted to bring together within the covers of a single book.

By the gracious permission of His Majesty the King, the writer has been allowed to include among the illustrations, reproductions, in some instances in colour, of a number of pictures and drawings by Holbein in the royal collections; and he has to thank the Lord Chamberlain and Mr. Lionel Cust, M.V.O., Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, for the kind assistance they rendered him in obtaining such permission. He has also to express his grateful acknowledgments to a number of owners and collectors for similar permission to reproduce works by the master in their possession, among them Her Majesty the Queen of Holland, who has graciously allowed the inclusion of the beautiful miniature of an Unknown Youth; the Duke of Devonshire, G.C.V.O.; Earl Spencer, G.C.V.O.; the Earl of Radnor; Lord Leconfield; the Earl of Yarborough; Sir John Ramsden, Bt.; Sir Hugh P. Lane; the late Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan; Major Charles Palmer; and the Barber-Surgeons’ Company. Special thanks are due to Lord St. Oswald for permitting the large “More Family Group” at Nostell Priory to be photographed for the purposes of this book, and for allowing the writer to take notes from a very interesting manuscript containing a description of the various versions of the Family picture compiled by his grandfather, Mr. Charles Winn. He has also to record his great indebtedness to Mr. Ayerst H. Buttery for giving him the privilege of reproducing the recently discovered portrait of an Unknown English Lady, formerly in the possession of the Bodenham family at Rotherwas, near Hereford. His thanks also are due to Senhor José de Figueiredo, director of the National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon, for permission to include the elder Holbein’s “Fountain of Life” among the illustrations, as well as to the directors of a number of galleries and museums, including the Public Picture Collection, Basel; the National Gallery, British Museum, and Wallace Collection; the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin; the Imperial Gallery, Vienna; the Louvre, Paris; the Royal Picture Gallery, The Hague; the Metropolitan Museum of New York; the Royal Hermitage Gallery, St. Petersburg; and the Galleries of Dresden, Munich, Hanover, Rome, Florence, Solothurn, and elsewhere.

In addition, he has the pleasure of recording his great indebtedness to Mr. Lionel Cust, M.V.O., for kind assistance and advice; to Mr. Maurice W. Brockwell, for much valuable help in many directions; to Mr. Campbell Dodgson, who was good enough to assist in the selection of woodcuts from the British Museum Collection for the purposes of reproduction; to Dr. George C. Williamson, through whose kindness the writer has been able to make use of his Catalogue of the late Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan’s Collection of Miniatures; to the Editors of the Burlington Magazine of Fine Arts for permission to include the writer’s paper on Holbein’s visit to “High Burgony”; to Mr. James Melville for transcribing from the Balcarres MSS. a long letter from the Duchess of Guise referring to that visit; to Herr F. Engel-Gros for information about the interesting roundel in his possession, which possibly represents the painter Lucas Hornebolt; and to Dr. James H. W. Laing, of Dundee, to whom he is deeply indebted for most generously undertaking the very onerous task of reading the whole of the proofs. He wishes also to offer his grateful thanks to his publishers, and in particular to Mr. Hugh Allen, for the great care and trouble they have spent upon the book, and for their hearty co-operation in attempting to make it as complete a record as possible of the great master to whom it is devoted.

A. B. C.

Birmingham, August 1913.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTE

The following abbreviations are used in the footnotes to this book:—

C. L. P., for Calendars of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII.

Davies, for Hans Holbein the Younger (Gerald S. Davies).

Ganz, Holbein, for Holbein d. J., des Meisters Gemälde in 252 Abbildungen (Klassiker der Kunst).

Ganz, Hdz. Schwz. Mstr., for Handzeichnungen Schweizerischer Meister, ed. Dr. Paul Ganz.

Ganz, Hdz. von H. H. dem Jüng., for Handzeichnungen von Hans Holbein dem Jüngeren.

Woltmann, for Holbein und seine Zeit (A. Woltmann).

Wornum, for Some Account of the Life and Works of Hans Holbein (R. N. Wornum).

In order to obviate the constant use of a somewhat long official title, the Public Picture Collection, Basel, is generally referred to in this book as the Basel Gallery.

Hans Holbein the Younger

CHAPTER I
HANS HOLBEIN THE ELDER AND HIS FAMILY

The Holbein family in Switzerland and South Germany—Michel Holbein, the leather-dresser—Hans Holbein the Elder, citizen of Augsburg—His brother Sigmund, and his two sons, Ambrosius and Hans—The art of Hans Holbein the Elder and his position in the German School of painting—His principal pictures—Work in Ulm and Frankfurt—Paintings for the Convent of St. Catherine in Augsburg—Work for the Church of St. Moritz—Monetary difficulties—The St. Sebastian altar-piece—the “Fountain of Life” at Lisbon—His silver-point portrait drawings—His death at Isenheim.

DURING the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the name of Holbein was not uncommon in various parts of Southern Germany and Switzerland. At Ravensburg, near Lake Constance, a family of that name had settled as paper manufacturers, their trade-mark being a bull’s head, which was also used by Hans Holbein in his coat of arms. The name is also found in the records of the town of Grünstadt, in Rhenish Bavaria, during the same centuries; while for a still longer period members of a Holbein family were living in Basel, where they had a house called “Zum Papst” in the Gerbergasse. It was from this branch that the painter was in all probability descended,[^[1]] and it is also possible that the Basel and Ravensburg Holbeins were connected. This relationship between the three branches may have been one of the reasons which induced the youthful Hans to turn his face towards Switzerland when he finally left Augsburg, the city of his birth.

In Augsburg itself the first reference to a burgher bearing the name of Holbein occurs in the middle of the fifteenth century. In 1448 a certain Michel Holbein, who had been living at Oberschönefeld, in the near neighbourhood, moved into Augsburg, and settled there permanently. In the first entry in the records in which his name occurs he is called “Michel von Schönenfeld,” but in 1454 his surname is given as “Holbain,” this being the common spelling of the name in Augsburg at that time, or, less frequently, “Holpain.” This Michel Holbein, who came from Oberschönefeld, and died in Augsburg about 1497, and at one time was regarded as the father of Hans Holbein the Elder, is no longer considered to be identical with the latter, who was also named Michel and was a leather-dresser by trade. From 1464 to 1475 the last named was living in a house of his own, No. 472A in the Vorderer Lech, which is spoken of as “Michel Holbains Hus,” or “Domus Michel Holbains.” After 1475 he changed his dwelling more than once, and his several removals can be traced from the rate-books, in which his addresses at various dates are given as “Salta zum Schlechtenbad,” “Vom Bilgrimhaus,” “Vom Nagengast,” “In der Prediger Garten,” and so on. All these places were in the Vorderer and Mittlerer Lech, in that part of the city to the east of the Maximilianstrasse known as the Diepold, in the neighbourhood of the Lech canals and streams, by which Augsburg is watered, along the banks of which most of the smaller trades of the city were carried on and the workshops of the artificers and metal-workers were situated. In the years 1479, 1481, and 1482 Michel Holbein was absent from Augsburg, and appears to have left his wife behind him, for in 1481 it is noted against her in the rate-book that her husband was not with her (“Ihr Mann nicht bei ihr”). Michel Holbein died probably about the year 1484.[^[2]] His widow, whose name first occurs in the town records in 1469, continued to move from house to house, her addresses being given as “in der Strasse Am Judenberg,” “Von Sant Anthonino,” “Vom Diepolt,” and beyond the Sträfinger Gate.

HANS HOLBEIN THE ELDER

The name of “Hanns Holbain” first appears in the records in the year 1494. This was the painter usually known as Hans Holbein the Elder, to distinguish him from his more celebrated son. Although there is no actual proof of the relationship, there is every reason to believe that Hans the Elder was one of the sons of Michel the currier. He lived in the same quarter of the city as the latter, his address in 1494 being in the “Strasse vom Diepolt,” and two years later in the “Salta zum Schlechtenbad.” More than once Hans Holbein’s mother is mentioned as living with him, thus evidently at that time a widow, which affords further proof in favour of the connection.[^[3]] In 1504 it is recorded that Sigmund, his brother, was living in the same house with Hans, which confirms the statement by J. von Sandrart, one of the earliest of Holbein’s biographers, in his Teutsche Akademie (1675), that the elder Hans Holbein and Sigmund were brothers, a relationship of which absolute proof is to be found in the latter’s will. Sigmund was born after 1477, was of age in 1503, and died in Berne in 1540.[^[4]] The two painter brothers had several sisters. Between 1478 and 1480 the records speak of a daughter, Barbara von Oberhausen, as living with her mother, Michel Holbainin, and a few years later a second daughter, Anna Holbainin, who is sometimes called by the diminutive name “Endlin.” There appear to have been four sisters in all, but Sigmund Holbein mentions only three of them in his will, Barbara being apparently dead—Ursel (Ursula) Nepperschmid, of Augsburg; Anna Elchinger, living by St. Ursula am Schwall, in the same city; and Margreth Herwart, at Esslingen. The name of this last sister, Margaret, occurs in the town records from 1502 as “Gret” or “Margreth Holbainin.” In 1493 there is a reference to an “Ottilia Holbainlin,” but the use of the diminutive in this case suggests that she was a small child, and, therefore, more probably a daughter rather than a sister of Hans Holbein the Elder.

HANS HOLBEIN THE ELDER

At one time, before these authentic records of the Holbein family had been unearthed from the Steuerbücher and Gerichtsbücher of Augsburg, it was believed that a third painter named Hans Holbein had existed, the father of Hans Holbein the Elder. Attention was first called to him by Passavant in 1846, in connection with a painting then in the possession of Herr Samm of Mergenthau, and now in the Augsburg Museum. This picture, which represents the Virgin Mary seated on a grassy bank by a wall, with the Infant Christ in her arms, is signed “Hans Holbein, C.A. (i.e. Civis Augustanus) 1459,” a date too early for the picture to have been painted by Hans Holbein the Elder; but the inscription has been proved to be a forgery. Further proof of the existence of this painter was thought to have been discovered in connection with a second picture, forty years later in date, and in reality from the hand of Hans Holbein the Elder. It is one of a series of six pictures representing the principal basilicas of Rome, ordered by the nuns of St. Catherine in Augsburg in 1496, on the occasion of the reconstruction of their convent. The names of the several donors of these pictures, with the prices and other details, are preserved in the annals of the convent, compiled by the nun Dominica Erhardt from old records and documents. Extracts from this work were supplied to Passavant, including one with reference to the picture of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, now in the Augsburg Gallery (Nos. 62-64), which is signed “Hans Holbain” on the two bells in the tower, and bears the date 1499. The passage in question is as follows:—

“Item Dorothea Rölingerin hat lassen machen unser lieben frauen Taffel, die gestatt oder steht 45 gulden. Vom alten Hans Holbein hie.” (Item. Dorothea Rölingerin has ordered of old Hans Holbein a panel painting of our dear Lady for the sum of 45 gulden.)

The term “old Holbein,” Passavant thought, could only be applied to the grandfather of the family, for in 1499 Hans Holbein the Younger was still a little child, and his father too young a man to be termed “the old.” Later researches, however, proved that the extracts supplied to Passavant were incorrect, containing numerous amplifications and spurious additions not to be found in the original document, which, after considerable search, was discovered by Dr. Woltmann in the Episcopal Library in Augsburg. In the original record the price paid for the picture is given as 60 gulden, and neither the name of “old Holbein” nor of any other painter occurs, so that the myth of the grandfather Hans was finally demolished.

THE MYTHICAL BRUNO HOLBEIN

There is no record of the birth of Hans Holbein the Elder; but as the earliest dated picture by him so far discovered was painted in 1493, it is supposed to have taken place about 1473-4.[^[5]] There is equal lack of information as to the date of his marriage or the name of his wife. It was believed at one time, on the authority of Paul von Stetten, that she was the daughter of Thomas Burgkmair, and sister of the more famous Hans Burgkmair, and that the young couple lived with their father-in-law; but no confirmation of this legend has been discovered. The two families dwelt in the same street, “Vom Diepolt,” but Burgkmair’s house was No. 7, while Holbein’s was No. 17. His family, as far as is known, consisted only of his two sons, Ambrosius and Hans. A third son, Bruno, is mentioned by Remigius Faesch (1651) in his manuscript notes preserved in the Basel Library, compiled from information supplied to him from the Amerbach papers; but beyond this short notice, and a repetition of it by Patin, there is no trace of a Bruno Holbein to be found. There are two silver-point drawings, one of the head of a child in the Bernburg Library,[^[6]] and the other of a mitred bishop in the Albertina, Vienna,[^[7]] both dated 1515 and signed with the letters B. H. in monogram, which it has been suggested are the work of the supposed Bruno. Dr. Woltmann, however, considered them to be by Ambrosius Holbein. The latter, he says, was known by the diminutive name of “Prosy” in the family circle, and as at that time in Germany the letters p and b were often used indifferently—as can be seen in the spelling of Holbein’s own name in the Augsburg records, where it is sometimes given as “Holbain,” and sometimes as “Holpain”—it may well be that the monogram on these two drawings is that of “Prosy” or “Brosy” Holbein.[^[8]] Modern criticism, however, has shown that the attribution of these two drawings to Ambrosius is a wrong one.[^[9]]

THE “BASILICA OF S. MARIA MAGGIORE”

Hans Holbein the Elder, whose exceptional ability as an artist has always been overshadowed by the greater genius of his celebrated son, was one of the most representative painters of the Swabian School at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. His art, more particularly, but not only, in its earlier manifestations, shows the influence of Martin Schongauer, and, through Schongauer, that of Rogier van der Weyden and the Flemish School. The influence of Schongauer upon him is at times so marked that it has been suggested that he may have studied under him at Colmar during his younger days. Whether this be true or not, it is evident that Holbein was still under the spell of Schongauer’s painting during his stay in Isenheim towards the end of his life. The “Fountain of Life,” painted there in 1519, owed much of its inspiration to Schongauer’s “Madonna in the Rose Garden,” which Holbein must have seen in the not far-distant city of Colmar. Both in the types of his figures and the management of his draperies, as well as in the arrangement of his compositions, there is an echo of Schongauer’s art, which, however, may not have been derived through personal contact with that painter, but largely from the study of his numerous engravings, which were widely popular throughout Southern Germany. Schongauer himself, whose father, Kasper Schongauer, was an Augsburg painter, had studied, or, at least, had come much under the influence of, Rogier van der Weyden at Tournai, and had caught from him something of the sweetness and grace which characterised the finest Flemish art of that day. These characteristics, and others representative of the school, he handed on in his turn to the Swabian painters, the elder Holbein among them. Hans Burgkmair was one of Schongauer’s pupils, and was afterwards a near neighbour of Holbein, so that he also may have been an inspiring force in the moulding of the art of both the older and the younger Hans. Another of Schongauer’s followers, Bartolomaeus Zeitblom of Ulm, is also considered to have had some influence upon the elder Holbein’s painting. The latter, at one period of his career, became a citizen of Ulm, where he must have encountered Zeitblom, the leading painter of that city. Thus his earlier works show a gradual fusion of the methods of the old German or Rhenish School with those of the Flemings. He began to paint in the days when German art was almost uninfluenced by the great Italian Renaissance, which was gradually but surely spreading over Europe, but before the close of his career he had succumbed to its spell. A chronological examination of his later works shows what a vitalising force his study of Italian models had upon his style, though he did not accept these changes as easily or as rapidly as some of his contemporaries, such as Burgkmair. Unlike the latter, however, he never paid a visit to Italy, but he nevertheless found it impossible in the end to resist the new artistic impulses with which that country was then flooding the rest of Europe. It was not necessary for him, however, to cross the Alps in order to experience the magic spell of the new teaching, for Augsburg was one of the first of the South German towns to feel the effects of the Renaissance. The two chief routes from Italy, the western one from Milan, and the eastern road from Venice, met at its gates. The greater part of the trade between the Venetian States and Germany passed through the city, and its leading merchants had business branches in Venice and other North Italian towns. Many members of the Fugger and other patrician families of Augsburg spent long periods in the districts immediately south of the Alps, for the purpose of extending their trade connections; and the active commercial intercourse with Italy which resulted brought not only riches to the Augsburgers, but knowledge and love of the new culture as well, and thus through the old free city of Swabia the intellectual and artistic wealth of the Renaissance made its way into Germany. The elder Holbein was among those who reaped advantage from this intercourse between the two countries. Without entirely abandoning the solid German groundwork of his art, he stripped it, more particularly in his management of draperies, of many of its hardnesses. His colour grew more harmonious, and his handling broader and more free. His figures became less attenuated, and his heads, treated with greater realism, displayed more character, while the general composition of his pictures showed a greater dignity of conception and a deeper sense of beauty. In addition to these gradual changes in his art, the new influence wrought a complete alteration in his methods of dealing with all accessories and with the architectural backgrounds against which his subjects were placed, Renaissance forms and ornamentation taking the place of the earlier Gothic settings.

The earliest dated pictures which can be ascribed to him with any certainty are four altar-panels in the Cathedral of Augsburg, of the year 1493, which at one time formed the two wings of an altar-piece in the Abbey of Weingarten, representing Joachim’s Sacrifice, the Birth and the Presentation of Mary in the Temple, and the Presentation of Christ.[^[10]] They display a strong Flemish influence, with a warm, luminous colour, and considerable dignity and sense of beauty in the figures.

His next pictures of which the date is certain are of the year 1499,[^[11]] and include the picture of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore,[^[12]] the work already mentioned as ordered by Dorothea Rölingerin[^[13]] for the Convent of St. Catherine in Augsburg, and at one time attributed to the mythical grandfather Hans. It is a panel in the form of a broad pointed arch, corresponding, like the five other pictures of the series, with the vaulting of the chamber for which it was painted. It contains four scenes in three sections, divided from one another by gilded Gothic ornamentation. The lower half of the central compartment contains a view of the church, with a pilgrim kneeling at the altar. On the two bells is inscribed “Hans Holba—in 1499,” while an “H” is on one of the tombstones, and the date is repeated on the outer wall of the church. The upper part of the arch is filled with the Crowning of the Virgin. The division on the left contains St. Joseph and the Virgin adoring the Child in the stable, that on the right the Martyrdom of St. Dorothea, in honour of the donor of the picture, who is represented, a small figure, kneeling in prayer behind the saint. This picture is now in the Augsburg Museum (Nos. 62-64).

A second work in the same gallery (No. 61), of the same date, is, however, far inferior to the foregoing, the execution being careless and perfunctory. It was a commission from the nun Walburg Vetter, also for the Convent of St. Catherine, as an offering from herself, and in memory of her two sisters, Veronica and Christina, all three of whom lived, died, and were buried in the convent; and the indifference of the workmanship has been attributed to the fact that Holbein received extremely poor payment for it, only 26 gulden in all. It has an arched top, and is divided into a number of small compartments, with the Crowning of the Virgin above, and six roughly-painted scenes from Christ’s Passion below, in which the figures, more particularly of the executioners, are extremely repulsive. It is dated, and contains a long inscription.[^[14]]

Shortly after he had sent out this very inferior example of his art from his workshop, Holbein appears to have left Augsburg for a year or two, and to have settled in Ulm. His name is found in the Augsburg rate-books every year from 1494 to 1499, but is missing in 1500 and 1501, while there is a document in the Augsburg archives, dated Wednesday, November 6, 1499, which proves that in that year he had become for the time being a citizen of Ulm (“Hannsen Holbain dem Maller, jetzo Bürger zu Ulm”),[^[15]] though no traces remain of any work undertaken by him in that city. This entry is in connection with the contract for the purchase of a house in Augsburg from which Holbein received interest.

THE KAISHEIM ALTAR-PIECE

In 1501 he was in Frankfurt, engaged upon an altar-piece for the Dominican convent church. Two large panels, which once formed the back of the centre portion of this work, represent the genealogy of Christ and that of the Dominicans,[^[16]] each in two divisions. On the first there is a Latin inscription stating that the work was executed in 1501 to the order of the Superior, one “I. W.,” and concluding with the words, “Hans Hoilbayn de Avgvsta me pinxit.” These panels are now in the Städtisches Museum in Frankfurt, together with seven out of eight scenes of “Christ’s Passion,” which originally covered the outer and inner sides of the wings of the same altar-piece.[^[17]]

In 1502 he was back again in Augsburg, at work upon a large altar-piece for the monastery of Kaisheim at Donauwörth. Sixteen portions of it, which formed the inner and outer panels of the folding doors, are now in the Munich Gallery (Nos. 193-208).[^[18]] Between the years 1490 and 1509 the Abbot Georg Kastner spent much money on the adornment of the fine Gothic church of this famous imperial monastery, and in an old manuscript chronicle which has survived, there is a passage referring to this particular altar-piece, from which it is to be gathered that two other artificers of Augsburg, the sculptor Gregorius and the joiner Adolph Kastner, were associated with Holbein in the work. It speaks of them as three masters of Augsburg, who were the best masters far and near. The panels from the outer sides of the shutters represent scenes from the Passion, those from the inner ones incidents in the life of the Virgin and the childhood of Christ. The former are of inferior workmanship to the latter, and were no doubt produced wholly or in great part by an apprentice or assistant, for they display many exaggerated and grotesque types and a general lack of taste in composition. The inner panels show a far higher standard, and are from the hand of the elder Holbein himself, whose signature occurs no less than three times as “J. H.,” “Hans Holbon,” and finally the inscription, “Depictum per Johannem Holbain Augustensem 1502.” Studies for some of the heads are to be found in his sketch-book in the Basel Gallery. Several panels representing the martyrdom of the Apostles, at Nuremberg, Schleissheim, and elsewhere, have much in common with the Kaisheim altar-piece.

In the same year (1502) Holbein was engaged for a second time upon work for the Convent of St. Catherine in Augsburg. This was a panel, in three compartments, representing the Transfiguration of Christ,[^[19]] a commission from a leading Augsburg citizen, Ulrich Walther, whose daughters, Anna and Maria, were inmates of the convent, the former being the prioress. It is now in the Augsburg Gallery (Nos. 65-67). It was ordered to be made “to the praise of God and in honour of his two daughters,” and the price paid was 54 gulden 30 kreuzers. Walther, who, dying at the age of eighty-six in 1505, left behind him one hundred and thirty-three living descendants, is represented kneeling in the lower part of the left-hand compartment, with eight sons behind him; and in the corresponding part of the opposite compartment are his wife, the two nuns, and twelve others, daughters and daughters-in-law, also kneeling in prayer. These portraits, of which those of the younger children in particular are of considerable charm, form the happiest part of the painting. In the central subject, the movements by which the Apostles express their surprise at the transfiguration of their Master are exaggerated almost to the point of caricature. The side panels represent the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, and the Healing of the Possessed Youth.

THE “BAPTISM OF ST. PAUL”

A much finer work, painted for the same convent, is the “Basilica of St. Paul,”[^[20]] like the “Transfiguration,” now in the Augsburg Gallery (Nos. 68-70). Although undated, it is usually ascribed to the year 1504. It was ordered by Veronica Weiser, daughter of the Burgomaster Bartholomäus Welser. She was one of the wealthiest of the sisters, and was at that time secretary to the convent, and afterwards succeeded Anna Walther as prioress. It follows the shape of the other pictures in the cloisters, that of a broad pointed arch, and is divided into a central and two side panels, separated by late Gothic gilded ornamentation. It depicts scenes from the life of St. Paul. In the upper arched portion is the Mocking of Christ, while the lower compartments contain the Conversion, Baptism, Martyrdom, and Burial of St. Paul, with other events in his life in the background. In the central division Holbein has shown the donor seated in a chair in front of the basilica with her back to the spectator, an evident portrait, although the face is not visible. The name “Thecla” is written on the chair-back. The division on the left hand is of much greater interest, for it contains portraits of the Holbein family, including the earliest but one known of Hans Holbein the Younger. The subject is the Baptism of St. Paul (Pl. [1]), who is represented, a nude figure, standing in a stone font in the foreground. In the right-hand foreground the artist has placed a group of three spectators, a middle-aged man and two small boys, representing, according to old tradition, the painter himself and his two sons, Ambrosius and Hans. The truth of this tradition is confirmed by three drawings by the elder Holbein which still exist—one, a head of himself, a study for the St. Sebastian altar-piece, inscribed “Hanns Holbain maler—Der alt,” now in the Aumale Collection at Chantilly;[^[21]] and the others, in the Berlin Print Room, representing the two boys in the years 1502 and 1511.[^[22]] In the picture the painter himself, with long hair and a flowing beard, but the upper lip shaved, and dressed in a fur-lined coat, stands with his right hand resting upon the head of the younger boy, and with the first finger of his left points towards him as though wishing to draw particular attention to him. Ambrosius, with his hair curling upon his shoulders, stands with his right hand placed affectionately upon his younger brother’s shoulder, and with his left clasps the other’s hand. Both boys are dressed in grey cloth gowns, with gaiters and thick shoes, the elder having a pen-case and ink-bottle suspended from his girdle. Hans, a big-headed, round-faced, chubby little lad, six or seven years old, has shorter hair. One hand is raised to his chest, and the other grasps a stick. The father’s face is not a highly intellectual one, but is sensitive and amiable; that of the boy Hans is stronger in character, with a fine forehead and good mouth. On the opposite side of the picture there stands a lady, seen in profile, with plaited golden hair and a white head-dress. Her costume is a rich one, with brocaded sleeves, and the lower part of her skirts edged with pearls. Tradition, which is possibly correct, declares this lady to be the mother of the two boys. There is considerable likeness between her and Ambrosius, and it is evident that she is taking no part in the incident of the Baptism beyond that of a very passive spectator. The costume she wears precludes her from being the donor of the picture, who, indeed, is already represented in the central compartment. Holbein apparently introduced his whole family into the work. The only reason for throwing doubt on the tradition lies in the elaborate dress she is wearing, which seems too sumptuous for a poor painter’s wife; for the elder Holbein at this period of his life was in frequent difficulties over money. Mr. Gerald Davies draws attention to a drawing by him in coloured chalks in the Munich Print Room, which, he thinks, represents the wife some years earlier, perhaps before her marriage.[^[23]] “It is,” he says, “a very charming drawing of a young woman, not of any special beauty beyond that which belongs to every young face which has the sparkle of happy pleasure in the lips and eyes; the hair is partly covered with a white cap, into which some delicate yellow is touched, and she wears yellow sleeves and bands of the same colour across the white chest front. Allowing for some years’ difference in age, this may well, I think, be the same person as she who appears in the Augsburg picture. But, whether it be the mother of the great painter or no, it is certainly a study which shows Hans Holbein the Elder to have been possessed in some degree of those very qualities in which his son afterwards stood supreme. There is something of the same sympathetic power of seeing, and the same completeness of recording what has been seen, without pedantries and without makeshifts, all that gives to any given human face its charm and its interest.... There is in it something of inspiration which neither care nor industry nor strength—and there are certainly artists stronger than he—can give. There is in this drawing the germ, and something more than the germ, of the spirit of his great son.”[^[24]]

This altar-piece, in which the figures are represented at about one-third the size of life, marks a considerable advance in Holbein’s art, both in technical qualities, the harmony of colouring, and in the drawing of the figures and natural arrangement of the draperies. When ordering the picture, Veronica Welser at the same time commissioned Hans Burgkmair to paint one of the Basilica of Santa Croce and the legend of St. Ursula. Only one payment, 187 gulden, is recorded for the two. As Burgkmair’s picture is dated 1504, it is natural to suppose that Holbein’s altar-piece was painted at about the same time.

Vol. I., Plate 1.

THE BAPTISM OF ST. PAUL
Left-hand panel of the “St. Paul” Altar-piece, with portraits of the Holbein Family
Hans Holbein the Elder
Augsburg Gallery

THE ELDER HOLBEIN’S TROUBLES

Between the years 1504 and 1508 Holbein found frequent employment in connection with the Church of St. Moritz in Augsburg. Various payments are recorded in the church account books, but the pictures he painted cannot now be traced. Among them appear to have been two large altar-pieces, for which he frequently received small sums in advance at his own request. On the 28th October 1506, he agreed to supply four altar-panels for 100 gulden, receiving 10 gulden on account. Money was evidently scarce in the Holbein household in these years; he was even obliged to borrow 3 gulden from the churchwarden’s wife. For the second altar-piece, commissioned on the 16th March 1508, he was to receive the considerable sum of 325 gulden; but, as he was evidently still in debt, the whole of the money was not paid directly to him, but was handed over to various creditors; thus 74 gulden was paid to one Thomas Freihamer. On the same occasion Holbein’s wife received a present of 5 gulden from the church authorities, and his son, no doubt Ambrosius, one gulden.[^[25]]

The elder Holbein, indeed, was often in monetary difficulties, more particularly towards the end of his life. From time to time he was sued for small sums by impatient creditors. In 1503 he went to law with a neighbour, Paulson Mair, and on the 10th May 1515 he was sued by his butcher, Ludwig Smid, for one gulden. In the following year he was twice in the courts, the second time at the suit of one Jörg Lotter for the small amount of 32 kreuzers. On the 12th January 1517 his own brother, Sigmund, was obliged to take proceedings against him for a debt of 34 florins, money advanced to enable Holbein to move his painting materials to “Eysznen”—that is, Isenheim in Alsace—to which place he went towards the end of 1516 for the purpose of painting an altar-piece for the monastery of St. Anthony. Once again, in 1521, a certain Hans Kämlin sued him before the justices for two sums of 40 kreuzers, and 2 florins 40 kreuzers. Thus, in spite of numerous commissions, which, however, were not always well-paid ones, he often had great difficulty in supporting his household in comfort.[^[26]]

THE “ST. SEBASTIAN” ALTAR-PIECE

The scope of this book does not permit a detailed description, or even a bare list, of his numerous works. Two only of his later, and probably his finest, paintings must be alluded to briefly—the “Martyrdom of St. Sebastian,” in the Munich Gallery (Nos. 209-211), painted shortly before his departure from Augsburg to Isenheim, and the “Fountain of Life,” in Lisbon, both of which were at one time ascribed to his younger son.[^[27]] The “St. Sebastian” altar-piece,[^[28]] which in earlier days was rightly regarded as a work of the elder Holbein, is thought to have been one of several commissions given to him by the nuns of St. Catherine in Augsburg. The entry in the archives which is supposed to refer to it merely states that “Sister Magdalena Imhoff has given 3 gulden to the new Sebastian, for the Holy Cross on the altar, and the lay sisters 2 florins. This is the cost of the said picture.” Neither the name of the artist who was employed upon it nor the date of the order is given, and from the wording of the entry, and the very small price paid, it seems evident that it cannot refer to so important a painting as the “St. Sebastian.” Dr. Woltmann was probably right in suggesting that what was ordered was merely a painted wooden figure of the saint, which was to be added to a carved group of the Crucifixion on the altar of the church.[^[29]] The picture was first attributed to the younger Holbein by Passavant and Dr. Waagen, who were misled by the forged extracts from the St. Catherine annals, in which the passage quoted above was considerably amplified, the “St. Sebastian” being definitely described as a picture “by the skilful painter Holbein,” with the additional information that it was ordered in 1515, and placed in the church in 1517, after its rebuilding, and that Magdalena Imhoff paid 10 gulden towards it, and the other lay sisters 2 gulden each. As a result of this falsification, the authorship of the picture was taken from the father and given to the son, and, in consequence, it was regarded for a number of years as an extraordinary manifestation of youthful genius. Even when the forgery was discovered, such critics as Dr. Woltmann and Mr. Wornum continued, from considerations of style, to uphold the picture as an early Augsburg work of the younger Holbein. The inner and outer panels of the wings, in particular, were considered to afford undoubted proof, by their high artistic merit and their method of handling, that they were from the brush of the son; and some modern critics still maintain that, if not entirely his work, they were nevertheless carried out by him under his father’s supervision, although they show a much more finished and mature style than is to be found in the first sacred paintings he produced in his early Basel days. Professor Karl Voll of Munich holds that no one but the younger Hans could have painted the lovely figures of St. Elizabeth and St. Barbara. Dr. Glaser, on the other hand, is of opinion that the whole altar-piece is the work of Hans Holbein the Elder. The picture is undated, though Passavant states that it is inscribed “1516.” According to Förster, in 1840 the old frame bore the inscription “1516, H. Holbain.” Dr. Woltmann placed it in the year 1515, but at that date the younger Hans had already left Augsburg for Basel. From considerations of style, however, and the strong Renaissance influence it displays, it is now generally considered to have been executed by Hans Holbein the Elder in or about 1516, prior to his departure from Augsburg to Isenheim.

Judged by his authentic works of this date in Basel, it is difficult to allow that the younger Holbein had any serious part in the painting of this altar-piece, though he may have worked on some of the details under his father’s direction. Whether originally painted to the order of the nuns of St. Catherine or not, the picture is said to have been found in their possession on the abolition of the convent. It was acquired in 1809 from the church of St. Sauveur in Augsburg.

The central panel (Pl. [2]) shows the nude figure of the saint, transfixed with arrows, his right arm fastened by a chain above his head to a fig-tree. Four archers at very close quarters are shooting at him, the one kneeling in the left foreground, in the act of bending his bow, being dressed in a striped costume of blue and white, the colours of Bavaria, the hereditary enemy of Augsburg. Behind them stand spectators in rich costumes, two on either side, the foremost one on the right being the officer of the Emperor Diocletian, who is directing the execution. In the background is a river, on the far side of which rise the towers and buildings of a city, with the Alps beyond. The outer panels of the shutters are painted with the “Annunciation to the Virgin,” and the inner ones with the figures of St. Barbara and St. Elizabeth (Pl. [3]). St. Barbara, who is attired in a purple mantle, a blue dress embroidered with gold, and wide white puffed sleeves, holds a cup with the Host hovering over it. St. Elizabeth has also a purple mantle, and a dress edged with fur. With her left hand she gathers up her cloak, in which she is carrying bread for the poor, and with the other pours wine from a tankard into a shallow bowl held by one of the two beggars crouching at her feet. These two suppliants, both of whom are afflicted with leprosy, have been painted with extreme and even repulsive realism. Behind the leper on the right appears the head of the painter himself, kneeling in adoration. The background in both these panels is similar in character to the central one, that behind St. Elizabeth representing, so it is said, a view of the Wartburg, near Eisenach; while above and below are deep bands of rich Renaissance ornamentation, of the type of design which the younger Holbein afterwards carried to so high a degree of excellence. The whole work, though still retaining many indications of the earlier influences which moulded the elder Holbein’s art, is strongly imbued with the newer conception of painting received from Italy. The drawing of the nude displays greater knowledge than in the “St. Paul” altar-piece, the colour is finer, and the figures of the two saints on the shutters possess much grace and beauty. There are several silver-point studies for the picture in the Copenhagen Museum, while the study for the head of Holbein himself is, as already pointed out, at Chantilly.

Vol. I., Plate 2.

THE MARTYRDOM OF ST. SEBASTIAN
Central Panel
Hans Holbein the Elder
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Vol. I., Plate 3.

ST. BARBARA ST. ELIZABETH
Inner sides of the wings of the St. Sebastian Altar-piece
Hans Holbein the Elder
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

“THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE”

It is in the “Fountain of Life” (Pl. [4]),[^[30]] painted in 1519,[^[31]] that the strongest proofs of the elder Holbein’s final surrender to the influences of the Italian Renaissance are to be discovered. This picture, like more than one other of his works, was formerly ascribed to the son. Nothing is known of its earlier history, but it is said[^[32]] to have been taken from England to Portugal by Catherine of Braganza, daughter of John IV of Portugal, and wife of Charles II, when she returned home a widow after the king’s death in 1685, and that it was presented by her to the chapel of the castle of Bemposta, where it remained until removed to the royal palace in Lisbon forty or fifty years ago. It thus appears to have belonged to the royal collections of England in Charles II’s time, but no traces of it are to be found in any inventory. If the picture ever was in this country, it can have been only for a short time, for about the year 1628 it was in the collection of the Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria, and is very carefully described in a manuscript catalogue of his pictures of that date, with the measurements, the date, and the name of the artist—“von Hanns Holpain ao 1519 gemalt.”[^[33]] It is signed “Iohannes Holbein Fecit 1519,” but from its present condition this signature seems to have been painted over an older one. Attention was first called to the picture by Pietro Guarienti, keeper of the Dresden Gallery, who was in Portugal from 1733 to 1736. He read the name as “Holtein,” and considered it to be the work of one of Holbein’s pupils. This would indicate that the signature was then becoming illegible, and that it was renovated some time after Guarienti saw it. On the inner edge of the circular fountain in the foreground there is also an inscription, “Pvtevs Aqvarvm Viventivm,” which has also been retouched by some clumsy hand, for the older writing, white on a brown ground, can still be seen beneath it.

The background, which occupies the upper half of the picture, is filled with a building or open loggia of very elaborate architecture in the style of the Italian Renaissance, with pillars of vari-coloured marbles, and capitals and friezes richly carved and decorated. In the central foreground, on the steps which ascend to this building, the Virgin appears, enthroned. The Infant Christ sits astride her right arm, firmly clasped against her breast. The Virgin appears to have been painted from the same model as the Virgin on the outer shutters of the “St. Sebastian” altar-piece. The Fountain of Life drips from a marble Cupid’s mask on the step below her feet into a small circular basin, on the edge of which is placed a tall vase with a spray of white lilies. Behind her carved chair stand St. Joseph and St. Anne, and on either side of her are groups of three saints, the two foremost ones being seated, with the folds of their dresses spread over the flower-strewn grass. On the right is St. Dorothy, in a richly-brocaded costume, and behind her kneels St. Catherine of Alexandria with her right hand stretched towards the Infant Christ, as a sign of their betrothal. On the left St. Margaret is seated, with a book and a long cross, and a dragon at her feet, and behind her St. Barbara is kneeling, holding the cup with the Host. Two other saints complete the near groups, and in the background a number of other saints are placed on either side. One of the figures is not unlike the so-called wife of Holbein in the “St. Paul” altar-piece. Still farther off, beyond the rails of the portico or temple, are three groups of singing and playing angels with vari-coloured wings. In the distance is an elaborate landscape, with a tall palm-tree, classical ruins, and a view of sea and mountains. Bands of dark cloud stretch across the sky, and the evening light still lingers over the waters, producing a peaceful and rather sombre effect. The composition is the most considerable to be found in any of the elder Holbein’s works, and is well grouped and arranged. The influence of Martin Schongauer can be very clearly traced in it, and the unusual position in which the Virgin is holding the Child is directly derived from Schongauer’s beautiful “Madonna in the Rose Garden,” which Holbein must have studied in the neighbouring city of Colmar.[^[34]] There were also altar-panels by Schongauer in the Isenheim Monastery itself, where Holbein appears to have been working when he painted the “Fountain of Life.” In addition to this direct influence, others, both Flemish and Italian, are to be traced in it, but well fused, so that the whole composition is unforced and natural, and contains passages of much beauty. There is delicacy and warmth in the flesh tints, and the sincerity of feeling which pervades all the principal figures is one of its chief charms. The rich architecture of the background shows good understanding and appreciation of the Italian models upon which it is based, and in all ways the picture indicates that when the elder Holbein put forth his greatest powers he was worthy of being ranked among the best German painters of the early sixteenth century.

Vol. I., Plate 4.

THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE
Hans Holbein the Elder
National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon

Although he does not appear to have had many opportunities of exercising his skill as a portrait-painter, his very numerous studies in this branch of art show abilities of a very high order, and possess many of the qualities, though in a lesser degree, which his son afterwards developed to so high a pitch of perfection. Indeed, in these portrait-studies of men his art attains its greatest strength and finest accomplishment. Sixty-nine of his drawings of heads are preserved in the Imhoff Collection in the Berlin Museum. They are on the leaves of sketch-books, and were made between 1509 and 1516, in silver-point and pencil, some of them strengthened with white and with red chalk. A smaller number of heads from the same series are in the Copenhagen Museum, and at Basel and Bamberg, while isolated examples are to be found in the print rooms of more than one European museum. Some of the Basel drawings were made before 1508, and in the collection of M. Léon Bonnat, which contains several fine silver-points by the elder Hans, there is one of the Augsburg goldsmith, Jörig Seld, dated 1497.

THE ELDER HOLBEIN’S STUDIES

These drawings, which at one time were all ascribed to his son, and are so attributed in the first edition of Dr. Woltmann’s book, represent citizens of Augsburg in all classes of life, many of them, no doubt, personal friends of the painter, who, in a number of cases, has written their names on the sketches. There is no evidence to show that the majority of them were preliminary studies for portraits for which he had received commissions; they were done partly for his own amusement and practice, and partly to serve as models for figures in his sacred paintings. They form, nevertheless, a very valuable record of the Augsburg life of his day, and so may be compared, in the wideness of their range at least, with the more brilliant series of drawings by his son. In numerous instances the same sitter has been drawn two or three times; of Johannes Schrott[^[35]] and Hans Griesher,[^[36]] monks of St. Ulrich, there are no less than seven and six respectively. Among them there are portraits of the Emperor Maximilian,[^[37]] on horseback, in helmet, and with sword, and of his grandson, afterwards Charles V,[^[38]] with a falcon on his wrist, inscribed “herzog karl vo burgundy.” As Charles became Duke of Burgundy in 1515, and King of Castile in 1516, the drawing must have been made in the former year. There are several portraits of members of the great Fugger family, among them Jacob Fugger,[^[39]] the head of the clan; his nephews, Raimund[^[40]] and Anton[^[41]]; his cousin, Ulrich Fugger the Younger,[^[42]] and his wife, Veronica Gassner[^[43]]; and several more. Other leading Augsburg families are represented in heads of Gumprecht Rauner,[^[44]] Hans Nell,[^[45]] Hans Pfleger,[^[46]] and Hans Herlins,[^[47]] and members of the court circle by such men as Kunz von der Rosen,[^[48]] the Emperor Maximilian’s lifelong friend and adviser. Included among these drawings are representations of more than one of Holbein’s fellow-workers in art, such as Hans Schwartz[^[49]] the wood-carver, and Burkhart Engelberg,[^[50]] stone-carver and architect. Representatives of more lowly pursuits are Gumpret Schwartz,[^[51]] schoolmaster, and one Grün,[^[52]] a tailor, and certain “merry fellows” of the artisan class. The heads of ladies are not very numerous, but one of them, the wife of the Guildmaster Schwartzensteiner,[^[53]] a typical example of the “good wife” of Augsburg, has been drawn no less than three times. A less reputable personage among them is Anna, known as “the Lomentlin,”[^[54]] who was twice expelled from the town for serious misconduct, and returned in the end apparently repentant, afterwards posing as a saint, and professing to be able to live without meat or drink. One of the most important groups in this series of drawings represents the monks of St. Ulrich, Augsburg’s famous monastery—Heinrich Grün,[^[55]] Leonhard Wagner,[^[56]] Conrad Merlin,[^[57]] Johannes Schrott, Hans Griesher, and others. Finally, there are a few studies of heads of members of the artist’s family, including his own likeness, that of his brother Sigmund,[^[58]] and the double portraits of his two sons, which have been already mentioned.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY OF AUGSBURG

There is a small finished portrait of a lady of Augsburg, whose Christian name only, Maria, is known, in the collection of Sir Frederick Cook, at Richmond, which is the sole example of portraiture by the elder Holbein in England; and, indeed, with the exception of the portrait of a man, dated 1513, in the Lanckoronski Collection in Vienna,[^[59]] which is also attributed to him, it is very possibly the only specimen of such work by him in existence. This portrait is of particular interest, because it conflicts with the statement of Dr. Glaser, that he never painted an independent portrait.[^[60]] It was formerly attributed to the younger Holbein, but most critics failed to see his hand in it; and, when exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1906, it was described as of the South German School, with a note recording that the names of Schaffner and Ambrosius Holbein had been tentatively suggested in connection with it. Dr. Friedländer, however, considered it to be a work of the younger Holbein in his early Basel period. In 1908 Dr. Carl Giehlow suggested that the older painter was its real author, and drew attention for the first time to the fact that a fine study for it exists in the British Museum (Pl. [5]); and further evidence in favour of this attribution has been brought forward by Mr. Campbell Dodgson.[^[61]]

The picture is on panel, 13¾ by 10½ inches. The sitter wears a white cap with embroidered margin of fleur-de-lis pattern. Her yellow bodice, trimmed at the edges with a broad band of black velvet, opens in front to show a white under-garment patterned in black and gold. The girdle is studded with gold ornaments. The hands are hidden, being pushed within the sleeves, as though for warmth. The background is plain blue, and on the back of the panel is painted “Maria” in an abbreviated form, evidently the sitter’s Christian name. On the front of the old original frame is inscribed: “Also.was.ich.vir.war.in.dem. 34. iar.” (So was I in truth in my thirty-fourth year.)

The silver-point drawing in the British Museum is, says Mr. Dodgson, “a delicate piece of work, in perfect preservation, and so fresh and spontaneous that it must be regarded as a study from life, preparatory to the picture, and not as a copy from the latter. It is significant that only the main outlines of the costume are noted, and that ornamental details, which it would have taken a long time to draw, are reserved for the final execution of the portrait in oils; nothing of the kind is even suggested except the fleur-de-lis pattern on the cap. All the essential outlines of the figure itself, on the other hand, are drawn with a careful and expressive line, which notes the folds of the flesh beneath the chin more accurately than the creases of the sleeve at the elbow.” This drawing, like the portrait itself, is neither signed nor dated, so that it may be suggested, by those who see in the finished work the hand of the younger Holbein, that the drawing also is the work of the son. There is, however, a second drawing of the same lady in the Berlin Museum,[^[62]] one of the series of the elder Holbein’s studies, in which she is represented in almost the same position, and wearing the same dress, though apparently several years older.[^[63]] It does not seem to be a repetition of the earlier drawing, but a fresh portrait from life made after a considerable interval. The Berlin drawing is undoubtedly the work of the elder painter, while the one in the British Museum is closer to his style than to that of his son at the period in question, when the latter was still in his teens, as shown in such early Basel drawings as the studies of Meyer and his wife. The new attribution, therefore, appears to be the correct one, the evidence in favour of the elder Holbein being, if not conclusive, at least very strong.

Vol. I., Plate 5.

STUDY FOR THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY OF AUGSBURG
Silver-point drawing
Hans Holbein the Elder
British Museum

Little is known of the last eight years of his life. The “Fountain of Life” is the only picture painted by him during that period which has survived.[^[64]] It is supposed that he never returned to Augsburg, but died in Isenheim; but that he spent the whole period there seems unlikely. Isenheim is close to Basel, and it is not impossible that his last days were passed under the roof of his son Hans in the latter city. A letter, dated 4th July 1526, and addressed to the Vicar of the Order of St. Anthony in Isenheim by the burgomaster of Basel, Heinrich Meltinger, bears out this supposition.[^[65]] It was written on behalf of Hans Holbein the Younger, and by means of it he made a final attempt to obtain possession of, or compensation for, his father’s painting materials, which the latter had left behind him, or which had been detained for some purpose by the monastery authorities. From this letter it appears, also, that the son had made more than one previous attempt, during his father’s lifetime, and at the elder painter’s request, to get the goods returned; from which it is to be inferred that for some considerable time prior to his death Hans Holbein the Elder had left Isenheim. In 1521, as already pointed out, he was sued by Hans Kämlin for a small debt, but this does not necessarily indicate that the painter himself was in Augsburg at the time. His death took place in 1524, as is proved by an entry in the Handwerksbuch of the Augsburg Painters’ Guild of that year, in which “Hannss Holbain maller” is noted as deceased; but this again does not prove that his actual death occurred in that city.

CHAPTER II
YOUTHFUL DAYS IN AUGSBURG

Birth of Hans Holbein the Younger—Forgeries of dates on early pictures attributed to him—Various portraits bearing on the question of the year of his birth—His early life in Augsburg—The family house on the Vorderer Lech—Early training in his father’s studio—Hans Burgkmair—Augsburg and the decorative arts.

NO absolutely conclusive proof has yet been discovered of the exact date of the birth of Hans Holbein the Younger. For years the question was complicated by more than one forgery of dates and signatures on certain pictures in Augsburg, and by spurious amplifications made in the modern copies taken from certain entries in the annals of the convent of St. Catherine. Owing to these forgeries, Dr. Woltmann, in the first edition of his book,[^[66]] advanced the opinion that Holbein was born in 1495; but before the publication of the first volume of the second edition of his work, in 1874, these inscriptions and entries had been proved to be falsifications, and he then altered the date to 1497,[^[67]] and this is now generally accepted as correct. Equal doubt existed at one time as to the place of his birth. Among earlier writers, Carel van Mander (1604) and Patin (1676) stated that he was born in Basel, while Matthis Quad gave his birthplace as Grünstadt in the Palatinate. Sandrart (1675) was the first biographer to name Augsburg, which modern research has shown to be correct. The forgeries, no doubt, were the result of the discovery that Holbein was not a Swiss, as had been usually supposed, and were intended to supply convincing evidence that he was of German origin, and a citizen of Augsburg, and also to furnish proof of the precocity of his youthful genius.

THE YOUNGER HOLBEIN’S BIRTH

The chief forgery was an inscription on a picture in the Augsburg Gallery (Nos. 74-77), dated 1512, which until 1845 had always been rightly regarded as the work of the elder Holbein. This picture is one of the four panels which originally formed the inner and outer sides of the two shutters of an altar-piece or shrine painted for the convent of St. Catherine.[^[68]] The two inner panels represent the Martyrdom of St. Catherine[^[69]] and the Legend of St. Ulrich, the patron saint of Augsburg; the outer ones the Crucifixion of St. Peter, and the Virgin and St. Anne teaching the Infant Christ to walk. On the panel representing St. Catherine the date 1512 occurs on a votive tablet containing a Latin prayer to the saint, while on the old original frame the name of the painter, “Hans Holbain,” the two last letters of the surname now defaced, stands in gold letters.[^[70]] It was upon the panel representing the Virgin and St. Anne with the Infant Christ[^[71]] that the false inscription was placed. In this picture Mary and her Mother are seated, each holding a hand of the youthful Saviour, who stands between them on the bench making his first attempts to walk. Three small angels hold up a curtain behind them, and at the top of the panel is a band of rich Renaissance ornamentation, with two cupids blowing horns.[^[72]] St. Anne holds an open book on her lap with her left hand; and when, in 1854, the panel was separated from its obverse side and cleaned and restored, a Latin inscription upon this book came to light, parts of which were hidden by the hand of the saint. This inscription stated that the picture had been painted “by order of the venerable and most pious mother Veronica Welser—Hans Holbain, of Augsburg, at the age of 17.”[^[73]] Before this Dr. Waagen[^[74]] and several other critics had attributed this altar-piece to the younger Holbein because of supposed differences in style between it and the greater number of the authenticated works by the father. The newly-discovered inscription, which was accepted as genuine by Dr. Woltmann and most German writers, was considered to afford final proof of the truth of Waagen’s contention, though a few, among them Herman Grimm, refused to credit it. It was not until after the death of A. Eigner, the keeper of the Augsburg Gallery, and the originator of the falsification, in November 1870, that it was possible to apply a practical test to it, with the result that it proved to be a modern forgery. Upon the application of turpentine the whole of the inscription disappeared, and traces of a much earlier and badly-defaced one were found beneath it. The discovery of its fictitious nature led to further investigation, and the final abandonment of the date 1495 as the year of the painter’s birth, while the picture is now rightly restored to the older artist who painted it.

THE YOUNGER HOLBEIN’S BIRTH

Far more reliable proof as to the correct date of Holbein’s birth is afforded by the fine silver-point drawing by the elder painter, in the Berlin Museum, of the heads of his two sons (Pl. [6]).[^[75]] Between the heads is written “Holbain,” and over that of the younger boy on the right the word “Hanns,” with the age “14” above the name. Over the head of the elder boy on the left the shortened name “Prosy” is still legible. Probably the first syllable, “Am,” has become obliterated in course of time, or it may be that the father merely set down his nickname, “Prosy.”[^[76]] The age of Ambrosius, which must also have been added, is now entirely effaced. At the top of the sheet is placed the date, which to-day is barely legible. Dr. Woltmann read it as “1511,” which would give the birth-year of Hans as 1497, and this reading is now generally accepted. The same writer imagined that he could trace the figure “5” above the head of Ambrosius, which would make his age fifteen, and thus one year older than his brother. In the drawing itself, however, he appears to be at least two or three years the senior. Dr. Willy Hes, in his recently-published book on Ambrosius Holbein, states that this now almost obliterated age-figure is “17,” and this is probably correct.[^[77]] Both heads are full of character. The younger boy, with round face, and straight hair falling on his forehead and covering his ears, though not a child of much personal beauty, has a pleasant, thoughtful expression. The forehead is a fine one, projecting over the eyes, and showing, according to phrenologists, a strongly-developed power of imagination, while the mouth is large and determined. Ambrosius has more mobile features, and a mass of curling hair. This drawing, which at one time was attributed to the younger Hans, is one of the most masterly in the Berlin series, and shows how largely the son’s great gift of lifelike portraiture was inherited from his father.

THE YOUNGER HOLBEIN’S BIRTH

Dr. Hes also publishes a second drawing by the elder Holbein from the Berlin collection,[^[78]] which, as he was the first to point out, undoubtedly represents the two boys at an earlier age. This silver-point drawing, hitherto known merely as “Portraits of two Children,” and bearing the inscription “Thomasins Sohn und Tochter” in a later hand, represents the two boys in profile, facing one another. It is not of such fine quality as the drawing of 1511, but the likeness to Ambrosius and Hans is unmistakable. In this earlier study Dr. Hes considers the age of the boys to be eight and five respectively. The further researches of the same writer have resulted in his discovery of a third likeness of the elder son from his father’s pencil, a beautiful drawing of a curly-haired lad with looks cast downwards. It is among the silver-point drawings of Hans Holbein the Elder in the Basel collection,[^[79]] and seems to be connected with two other works by the Augsburg master, both also at Basel, for which, perhaps, it may have served as a preliminary study. One is an Indian-ink study for a “Death of Mary,” and the other a large oil-painting of the same subject (No. 301). In both the features of the youthful St. John, who bends over the Virgin with palm-branch and long candle in either hand, are evidently those of Ambrosius. This drawing[^[80]] is dated 1508 on a slate hanging at the head of the bed, so that the “St. John” represents the boy at the age of about fourteen. A still more youthful figure, with long hair, stands behind the wooden head of the bed, with clasped hands, gazing down at the Virgin. It may be suggested, though Dr. Hes does not call attention to it, that in this figure we have a third likeness of the younger Hans. The resemblance to the heads in the two drawings is not as close as in the case of Ambrosius, but is sufficiently so to permit the conjecture that the father intended to introduce both his boys into the picture to be painted from this study. The connection between these drawings and the picture at Basel is not, however, very clear. In the oil-painting[^[81]] Mary is enthroned, the arrangement is entirely different, and many more figures are introduced; but the figure and face of the St. John are the same as in the Indian-ink drawing, though seen from the opposite side. According to the Basel catalogue, however, this picture was painted in 1501, and it does not appear very probable that the painter would have used a boy of seven as his model for the Saint. Behind St. John appears the curly head of a young man looking down; and here again, though possibly only in the imagination of the present writer, there is a faint resemblance to Hans the Younger. But this cannot be so if the picture was painted in 1501, when Hans was only four. The same figure of St. John occurs also in the “Death of Mary,”[^[82]] on one of the panels of the Kaisheimer altar-piece at Munich. We have thus, in these drawings, together with the “Basilica of St. Paul” picture of 1504, portraits of Ambrosius Holbein at the ages of eight, ten, fourteen, and seventeen respectively, and of Hans when five, seven, and fourteen,[^[83]] and also, if the likeness in the Indian-ink drawing of 1508 be allowed, at the age of eleven as well.

Vol. I., Plate 6.

AMBROSIUS AND HANS HOLBEIN
1511
Silver-point drawing
Hans Holbein the Elder
Royal Print Room, Berlin

Further evidence as to his birth-date is afforded by two engravings, by Vorsterman and Hollar respectively, and several miniatures of Holbein by himself, some of the latter being only early copies, all of which are dated 1543, and give the age as forty-five. Vorsterman’s print, which is 4¾ inches in diameter, shows no date on the background, but round the outside is engraved “Ioannes Holbenius Pictor Regis Magnæ Britanniæ Sui Cæculi Celeberrimus Anno 1543 Ætat: 45.” Hollar’s etching is also circular. There is no lettering round the rim, but across the background is inscribed: “HH. Æ. 45—An^o 1543.” Below is the legend—“Vera Effigies Johannis Holbeinii Basiliensis Pictoris et Deliniatoris rarissimi. Ipse Holbeinius pinxit, Wenceslaus Hollar aqua forti æri insculpsit. Ex Collec: Arundel: 1647.”[^[84]] The original paintings from which these two engravings were taken have not been discovered, but they were, no doubt, two small roundels in oils.[^[85]] In Carel van Mander’s time two such portraits were in existence. He says, when speaking of Holbein’s works then in Amsterdam: “At the house of Jacques Razet, the fine arts amateur, I saw Holbein’s portrait, painted by himself very prettily and neatly, in miniature, with a small margin round it; and in the possession of Bartholomäus Ferreris, I saw a second, about the size of the palm of my hand, excellently and neatly executed in flesh tints.”[^[86]] Sandrart, who was in Amsterdam between 1639 and 1645, gave to the collector Le Blond a small round portrait of Holbein, and this is probably identical with the one which Van Mander saw in the possession of Razet. From Le Blond, who acted as agent for the Earl, it may well have passed into the Arundel Collection before 1647, in which year Hollar etched it. Vorsterman’s engraving is not dated, but it is evidently taken from the same or an almost similar original, and this artist engraved other pictures in the Arundel collection. According to Walpole, the picture in the Earl’s possession was dated. He says, quoting from one of the pocket-books of Richard Symonds:—“In the Arundelian collection was a head of Holbein, in oil, by himself, most sweet, dated 1543.”[^[87]] The various miniatures of the painter, the greater number of which are merely good and almost contemporary copies, described in a later chapter,[^[88]] have all, with one possible exception, the same date, 1543, upon them, and, like the engravings, represent the artist with a beard, wearing a black skull-cap, and, in those which show the hands, in the act of painting. The exception is the fine miniature in the Salting Collection, which is inscribed “Etatis svæ 35,” but is without date. It is almost certain, however, that this miniature does not represent the painter.[^[89]]

HOLBEIN’S BIRTHPLACE

The fact that the inscriptions on these various engravings and miniatures agree as to the date and the age of the painter does not necessarily prove that such date and age were placed by the artist himself upon the original painting on which most of them are based; but the probability is that such was the case, and that Holbein, therefore, was forty-five years old in 1543. Unless, however, more definite evidence is forthcoming in the future, the question must remain undecided, though it is practically certain that his birth took place either in 1497 or 1498.

Nothing is known of Holbein’s early life in Augsburg, where he spent the greater part of his first seventeen years. It is not very likely that his father took his family with him upon his painting expeditions to Ulm, Frankfurt, and elsewhere, although he became a burgher of the first-named place for a time. It was the custom at that period for a painter to leave wife and children at home while he visited other centres in search of work or to carry out commissions. The house in which the young Hans is supposed to have been born is still standing in Augsburg, and bears a recording tablet on its front. It is in the Vorderer Lech, No. 496A, one of the quieter streets of the city to-day. It is thus described by Mr. Davies: “The Vorderer Lech obtains its name from the fact that a narrow channel of the Lech runs clear and green down one side of the street, separating the roadway from the houses on the north side. Access is gained to these houses in most instances by a wooden bridge or gangway which leads the visitor under an archway in the house itself. The house of the Holbeins, one of those little whitewashed buildings with the comfortable red-tiled roofs which are so plentiful in the city, has nothing to distinguish it beyond the tablet aforesaid. You pass under the arch, and find on either side the doors (still retaining their ancient hinges) and the open staircase which leads to the separate tenements into which the house is now divided. Ascending the staircase to the right, one finds the little room wherein tradition has it that our Hans Holbein was born, the little kitchen over which his mother presided, and the room which is traditionally regarded as the painting room of Hans Holbein the elder. It looks pleasantly out over enclosed gardens and picturesque roofs up towards the statelier buildings of the Maximilianstrasse. The house is not luxurious, but may well have been a house of no small comfort in the days when the Holbeins held it.”[^[90]]

It is impossible to point to any work of this period which can be accepted without question as from the hand of the younger Holbein alone. Both he and his brother Ambrosius received a very thorough training in their father’s workshop, and for the last few years before their departure for Basel they must have taken an active though minor share in the completion of the various commissions which fell to the elder painter. Many attempts have been made to separate the work of the father from that of his sons in such pictures as the “St. Catherine” altar-piece panels of 1512, already described, and the more famous “St. Sebastian” altar-piece in Munich; but the critics have never been able to come to any settled agreement as to the particular parts of these pictures, if any, which were the actual work of the younger Hans. It is only possible to say with some certainty that he must have been employed by his father on the less important portions of his altar-pieces, and that such work would be carried out under the personal direction of the elder painter, who alone was responsible for the general design and composition, and the arrangement of the colour-scheme, if not for the actual painting of the figures and the chief passages of the pictures. It is not possible to allow, as some writers have done, that such figures as the St. Elizabeth and St. Barbara on the shutters of the Munich “St. Sebastian” altar-piece were conceived and carried out by the younger Holbein independently of his father, although he may have shared to some small extent in the actual painting of the panels. They display a more advanced technique, and an art in all ways more matured, than is to be found in the earliest independent work of Holbein’s first Basel period.

THE DECORATIVE ARTS IN AUGSBURG

In his father’s studio Holbein obtained a very complete grounding in all the technical processes of his art, and was encouraged to develop that extraordinary gift for portraiture which he had largely inherited. The family seems to have been so frequently hard-pressed for money that the two boys would be obliged, at as early an age as possible, to begin to work seriously for a living, and in this way would gain much useful practical knowledge and facility in the handling of brush and pencil. In other respects Holbein’s art was apparently more strongly influenced by the example of Hans Burgkmair, who was some twenty-five years his senior, than by that of his own father, and more particularly in his ready assimilation of the newer methods and aspirations springing from the Italian Renaissance, which afterwards became so perfectly blended in his painting with those older forms and conceptions of the Germanic school of the fifteenth century, in which he was first trained in the elder Holbein’s workshop. Burgkmair returned from Italy about 1508, full of enthusiasm for the new movement, and his example must have acted as an inspiration to Holbein’s budding genius. Not only in his pictures and wall-paintings, but in his remarkable designs for woodcuts for the two great works in his own honour projected by the Emperor Maximilian—the “Weisskunig,” and the “Triumphal Procession”—Burgkmair exercised an undoubted influence over his younger contemporary. A year or two later in Basel Holbein’s art appears to have been affected to some extent, though indirectly, by that of Hans Baldung Grien and Matthias Grünewald, through the medium of some painter whose name so far has not been traced.[^[91]] Other causes, too, were at work in moulding him for his future career. The city of Augsburg was exceptionally well fitted for providing incentives to a young artist to develop his powers in many directions. The practice of decorating the more important buildings of the city and the mansions of its merchant-princes with wall-paintings both within and without provided work for numerous artists, and in this way, no doubt, Holbein first began to practise a form of art which a few years later he was to carry to so high a pitch of excellence in Lucerne and Basel. Numerous printers, too, were settled in the city, who provided employment for many wood-engravers and designers of book illustrations and ornamentation—the latter a form of art in which Holbein was very busily engaged during the first ten years of his residence in Switzerland. His skill, too, in making designs for workers in gold and silver, in enamels and painted glass, must have received its first encouragement in Augsburg, which was noted for its craftsmen. Every branch of handicraft, indeed, was practised there. Its armourers, headed by the great Kolman family, were celebrated throughout Europe, while the Augsburg goldsmiths were equally famous for the artistic excellence and fine workmanship of their productions. Among such masters in their various arts the youthful Holbein moved, and it must have been from personal intercourse with them that he gained his first knowledge of design, and how it should be rightfully applied to the service of the several decorative arts, and how best modified to suit the nature of the materials used in each particular handicraft; and that he made the most of his opportunities is proved by the fact that when, a few years later, he started upon an independent career in Basel, the first works he produced show him to have been even at that early age an almost complete master of decorative design.

CHAPTER III
FIRST YEARS IN SWITZERLAND

Departure of Hans and Ambrosius from Basel—The “Virgin and Child” of 1514—The painted Table at Zürich—Their arrival in Basel—Heads of the Virgin and St. John—The “Cross-Bearing” at Karlsruhe—The five scenes from “Christ’s Passion” at Basel—Work for the Basel printers—Holbein’s first title-page—The marginal drawings to Erasmus’ “Praise of Folly”—The share of Ambrosius in these illustrations—The legend of the painter’s intemperance—The Schoolmaster’s Sign-Board—Double portrait of Jakob Meyer and his wife—The “Adam and Eve.”

THE fortunes of the Holbein family, never very brilliant, having become still more precarious, if existing records are to be believed, the two sons, now approaching manhood, resolved to seek employment farther afield. Possibly in 1513, but more probably in the spring of 1514, they turned their backs on Augsburg and set out for Switzerland. Whether Basel was their objective from the beginning or whether they arrived there more or less by chance, in the course of their wander-year, and finding work plentiful, resolved to make it their headquarters, there is no actual proof to show; but their uncle, Sigmund, had been settled in Switzerland for some years,[^[92]] and had established himself in good practice in Berne, and this fact may have had something to do with the resolve of the younger Holbeins to turn their faces in that direction. The discovery of a little picture of the “Virgin and Child,” dated 1514, in a small village near Constance, which is attributed to Hans, affords some evidence that their departure from Augsburg took place in that year; that they had reached Basel some time in the spring or early summer of 1515 is proved by the existence of more than one authentic work by the younger brother bearing that date. Not long afterwards the father himself left Augsburg for Isenheim, near Gebweiler, in Alsace, at no great distance from Basel, and, so far as is known, never returned to his native city, so that the old home was finally broken up.

THE “VIRGIN AND CHILD” OF 1514

The small picture of the “Virgin and Child” (Pl. [7]) was discovered in the village of Rickenbach, near Constance, by Herr Anton Seder, and on the sale of his collection in 1876 it was acquired for the Basel Gallery (No. 302).[^[93]] It came originally from the Maria Wallfahrts (Pilgrimages) Church of Rickenbach. On the background of the panel, on either side of the Virgin’s head, are two coats of arms, the one on the left being that of the Von Botzheim family, and that on the right of the family of Ycher von Beringen. The picture, therefore, is supposed to have been ordered by Johann von Botzheim, canon of Constance, son of Michael von Botzheim and Anna Ycher von Beringen.

The Virgin is shown to the knees, a seated figure, holding the Child in her lap, upon whom she gazes with downcast eyes. She clasps him to her with her left hand, the right hand being placed under his chin. Her white dress of soft material is arranged in a multiplicity of small folds, each carefully drawn, and is decorated with a band of gold embroidery; the wide flowing sleeves are drawn in above and below the elbow with similar bands, and resemble the sleeves in the “St. Barbara” of the “St. Sebastian” altar-piece. The lower part of the dress is a very dark blue, almost black. She wears a golden crown, and her fair hair falls upon her shoulders, as in the famous Darmstadt “Madonna.” The Child lies quietly in her arms, a somewhat sad expression on his face, with his small toes curled up, both feet and hands being admirably drawn. The background is a deep red, and over the Virgin’s head hangs a festoon of laurel leaves, suspended from the painted framework which surrounds the group. This framework represents white stone pillars, with panels of black marble decorated with Renaissance ornamentation, and a number of small naked putti, three on either side and seven on the top. Some of these little winged angels salute the Virgin with trumpets, others carry the instruments of Christ’s Passion, and four of them hold small tablets for inscriptions. These delightfully natural little figures are painted in an ivory tone and stand out well against the dark background. The work is immature, but displays a very tender, sympathetic feeling, and possesses very considerable attractions. The colour-scheme, in which few tints are employed, is delicate and harmonious, and indicates that the artist already possessed a true sense of its possibilities. The type of the Virgin resembles that employed by the elder Holbein in such pictures as the “Fountain of Life.” The natural affection of mother for child is well expressed, both in the downcast face and in the drawing of the hands with which she holds the little one close to her.

On the plinth at the base of the picture is inscribed, in Roman lettering: “Que virgo peperit virgoque permanet lactavit propriis uberibus deum portantemque gerebat ulnis prona trementibus. M.D.XIIII.” It is regarded as the earliest authentic work of the younger Hans, but neither his signature nor his initials are now clearly distinguishable upon it, and its authorship is not absolutely certain. The four small tablets in the hands of the putti at one time held inscriptions. No traces of them remain on the two on the right, but portions of those on the left are still visible. On the upper one there appears to be part of a Latin sentence and the remains of a date “151—.” On the right-hand side of the lower one can still be deciphered some letters of a three-lined inscription, in the top line “R.A.,” in the middle one “C.A.” (Civis Augustanus), and in the bottom one the painter’s monogram. To the writer this latter appears to resemble more closely that of Ambrosius, “AH,” rather than that of Hans, “HH.” If this supposition be correct, it would indicate that the elder brother was the author of the picture, or, at least, that he had a share in the painting of it. In style it resembles almost as closely the few known works by Ambrosius as the earlier Basel works of Hans; indeed, in some ways, it approaches more nearly to the elder brother’s art, as seen in his drawings. In these there is a slight hesitancy and lack of decision in the touch which is not met with in the younger Holbein’s work of the same period. The tenderness of feeling displayed in the picture is also to be found in such drawings by Ambrosius as the head of a young girl inscribed “Anne,” in the Basel Gallery, while the putti have much in common with those which bear the shields above the heads of his two charming portraits of unknown boys, also at Basel. These putti, however, have a still greater likeness to those so frequently used by his brother Hans, as can be seen very plainly in the first title-page designed by him a year or two later; indeed, the whole framework of the picture recalls his handiwork. It may be suggested, therefore, that the Rickenbach “Madonna” was painted, in part at least, by Ambrosius. The two youths appear to have travelled together—though there is no absolute proof of this—and it might be expected that any small commissions picked up on the way would be given to the elder brother, who, again, may have been assisted in carrying them out by his younger companion. Dr. Ganz points out the close resemblances between this picture and a silver-point drawing at Basel attributed to the two brothers.

Vol. I., Plate 7.

VIRGIN AND CHILD
1514
Basel Gallery

THE PAINTED TABLE AT ZURICH

A work of a very different kind, the Painted Table at Zürich,[^[94]] has been regarded by some writers as the result of a commission received by Hans Holbein during a halt in that town on his journey to Basel. This, however, was not the case. It must have been painted after he had settled in the latter place, for it was ordered on the occasion of the marriage of Hans Baer, a citizen of Basel, with Barbara Brunner on the 24th June, 1515, either by Baer himself or by some friend of his as a wedding present, and the coats of arms of the two families are represented on it. Shortly afterwards the bridegroom left Basel for the Italian wars, marching as standard-bearer with one of the mercenary troops, and was killed at the battle of Marignano on the 14th of September in the same year.

This large table-top is of wood, and oblong in shape, with a slab of slate inserted in the centre. This broad wooden border or framework is painted with hunting, fishing, jousting, and other outdoor scenes. One of the longer sides is occupied with a number of mounted knights with long lances engaged in a tournament, attended by their squires and servants. The action is very spirited, and several of the individual figures are finely conceived. The corresponding side is devoted to hunting scenes, including the chase of the stag, the wild boar, the hare, and the bear. The last-named animal is represented in the act of overturning a number of bee-hives. The decoration of one of the end borders shows the banks of a river with a number of men and women engaged in fishing, using both the rod and nets of great variety. In the meadow at the back a table is spread for a meal, and two women are cooking at a fire. On the other end is depicted a lady and gentleman out hawking, with the branches of the surrounding trees crowded with birds of many kinds, and rabbits playing on the grass, and, on the left, some game is shown in progress, in which young men are capturing girls in nets. The slate slab in the middle contains two principal subjects. One of them represents the old legend of “St. Nobody,” the unfortunate mythical personage usually accused of being the author of all breakages and accidents in German households, and incapable of defending himself from such false accusations, and, for this reason, represented by Holbein with a padlocked mouth, and surrounded by broken crockery and other objects of daily use. A comic poem on “Nobody,” by Ulrich von Hutten, published in Basel at about the time the table was painted, suggested this subject, and some lines from it are inscribed on a ribbon-scroll above the dejected saint. The second subject is also humorous, and shows a pedlar sleeping by the roadside, quite unconscious of a troop of monkeys who have plundered his pack. Over the rest of the surface a number of small scattered objects have been painted, as though left there by the owner. These formed a part of the joke, and were painted with a realism intended to deceive, and with the expectation that the spectator would attempt to pick them up. Among them are a pair of spectacles, a seal, a quill-pen, and penknife, scissors, a carnation, and a folded letter with a seal, round the margin of which part of the painter’s signature, “Hans Ho,” can still be deciphered, though the coat of arms itself is not that of the Holbein family. A circle in the centre of the table contains the armorial bearings of Hans Baer and his wife.

In the year 1633 the table was presented to the State Library of Zürich, where it was held in high estimation throughout the seventeenth century. Both Sandrart and Patin saw it there. The former describes it at some length. “In particular,” he says, “there is a large table which is worthy of inspection, entirely painted by our Hans Holbein the younger, on which, in artistic oil colours, he has represented the so-called Saint (Nobody) sitting sadly on a broken tub, his mouth fastened up with a great lock. Around him torn old books are lying, earthen and metal vessels, glass pans, dishes, and various other utensils, but all broken and destroyed. An open letter, on which Holbein’s name stands, is so naturally represented, that many people have seized it by mistake, thinking it is a real one. The rest of this table is ornamented with various hunting scenes and foliage.” Patin speaks of it as “a square table, about five spans broad, on which are depicted dancing, fishing, hunting, fish-spearing, represented for the most part playfully.” In spite of this praise, in course of time it became neglected, and finally disappeared, and was not heard of again until 1871, when it was discovered by Professor Salomon Vögelin, buried under thick dust and a mass of old papers, and in a very damaged condition.[^[95]] It now forms one of the chief treasures of the Zürich Library, but it has been so seriously injured by the neglect and ill-usage to which it was subjected for so long a time, that even after more than one careful attempt at restoration, much of Holbein’s original and entertaining work has permanently disappeared.

ARRIVAL OF HOLBEIN IN BASEL

Although the exact date of the arrival of the two brothers in Basel is not known, there is evidence to show that they were busily at work there throughout the year 1515. Possibly it may have been their original intention to make a halt in that city of only some months’ duration; but they found it so profitable a field for their labours that they determined to remain there permanently. Basel, with its famous University, was at that time the home and refuge of many of the ablest thinkers and writers of the day, and it opened its gates freely to all whose advanced opinions made Germany and other parts of Europe undesirable as places of residence. Its many printing-presses were already celebrated, and the printers and publishers found constant employment both for learned scholars who edited for them new editions of the classics and the fathers of the Church, and for a large body of draughtsmen, designers, and wood-cutters who were engaged in illustrating their publications with portraits, pictures, title-pages, and innumerable initial letters and other ornaments. This well-paid and regular work which the city offered to all artists of ability was, no doubt, the real cause which induced the two brothers to become citizens of Basel.

Among the earliest works produced there by Hans were two small heads of saints now in the Basel Gallery (Nos. 308, 309), apparently intended to represent the Virgin Mary and St. John the Evangelist. (Pl. [8]).[^[96]] The Virgin is wearing a crown, and her long straight hair falls upon her shoulders, as in the Rickenbach “Virgin and Child” of the previous year. The type of face, too, is the same as in that picture, and is seen again in the “Adam and Eve” picture of 1517. St. John is represented as a beardless young man with curly hair, and here again the head closely resembles that of the man in the “Adam and Eve.” Each has a large golden nimbus, which stands out against a plain pale-blue background. These small panels are pleasant in colour, and carefully painted, but otherwise afford few indications of the artist’s future greatness. They formed part of the Amerbach collection, and in the inventory are described as the young Holbein’s first works. (“Item einer heiligen iungen und iungfrawen köpflin mit patenen vf holz mit ölfarb klein H. Holbein erste arbeit.”)

Vol. I., Plate 8.

THE VIRGIN MARY
Basel Gallery

ST. JOHN
Basel Gallery

EARLY “PASSION” PICTURES IN BASEL

The earliest work of Hans which is both signed and dated is the small panel in the Karlsruhe Gallery (No. 64), representing “Christ Bearing the Cross,” a composition crowded with small figures.[^[97]] In the centre Christ has fallen to his knees under the weight of the Cross, and is urged forward by the brutal soldiery, clad in the costume of the mercenary landsknechte of Holbein’s day. On the right stands St. Veronica holding the handkerchief, and behind her the mounted Centurion, with a small dog running by his horse’s feet, both animals very inadequately rendered. On the left is a group consisting of the weeping Virgin, St. John, Simon the Cyrenean, who is helping to raise the Cross, and Joseph of Arimathea. Behind the chief characters is a crowd of armed men and spectators issuing from the gate of a town, and in the background a hilly landscape with distant buildings. It is signed “H.H. 1515,” and was at one time attributed to the elder Holbein, and is still considered to be from his hand by some writers. It is so described in the first volume of the second edition of Woltmann’s book, but in the second volume he reverses his opinion, and modern criticism is mainly in agreement with this. Though in many ways a crude performance, it appears to be an undoubted work of the younger painter, conceived under the influence of his father. The figure of the stumbling Christ, the action of Simon, and of the soldiers striking at Christ are all reminiscent both of the “Cross-bearing” panel in the “Passion” series by the elder Holbein in the gallery of Prince Carl von Fürstenberg at Donaueschingen, (Nos. 43-54),[^[98]] and of the similar subject in the Vetter votive picture of the year 1499 in the Augsburg Gallery (No. 61). Upon the back of the Karlsruhe picture are the badly-damaged remains of a second “Passion” subject, the “Crowning with Thorns,” also by the younger Hans, first published by Dr. Paul Ganz in his recent book, which also has much in common with the same two works by the elder Holbein.[^[99]] The work, again, is closely akin to the five scenes from “Christ’s Passion” in the Basel Gallery (Nos. 303-307), which are certainly among the very earliest productions of the younger Hans. Two of these, “The Last Supper” and “The Scourging of Christ,” belonged to Bonifacius Amerbach, and are the best of the set, the remaining three having been acquired in 1836 at a sale in Basel. They are painted on canvas, instead of on panel, an unusual method for pictures of any value in those days, and for this reason it is supposed that they were ordered for some special purpose, such as the decoration of a church during Holy Week, after which they would be rolled up and put away until wanted again in the following year. The hasty execution which they betray possibly arises from the same cause. They may have been wanted in a hurry, and the pay for them was perhaps too small to allow of careful, elaborate work, which, indeed, would not be necessary, considering the temporary purpose for which they were intended. They have also been taken as affording indications that the young painters did not immediately on their arrival set up an independent workshop of their own, but entered for a period the service of some Basel artist as journeymen painters for a weekly wage.

The composition of these “Passion” pictures, it is urged, is too elaborate to be the unaided invention of the two young men, and it is therefore assumed that the designs were provided by some other painter, and that Hans and Ambrosius carried them out under his instructions. The name of Hans Herbster, whose portrait by the elder brother[^[100]] is now in the Basel Gallery (No. 293) has been suggested in this connection. On the other hand, although it is not easy at the first glance to recognise the workmanship of Hans in these coarsely-painted pictures, it is equally difficult to point to any one among the older painters then in Basel who, judged by existing works, was capable of producing compositions of this importance; in any case, the colour-scheme was probably Holbein’s own, as well as the vigorous expression given to the heads, which, however, in some of the subjects is exaggerated to the verge of caricature. The grotesquely ugly and brutal executioners in “The Scourging” have much in common with such works of Hans Holbein the Elder as the Passion scenes at Donaueschingen, and it may very well be that these five pictures were the unaided productions of Hans and his brother, based upon the knowledge of similar paintings by their father, in the execution of which they had in all probability given him assistance, and that they did not renew their prentice days in Herbster’s or any other workshop, but started as independent painters from the first.

In the “Last Supper” (No. 303) (Pl. [9]),[^[101]] the meal is laid on two tables placed at right angles, with Christ sitting at the angle, and he is represented in the act of passing the bread across the table to Judas, who, dressed in yellow, is half rising from his seat. The supper takes place in an open loggia or courtyard, the background being filled with archways and openings through which the deep blue sky is seen. In the distance on the right is a representation of the Washing of Peter’s feet. In the night scene on the Mount of Olives (No. 304),[^[102]] the kneeling Christ lifts up his arms with a passionate movement. The angel, a much fore-shortened figure in red draperies, flies head foremost from the skies bearing the host. Christ and St. Peter, who is asleep in the left foreground, are darkly clad. The background, with its tall, gloomy trees, is illuminated by the torches and lanterns of the soldiers entering the garden, while the light of the coming dawn is just breaking along the horizon.

Vol. I., Plate 9.

THE LAST SUPPER
Basel Gallery

EARLY “PASSION” PICTURES IN BASEL

The “Arrest in the Garden” (No. 305)[^[103]] is a composition crowded with figures, and is full of movement and noise. In the centre Judas is kissing Christ, who is surrounded by armed men; and on the left Peter, with uplifted sword, has just struck off the ear of Malchus, who, screaming with pain, and flinging one arm over his head, has fallen prone on the ground, while Christ reaches down his hand to heal the wound. Clever use is made of the spears, maces, and other upraised weapons of the soldiery, which are seen against the dark sky. Many of the movements of the figures are awkward and ugly, and the faces of the men who are dragging Christ away are repulsive and exaggerated, but the general effect produced is an impressive one, and the grouping is noteworthy as the work of a youth of seventeen or eighteen.

The picture of the “Handwashing” (306)[^[104]] is the finest of the series, more particularly in the left-hand half of the composition, which represents Pilate in the act of washing his hands in a golden dish. He is clad in dark green, with an ermine cape over his shoulders, and an Eastern turban, and is seated on a throne or daïs with pillars of coloured marbles and an arch filled in with a shell design. Two attendants, one in yellow and black, hold the basin and pour out the water from a golden ewer. On the right, Christ, in dark blue and crowned with thorns, is led forth to execution. In this picture the colour is less crude and violent than in most of the others of the series, and in technical achievement, more particularly in the draughtsmanship of the group of Pilate and his attendants, is somewhat higher.

In the “Scourging” (No. 307) (Pl. [10]),[^[105]] Christ, a nude figure, is bound round the waist to a pillar in the prison, his uplifted arms being fastened to an iron ring above his head. His body is scored with wounds from the lashes of his executioners, his head falls in agony upon his shoulder, and one leg is dragged across the other in the extremity of his pain. The action of his torturers is of the utmost violence, and they jeer at him as they rain heavy blows upon his defenceless body. The scene to be depicted was a brutal and ruthless one, and to drive it home to the spectators, Holbein spared no details or efforts to make it as brutal in paint as it was in deed. The agony of Christ is well expressed, and considerable knowledge is displayed in the drawing of the body. The bright garments of the executioners form a striking though harsh contrast to the pale flesh tints of Christ and the stone wall of the cell, through the doorway of which on the right Pilate is gazing at his victim. Though by no means faultless, this picture has qualities, both of expression and of execution, which are remarkable when the age of the painter is remembered, qualities which already give indications, however faint, of the coming greatness of the master. This picture, and the one of the “Last Supper,” are noted in the Amerbach inventory as among Holbein’s first works.

Taken as a whole, the series displays numerous reminiscences of the art of the father, sufficiently so, indeed, to make needless the supposition that in the painting of them the artist was assisted by some older practitioner of Basel. They possess considerable dramatic power, and the draughtsmanship, though in parts faulty, is often excellent, the signs of hasty manipulation, which are very apparent, being due, no doubt, to the fact that the pictures were intended to serve merely as processional standards or temporary “stations of the Cross”; but the colour throughout is for the most part crude and harsh. It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine how much of them was the work of Hans and how much that of his brother Ambrosius. The three which do not form part of the Amerbach collection were regarded at the time of their acquisition by the Basel Gallery as the handiwork of Holbein the Elder, but this ascription has been long since abandoned. Mr. Davies is of opinion that the “Pilate Washing his Hands” is entirely the work of the younger Hans, and that “The Scourging” is almost wholly by him, while he gives “The Agony in the Garden” and “The Arrest” to Ambrosius alone.[^[106]] One is on safer ground, however, in confining oneself to the assertion that the pictures were produced in the common workshop of the two youths, and that both of them may have had something to do with the painting of all five canvases, but that the predominant hand was that of the younger brother.

Vol. I., Plate 10.

THE SCOURGING OF CHRIST
Basel Gallery

EXAGGERATED TYPES

These pictures were painted at some date between 1515 and Holbein’s departure for Lucerne in 1517, and are based largely upon the knowledge obtained in his father’s workshop in Augsburg, before the short visit to Lombardy produced so rapid an awakening of his genius. Dr. Ganz places them in the last-named year, and draws attention to the strong similarity of many of the motives to those of Dürer’s “Little Passion” series of engravings, thus showing that the younger artist must have borrowed from them freely.[^[107]] It is probable that the set was originally a larger one, and that one or two of them are now missing. There is an elaborate pen drawing on a dark grey ground, washed with Indian ink and heightened with white, in the Basel Gallery, which is very closely allied to these canvas pictures of the Passion. It represents the “Bearing of the Cross,” under the weight of which Christ has fallen on his hands and knees.[^[108]] He is in the centre of a body of soldiers and callous onlookers, who have just issued from the gate, the procession deploying along the outer wall of the town with its circular watch-tower. The head of the procession turns at a sharp angle round the corner of the wall. Christ looks up with his face contorted with agony, while one of the leading soldiers strikes at him with a heavy club, and a second pulls violently at the ropes in order to make him rise again. Behind them a third soldier bears the ladder, while a fourth man is carrying huge nails and the various implements to be used in the Crucifixion. The head of Christ is evidently based upon Dürer’s representation in his “Passion” series. In the brutality and grotesqueness of the faces of the soldiery and the lack of expression of those of the accompanying mob, many of whom do not even glance towards the prostrate figure, this drawing closely resembles both the Karlsruhe “Cross-bearing” of 1515, which must have been painted on the journey to or shortly after Holbein’s arrival in Basel, and the Passion series just described. In order to bring home to the spectator the cruelty of the scene depicted, and his detestation of it, he makes use of violent movement and brutal types, and even in the head of our Lord the agonized expression is so pronounced that it becomes painful to look upon. After he had gained wider experience of the art of the great painters of Northern Italy, Holbein gradually rid himself of these cruder and more vehement methods, and depicted the pitiful story by means of more natural and less exaggerated types, helped by a deeper insight into character. During these early years he was often employed in painting subjects from the “Passion,”[^[109]] and the gradual change in his point of view and the maturing of his art can be seen very plainly in them, from the early Karlsruhe panel and the canvas series and the drawing just described to the great altar-piece in eight scenes in the Basel Gallery, and, finally, in the masterly set of ten designs for glass-painting in the same collection, in which the fruits of his Italian experience are seen to so great an advantage. In the “Cross-bearing” scene in the large altar-piece, as well as in the later design of the same subject for painted glass, the procession issues from a similar gateway and passes along walls with the same round tower shown in the earlier examples. In the former, too, the procession turns sharply to the left, as in the Basel drawing, while the same type of face in the soldiery occurs in all, but gradually becoming less exaggerated and truer to life. The ill-treatment shown to Christ, though still brutal, is less violent in its exhibition, and the Saviour, though faltering under his burden, has not fallen to the ground. In the altar-piece his face is bent downwards, and cast into shadow by the Cross beneath which he staggers, so that his agony is hidden, while in the glass design the face, though agonized, has a spiritual beauty which is not to be found in the drawing now in question. This latter is undated, but Dr. Ganz places it in the year 1517, and he considers that it is most probably Holbein’s design for a picture, now lost, which originally formed one of the early “Passion” series on canvas.[^[110]] Holbein drew this figure of Christ over again for the very beautiful woodcut of which only the single impression, in the Amerbach collection, is known. This woodcut,[^[111]] which, from the beauty of its cutting, must be from the hand of Lützelburger, recalls Dürer even more strongly than the drawing, from which it differs slightly. Christ, who has fallen to his knees, has one arm round the bar of the Cross, the other hand resting on the stony ground. A small twisted tree, almost leafless, is on the right, and the background consists of a cloudy sky. The head, with its crown of thorns, long hair falling on the shoulders, its open mouth, and the drops of bloody sweat on the brow, is a wonderful realisation of deep suffering nobly borne.

THE “PRAISE OF FOLLY” DRAWINGS

Both Hans and Ambrosius appear to have obtained regular employment from the Basel printers and publishers very shortly after their arrival in the town, but more particularly from Johann Froben, one of the best known of them all, who was then issuing, among many fine books, numerous works from the pen of Erasmus. The earliest work of this nature which Holbein produced was a title-page in the form of a Renaissance arch with a number of small cupids, one blowing a horn, others with spears, two holding the flat cartoon or roll of parchment in the centre reserved for the lettering of the title-page, and two others supporting a shield with Froben’s trade-mark, the caduceus (Pl. [11]).[^[112]] This appears to have been cut towards the end of 1515, and did service in several books issued by Froben during the next few years, including More’s Utopia in 1518. Two small panels at the top contain the artist’s signature, “Hans Holb.” This interesting specimen of Holbein’s youthful skill in design and other examples of his earlier work for book illustrations are dealt with in a later chapter. Another design of the year 1515 formerly attributed to Hans, and afterwards to Ambrosius, was the coat of arms of Petrus Wenck, painted in gouache on parchment, in the Matriculation Book of the Basel University, of which Wenck was rector in that year. It represents a man in Roman armour holding a large shield with a coat of arms in each hand. It is reproduced by Dr. Willy Hes in his recent book on Ambrosius Holbein, Plate xxxviii., who shows that it is not the work of either brother.

By far the most important of Holbein’s surviving works of the year 1515 is the series of drawings, eighty-two in all, which he made on the margins of a copy of Erasmus’ Encomium Moriæ, or “Praise of Folly.” Erasmus paid his first visit to Basel in 1513, in order to make arrangements with Froben for the publication of his Adagia and his edition of the New Testament. The two men became close friends, and Erasmus, who from that time spent some months every year in Basel, always stayed in Froben’s house during these annual visits until 1521, when he made Basel his permanent home. This biting and jesting satire on the follies of mankind, written in Latin, with its punning title on the name of Sir Thomas More, was composed by Erasmus, according to his preface, during his journeys on horseback, and was done in order to beguile the weariness of the way. It was published by Froben in 1514, and Holbein’s pictorial commentary upon it was drawn in a copy of the first edition, now preserved in the Basel Gallery.[^[113]] The little pictures have been done with the pen on the broad margins by the side of the passages of the text to which they refer. All that is known of the history of the book is that it possibly belonged at one time to Erasmus himself, and afterwards to the theologian and schoolmaster Oswald Molitor, or Myconius. At a somewhat later date Basilius Amerbach, son of Erasmus’ friend, Bonifacius Amerbach, who continued to add to the collection of Holbein’s works formed by his father, obtained it with some difficulty, thanks to the kindly intervention of the painter Jakob Clauser, from Daniel Wieland, the town-clerk of Mühlhausen, who was very loath to part with it. Molitor’s ownership of the book is proved by an inscription on the title-page: “Est Osualdi Molitoris Lucerni”; and the earlier ownership of Erasmus by a second inscription on the second title-page, also in Molitor’s handwriting: “Hanc moriam pictam decem diebus ut oblectaretur in ea Erasmus habuit,” which shows that the marginal illustrations were completed in ten days, and that Erasmus derived much entertainment from them.[^[114]] Molitor was living in Basel until 1516, and afterwards in Zürich and his native city, Lucerne, returning finally to Basel in 1532. It has been suggested that on the death of Erasmus, of whom Molitor was a friend and admirer, he received the book from Bonifacius Amerbach, who was the philosopher’s residuary legatee, and made a point of presenting valuable mementos to a number of Erasmus’ closest friends. The book contains annotations in Molitor’s handwriting, and from one of them we learn that the illustrations were done in 1515.

Vol. I., Plate 11.

HOLBEIN’S EARLIEST TITLE-PAGE
First used in 1515
From a copy of More’s “Utopia” in the British Museum

THE “PRAISE OF FOLLY” DRAWINGS

It has been suggested, too, that the drawings were made by Holbein at the personal request of Erasmus, which is not very probable; and again, that Molitor gave the commission, and selected the passages to be illustrated, which is much more likely, and when finished presented the book to his friend, and that it was for this reason that Amerbach made a point of giving it back to him on the death of Erasmus. The book has also been taken as a proof that Holbein had gained a good knowledge of Latin in his school days, and that he selected his own passages for the pictures; but the few Latin inscriptions on his paintings do not indicate much proficiency in that language. The supposition that Molitor was the prime mover in the matter, and that it was done for him personally, and not as a gift to be presented to Erasmus, is by far the most probable; for, as stated above, he was in Basel at the time, and this would account for Holbein’s apparent knowledge of the language in which the book was written. On the other hand, the pen drawings in more than one instance do not so much illustrate the incidents and sense of the text, as isolated sentences and phrases which appear to have caught the fancy of the artist, and, therefore, are not likely to have been selected for pictorial comment by a learned student of the book. In recent years the drawings have been subjected to a searching examination and comparison, and Dr. Ganz was the first to point out that it is impossible to accept the whole of them as by Hans Holbein.[^[115]] Considerable variations in style are to be noted, and it is now held, and with good reason, that while the more important share of the work was due to Hans, not only did Ambrosius contribute a certain number of the drawings, but that a third artist, some unknown Basel painter of the school of Urs Graf, and possibly even a fourth, also had a hand in it. One of these drawings, which represents Jupiter seizing the naked Ate by the hair, and flinging her across his knees in order to chastise her with his thunderbolts, bears letters which until recently were regarded as the initials of Ambrosius, though not his usual monogram; but this inscription has now been correctly read by Dr. Hes as the word “Aten,” and refers to the subject, and not to the author of the drawing.[^[116]]

The two brothers must have been in constant communication with Froben, and for the purposes of the work they undertook for him would pay many visits to his house “zum Sessel” in the Fischmarkt, where Erasmus also had his headquarters, and where, no doubt, they first made his acquaintance. The illustrations to the “Praise of Folly” may thus have been begun in some idle moment in a copy of the book found lying about in Froben’s office, to pass the time while waiting for proofs or instructions in connection with work in hand; and having been thus begun, the interest would grow, and the printer himself would encourage its completion, and, perhaps, show it to Erasmus himself more than once during the short period of ten days in which the eighty-two drawings were accomplished. Any lack of profound Latinity on the part of the brothers, who in turn jotted down their fancies on the book’s margin, may have been overcome by Froben himself translating passages of the book to them.

The sketches[^[117]] are drawn freely and rapidly, without any attempt at elaboration or such careful draughtsmanship as would have been necessary had they been a commission or intended in the end to serve as woodcut illustrations in some future edition of the text. Many of them are witty and to the point, and show that Holbein had a true sense of humour. The wit is, perhaps, not so biting as that of Erasmus himself, but it matches in character the satirical humour and popular tone of the book. The contributions of Hans are both the most numerous and the best, and some of them, in the freedom and certainty of their draughtsmanship, show a distinct advance in his art.

Vol. I., Plate 12.

MARGINAL DRAWINGS IN A COPY OF THE “PRAISE OF FOLLY”
Basel Gallery

THE “PRAISE OF FOLLY” DRAWINGS

The opening picture represents Folly, as a young woman in cap and bells, mounting the pulpit in order to sing her own praises to a listening world, and in the concluding one she is seen descending the same steps with a gesture of farewell, leaving a gaping and astonished audience behind her (Pl. [12] (1)). One of the most beautiful of the drawings, representing Penelope at her loom (Pl. [12] (2)), is now given to Ambrosius, but it bears so close a resemblance to the style of some of the figures in the “Dance of Death” woodcuts, that it is difficult to believe that it is not by Hans.[^[118]] Some of the representations of single figures, such as the Pope under a high canopy (Pl. [12] (3)), the Cardinal (Pl. [12] (4)), the Bishop (Pl. [12] (5)), and the Astronomer, are drawn with greater care, and show a more serious point of view, than is anywhere disclosed in the book itself. In these Holbein is seen at his best, and also in the charming little picture of nuns kneeling with lighted candles before a picture or carving of the Virgin and Child, which calls to mind more than one of his later designs for painted glass (Pl. [12] (6)). In several of them, such as the group of men engaged in an animated theological discussion, and that of the young man looking back so intently at the fair damsel who comes after him that, without noticing it, he has stepped into a basketful of eggs belonging to an old market woman, there is a landscape background of town and river and distant Alps, charmingly though hastily indicated (Pl. [13] (1)). Among the classical allusions there are comic representations of the slaying of Niobe’s children,[^[119]] of Vulcan splitting the skull of Jupiter,[^[119]] of Atlas staggering under the weight of the world,[^[119]] of Polyphemus dancing, and of Hercules quieting Cerberus by means of a sausage.[^[119]] Nicolas de Lyra is represented reading the Scriptures, and at the same time playing a small hand-organ, in allusion to his name (Pl. [13] (2)). King Solomon stands pointing to his open book (Pl. [13] (3)), and another excellent little drawing is that of the young courtier or nobleman (Pl. [13] (4)). The sketch of Folly talking to his puppet (Pl. [13] (5)) is one of the illustrations now given to the unknown artist who collaborated with the Holbeins.

The drawing illustrating the phrase, “the golden collar of princes,” is an unmistakable portrait of the Emperor Maximilian. A portrait, much less easily recognised, is that of the writer of the book. In one passage Erasmus has mentioned his own name, and opposite to it Holbein drew the philosopher seated at a desk in his study, in scholar’s cap and gown, engaged in writing the Adagia. Through an arched opening is seen a view of mountain and lake (Pl. [13] (6)). To make certain that there should be no doubt as to whom the portrait represented, Holbein has written the name “Erasmus” at the top of the arch. Molitor, in a marginal note, states that when Erasmus came to this drawing, in which he is depicted as a comparatively youthful man, he exclaimed, “Ohé! Ohé! if Erasmus still looked like this, he would certainly take a wife.” The name “Holbein” occurs over one of the other sketches, which represents a fat and coarse-looking carouser seated at table, draining a bottle of wine, and at the same time fondling a woman seated by him, and illustrating the passage from Horace which refers to “a fat and splendid pig from the herd of Epicurus” (Pl. [13] (7)). This is said to have been written by the sage himself in playful revenge for the introduction of his own portrait among the foolish of mankind.[^[120]]

This somewhat primitive jest appears to be the sole foundation for the statements of several of Holbein’s earlier biographers that he was of a gross and sensual character, too fond of the wine-cup, and, in consequence, lived in poverty. The worst offender in this way was Charles Patin, a French physician who had settled in Basel in the seventeenth century, after having been forced to leave Paris on account of some misbehaviour. He was the first to bring this accusation against the painter, and later writers copied him without verifying his statements. Van Mander and Sandrart, who repeated all the gossip they could collect, do not allude to this supposed weakness in the painter’s character. Patin’s misrepresentations occur in a short life of Holbein, filled with inaccuracies, which he wrote as a preface to an edition of the Praise of Folly, issued in Basel in 1676, in which, for the first time, these marginal illustrations were published, being engraved for the book by C. Merian from copies of the originals made by W. Stettler. They at once became highly popular, and various editions followed, both on the Continent and in England. Patin evidently allowed his imagination to run away with him in his interpretation of this somewhat feeble joke made at Holbein’s expense. There is absolutely no foundation for the legend thus set going; the painter’s whole career, the high perfection of his technical powers, and the extraordinary amount of work he accomplished in his short life are more than sufficient in themselves to refute it.

Vol. I., Plate 13.

MARGINAL DRAWINGS IN A COPY OF THE “PRAISE OF FOLLY”
Basel Gallery

There is a small portrait in the Grand-Ducal Museum at Darmstadt, dated 1515, at one time in the possession of the Von Schinz family of Zürich, which represents, at half-length, a young man in scarlet dress and cap, with long fair hair falling over the ears, the head standing out strongly against a bright-blue background.[^[121]] It is inscribed across the bottom with the date between the initials H.H., and until recently has been considered by most writers to be a work of the younger Hans, and was reproduced as his by Herr Knackfuss. In 1904 Dr. Hes first drew attention to its close similarity to the work of Ambrosius, and most modern criticism is in agreement with him. It bears, in style and touch, a far stronger likeness to the art of Ambrosius than to that of Hans, and has much in common with the portrait of Hans Herbster in the Basel Gallery (No. 293), painted by him in the following year,[^[122]] which, when it was in Lord Northbrook’s collection, was regarded as from the brush of his brother; and still more so to the two portraits of unknown boys, also in the Basel Gallery (Nos. 294-5). There is, indeed, a fine drawing of the head of an unknown man by Ambrosius, belonging to the Basel Kunstverein, which as a portrait bears so strong a likeness to the Darmstadt picture that it might almost be regarded as a study for it.[^[123]] In the drawing the position is reversed, the subject being turned to the right instead of to the left, but the dress and hair are the same, and, judging from the technique, both are from the same hand. The inscription on the Darmstadt portrait is possibly of a somewhat later date than the painting, and there are faint indications of an earlier one beneath it. When this earlier one was replaced or renewed, the initial of the Christian name may have been changed from A. to H. In his book Dr. Woltmann included the portrait among the works of Hans Holbein the Elder, but modern criticism does not follow him in this.

THE SCHOOLMASTER’S SIGN-BOARD

At this early period of his career the young painter was willing to undertake any piece of work, however humble, that came to his hand. Thus, in 1516, he painted a sign-board for some Basel schoolmaster to hang outside his house (Pl. [14]). The panel was painted on both sides, the upper and larger portion of each being filled with a long inscription in German stating that the owner of the sign was prepared to teach reading and writing in the shortest possible time, and at moderate prices, to all comers, citizens, artisans, women, and maidens; and that if in any instance the scholar proved too stupid to learn, no fee would be demanded, but that children were to be paid for in advance at each quarter. The inscription is the same on both sides, one being dated “1516,” and the other “Anno MCCCCCXVI.” In the narrow space left below, Holbein depicted two scenes representing the interior of the school, with benches against the wall under the leaded windows. In one of them the schoolmaster is shown on the left, in red and yellow, seated at his high desk, with a birch rod in his hand, teaching a small boy in green to read. On the other side of the room is the schoolmistress, in red dress and white coif, at a similar desk, instructing a little girl clad in blue and green. Between them sit two small lads at their books, one in blue, and the other in yellow with a red cap. The second picture represents the same room from another point of view, with a washing cistern and basin, and a long towel fastened to the wall. In the centre is a large table at which the schoolmaster is engaged with two young men dressed in the fashion of the landsknechte, one in trunks of red and yellow stripes, who is wrestling with a pen, and the other in green, who is listening with an intent and highly-puzzled expression to the instructions of the master, who is attempting to teach him to read. Holbein has represented the mental perturbation of this second pupil with considerable humour. Both pictures display signs of some haste in the execution, but they must have served the purpose for which they were intended admirably. Though slight works, they have undoubted charm, and, small as they are, the youthful painter has managed to give considerable expression in both the faces and the gestures of his figures, while the light which comes through the windows is well managed. This sign-board, now in the Basel Gallery (Nos. 310-11), has been split into two, in order that both sides may be exhibited.[^[124]] When in actual use it must have hung from an iron bar over the pavement. It is quite possible that it was painted for Oswald Molitor, who, as already pointed out, was at that time in Basel, engaged in teaching.

Vol. I., Plate 14.

BACK AND FRONT OF A SCHOOLMASTER’S HANGING SIGN
1516
Basel Gallery

Vol. I., Plate 15.

DOUBLE PORTRAIT OF JAKOB MEYER AND HIS SECOND WIFE, DOROTHEA KANNENGIESSER
1516
Basel Gallery

PORTRAITS OF MEYER AND HIS WIFE

A much more important work of the same year, 1516, also in the Basel Gallery (No. 312),[^[125]] is the double portrait of the Burgomaster of Basel, Jakob Meyer or Meier “zum Hasen,” so called from the sign of a hare which hung upon his house, and his second wife, Dorothea Kannengiesser (Pl. [15]). This new patron of Holbein’s proved to be an excellent friend, giving him more than one commission, and obtaining important public work for him. Meyer was a man of influence in Basel, and was the first citizen not of knightly birth to be elected as burgomaster. His election took place in 1516, and it was no doubt in honour of this event that he ordered the portraits. He was again elected to the post in 1518 and 1520—no one was allowed to fill it for two years in succession; but in 1521 he fell into disgrace, through secretly accepting a higher pension from the French king than the laws of the city allowed. For this he was dismissed from office, and made to refund the money, with the exception of the fifteen crowns which was the permitted sum. Objecting to this treatment, he was clapped into prison, and was only released on his family paying a fine. During his burgomastership many important changes took place in the municipal government of Basel, and the Church and the nobility were gradually deprived of all their privileges. In his younger days he had served as a soldier in Italy with some distinction, and after his deprivation of office he went there again, in 1524, as captain of a Basel troop in the pay of France. On his return home he attempted without success to obtain the annulment of the decree against him of exclusion from all public offices; and during the religious disturbances of 1529 he was at the head of the Catholic party, then in armed opposition to the Reformers. The reasons which induced Meyer to choose Holbein as the painter of the portraits of himself and his young, comely, and newly-married wife, when there were older painters of repute in the town, are not known; but his first wife, Magdalena Baer, had been a sister of the Hans Baer for whom the Zürich table had been painted, and it may have been owing to this connection that the young artist obtained his first introduction to the burgomaster.

In the portraits, which were painted and framed as a diptych, Meyer and his wife are shown at half-length and three-quarters face, turned towards one another. Meyer is wearing a black dress, open at the front to show his white, gold-embroidered shirt, and a scarlet cap on his bushy, curly brown hair, which covers his ears. He is clean-shaven, and holds in his left hand a coin, which is introduced to indicate his calling as a money-changer, and also, it is supposed, to commemorate the charter granted to the Baselers in January 1516 for the mintage of gold coins. On the same hand he wears several heavy gold rings. His eyes are dark brown, and his complexion of a ruddy hue, and his face shows shrewdness and strength of character, while the eyes are intelligent and determined. His wife wears a red dress, fronted and edged with a broad band of black velvet across the breast, embroidered with circles of gold ornamentation. The dress is cut low, to show a white under-bodice worked in elaborate designs, with hanging tassels and a band of gold embroidery of a heart-shaped pattern. Her hair and ears are covered with a large white cap of thin linen decorated with bands of gold of a checked design, of the hooded shape common in Switzerland at that period, with a long white fall which is brought over the right shoulder and reaches the waist. Round her neck hang two thin chains, one of gold and one of pearls, the ends of which are hidden beneath the bodice. Her hands are not shown. Though not strikingly handsome, she has youth and good looks in her favour. The two portraits are placed against one continuous architectural background, seen in rather strong perspective. In the centre an elaborate gilt frieze of Renaissance ornamentation is supported by short pillars of red marble, and on either side larger columns, also decorated with gilded carving, form the supports of two arches. Through these the blue sky is seen, against which the wife’s head stands out in strong colour contrast. Owing to the perspective arrangement, the opening is smaller in the portrait of Meyer, but part of his red cap is placed against the blue sky with equally striking effect. The signature, “H.H.,” and the date, “1516,” are placed on a small shield in the entablature over Meyer’s head.[^[126]]

In these two portraits—the earliest in point of date which can be ascribed to him with absolute certainty—Holbein, though not yet twenty years old, shows himself to be already a master of portraiture. The qualities they possess are the same, though not yet perfectly developed, as those which are to be discovered in such complete perfection in the work of his maturity. They show that he had already the power of seizing character, and was accurate and unhesitating in draughtsmanship. All the details, more particularly the elaborate ornaments of the woman’s dress, are drawn with a truth and delicacy that already falls but little short of the brilliance of his technique in such a masterpiece of portraiture as the Georg Gisze in Berlin, or the Jane Seymour in Vienna. The colour, though rich and strongly contrasted, is harmonious and delicate in the general effect it produces. The whole work, indeed, gives the impression that it is from the hand of an artist who is already sure of his methods. There is nothing faltering about it, and few indications that the painter was still only on the threshold of his career. All that was to come in the future was a deeper insight into nature, a greater perfection of methods which in the main were to remain unaltered throughout his life, and a more brilliant understanding and application of the lessons of the Italian Renaissance to the more decorative portions of his pictures.[^[127]]

STUDIES FOR THE MEYER PORTRAITS

The rapidity with which his art was maturing is shown more strikingly, perhaps, in the two studies for the portraits, now in the Basel Gallery (Pl. [16]),[^[128]] than even in the pictures themselves. These heads, of the same dimensions as the finished works, are about half the size of life. They are drawn in silver-point, with fine and delicate lines, and equally delicate modelling of the flesh, which has been afterwards touched here and there with red chalk. They display the utmost care and precision, though the line is less subtle and searching than it is in the drawings of his greater English period. They are, nevertheless, extraordinary work for so young a man, and of great beauty. They show a method of procedure in the taking of portraits which remained Holbein’s almost invariable practice throughout his life. He always made these preparatory drawings—the later ones, of course, with much greater freedom—in which the form, character, and expression of his sitter were fixed once and for all. Colour was occasionally indicated, but as a rule all that he did was to jot down on the margin of the paper a few notes for future guidance. Thus on the drawing of Meyer, he has written notes as to the colour of the hair, eyebrows, and cap.[^[129]] It was his habit, apparently, to rely upon his memory and these curt notes when he came to paint the actual portrait. This method enabled him to dispense with many sittings; after a few hours spent in close observation of his subject, he had obtained all the information he wanted. For the rest, he depended on what must have been a remarkable memory both for colour and form.

During 1517 Holbein left Basel, and was absent for a considerable time. There is one work by him, however, of this year which in all probability was painted before his departure, as it belonged to Bonifacius Amerbach. This is the “Adam and Eve”[^[130]] of the Basel Gallery (No. 313) (Pl. [17]), which is painted in oils on paper. It is entered in the Amerbach catalogue as: “Ein Adam vnd Eva mit dem äpfel H. Holb. vf holz mit olfarb.” It is a study from life of the head and shoulders of the same models used for the heads of St. John and the Virgin already described, while the “Adam” also served as model for the head of Christ in “The Scourging” of the early Passion series on canvas. Eve, with a long curl of fair hair falling over her right shoulder and breast, holds the apple in her left hand, her face being of a rather dull and heavy type. Adam, with dark curly hair, and a long moustache which drops below his chin, and head slightly bent, has his right arm flung across Eve’s shoulders. The general tone is brownish, but considerable effect is produced by the contrast between the dark complexion of Adam and the blonder tones of Eve’s flesh.

It is boldly and thinly executed, and the lines of the drawing are still plainly to be distinguished through the paint. The fingers of Eve’s hand, with high lights on the nails, are excellently modelled, already giving indications of what afterwards became one of the chief features of his portraiture, the beauty and character of the hands. Both heads stand out against a background which is now black. It is signed and dated, “1517, H.H.” Dr. Ganz points out the strong influence of both Baldung and Dürer this small study betrays.[^[131]] It also bears a curious resemblance to the heads in the well-known picture of “Adam and Eve” by Mabuse at Hampton Court[^[132]] (No. 385 (580)), though the position of the two figures is reversed. It is seen more particularly in Adam’s mass of dark hair covered with small curls, Eve’s long ringlets, the expression of pain on the faces, and the position of Adam’s arm across Eve’s shoulders. There is another very similar, but smaller, “Adam and Eve” by Mabuse in the Berlin Gallery (No. 661), displaying a composite art, half Flemish and half Italian, which is signed and dated 1516.

Vol. I., Plate 16.

JAKOB MEYER
Studies for the Double Portrait, 1516
Silver-point and red chalk drawings
Basel Gallery

DOROTHEA KANNENGIESSER
Studies for the Double Portrait, 1516
Silver-point and red chalk drawings
Basel Gallery

Vol. I., Plate 17.

ADAM AND EVE
1517
Basel Gallery

CHAPTER IV
WORK IN LUCERNE AND THE VISIT TO LOMBARDY

Holbein leaves Basel for Lucerne—Ambrosius Holbein—The known facts of his short life—His pictures, designs, and woodcuts—Records of Hans in Lucerne—His decoration of the Hertenstein house—Description of the wall-paintings—Portrait of Benedikt von Hertenstein—Holbein’s visit to North Italy—“The Last Supper” at Basel, and Leonardo’s influence—Evidences of his Italian journey in his designs for painted glass—Possible visit to Altorf—Return to Lucerne—Drawings of the “Archangel Michael” and of “Miners at Work”—Pictures painted for the Church of the Augustines in Lucerne.

IN 1517 Holbein left Basel, and was absent for nearly two years. For the greater part of the time he was in Lucerne, but traces of him are to be found in other parts of Switzerland, and it is practically certain that he also paid a short visit to Lombardy. It is possible, too, that during this time he may have returned to Basel more than once for a few weeks in connection with his work for Froben and other publishers. Whether he left Basel in the first place because he found that it gave him less employment than he had expected, or from a spirit of pure adventure, or, again, on account of the offer of some definite commission, such as the decoration of the Hertenstein house, is not known; but the last-named reason is the most probable one, for it cannot be said that his talents had been unrecognised in Basel. Although there is no record of any earlier wall-paintings than those he was now to complete in Lucerne, it is quite possible that the two brothers had already carried out work of this nature, and that Jakob von Hertenstein had seen it and had admired it, and so decided to employ one or both of the young men to decorate in like fashion the new mansion he had just completed. Even if this were not the case, Lucerne at that time offered nearly as many inducements to a young artist as Basel itself. The two towns were closely allied, and artists and learned scholars constantly passed backwards and forwards between them; and Holbein had at least one acquaintance in Lucerne, Oswald Molitor, who had recently returned from Basel to his native city, and was practising there as a schoolmaster.

There is an old legend in Lucerne that at this period the elder Holbein was living in the town with his two sons, but it does not appear to have any foundation in fact.[^[133]] There is much more probability that Ambrosius accompanied Hans, or followed him shortly afterwards, and remained for some time at work with his brother on the Hertenstein house; though here again there is no actual record of such an absence from Basel. There is, however, a fine drawing by him in the Basel Gallery (No. 297), a half-length figure of a young man of the Von Rüdiswiler family,[^[134]] which is thought to afford some proof that Ambrosius was in Lucerne at the time, for the Rüdiswiler family was one of the most important in the district, their chief seat being at Rüdiswil. Members of this house were settled both in Lucerne and Solothurn, and it is supposed that Ambrosius drew the portrait of this youth of patrician birth in the former town during 1517. The sitter is shown in profile, in a heavy brown cloak, wearing his cap on the side of his head. His fair straight hair covers his ears, and he holds a large red heart in his hand. The drawing has at some time been cut out round the outline and mounted on parchment, and the inscription in secret cipher, below the coat of arms, had been copied at the same time from the one which existed on the original drawing before the cutting out took place.

Ambrosius, however, must have been back again in Basel by the summer of 1518, for in that year, on June 6, he purchased his right of citizenship. The first mention of him in the town books is on September 26, 1516, when “Ambrosy Holbein von augspurg, ein maler,” appeared in court as a witness in a libel action brought by Bastian Lepzelter, the sculptor, against a tailor, Andreas Huber, for insulting remarks made on the previous 25th of July, when the plaintiff, Ambrosius, and another friend, were enjoying themselves in the house of Hans Herbster.[^[135]] Ambrosius may perhaps have been working as a journeyman under Herbster at the time. He joined the Painters’ Guild “zum Himmel,” to which bakers, saddlers, and barber-surgeons also belonged, on St. Matthias’ Day, February 24, 1517. The entry in the book of the guild runs as follows: “Item es hatt entpfangen die zunfft vff sant Mattistag ambross Holbein maler von augspurg In dem xvii Jor.” According to an order of the Basel Council issued in 1487, any one entering a guild was obliged to take oath to purchase the freedom of the city within a month. This Ambrosius did not do until the following year, which possibly indicates that he left the town shortly after joining the guild, early in 1517, without fulfilling his obligations. It may be that he had not sufficient money for the payment of the fees, for when, on June 6, 1518, he became a burgher, he was only able to find one gulden out of the four which were required, Jörg Schweiger, the goldsmith, whose portrait, now in the Basel Gallery (No. 296),[^[136]] he painted about this time, standing surety for the remainder. The portrait may have been taken as some return for the kindness shown on this occasion. It should be noted, however, that this portrait is not attributed to Ambrosius by all critics, and differs to some extent from his accustomed style.

AMBROSIUS HOLBEIN

The entry in the archives runs as follows: “Item do hat burckrecht kufft Ambrosy Holbein der moler uff Sundag nach corporis Xpi Im xviij jor umb iiij glden und hat bar gen j glden und sol al fronfasten j ort bitz zu bezallung dofür ist bürg und schuldner meister Jerg schweiger der goldschmit.”

Vol. I., Plate 18.

PORTRAITS OF TWO BROTHERS
Ambrosius Holbein
Basel Gallery

AMBROSIUS HOLBEIN

This is the last reference to the elder brother so far discovered in the official archives, and as no work by him of a date later than 1518 is known, it is supposed that he died in that year or early in 1519. Apparently the last work upon which he was engaged was a series of woodcut illustrations for the Geuchmatt of Thomas Murner, which was published by Adam Petri in Basel in April 1519. The first four only of the illustrations to this book[^[137]] were designed by Ambrosius, which would seem to indicate that he died before he had completed the commission. The only other supposition, and a most improbable one, is that he suddenly left Basel at about this time in search of better fortune elsewhere, though no traces of such removal have so far been discovered. Almost all the few works which can be attributed to him with any certainty are now in the Basel Gallery. In addition to those already mentioned, there are two charming half-length portraits of small boys in a Renaissance framework (Nos. 294-5) (Pl. [18]),[^[138]] for one of which, the boy turned to the left, the silver-point drawing is in the Albertina, Vienna,[^[139]] while a similar study for the other, recently published for the first time by Dr. Willy Hes, is in the Rodriguez Collection, Paris.[^[140]] A half-length portrait of a little girl, in a similar framework, also published for the first time by Dr. Hes, is in the Ambraser Collection, Vienna, but not exhibited.[^[141]] The strong likeness to the two lads proves almost conclusively that she was their sister. On the medallion which hangs from a chain round her neck are the initials H. V. So far, no preliminary drawing for this portrait has been discovered. In the Basel Gallery there are also “The Saviour as the Man of Sorrows” (No. 292),[^[142]] an oil-painting adapted from the title-page to Dürer’s “Great Passion” series; and a study of two death’s heads behind a trellised window (No. 299).[^[143]] Both pictures form part of the Amerbach Collection, but the latter is not regarded as the work of Ambrosius by Dr. Hes. A somewhat similar picture, attributed to Hans, was in the Arundel Collection, and was entered in the 1655 inventory as “Testa de Morte con osse.” The portrait of Hans Herbster, also at Basel (No. 293),[^[144]] which has been already mentioned, was at one time regarded as a work by Hans the Younger, but since its purchase for the Basel Gallery it has been given, more correctly, to the elder brother. Dr. Hes, however, considers that it is not his work, but rather a portrait of Herbster painted by himself.[^[145]] It is a bust portrait, turned to the right, representing a middle-aged man with long brown hair and a large bushy beard, wearing a dark dress and a red cap over his right ear. He is placed under an archway of Renaissance architecture, his head standing out against the blue sky seen through the opening. From the top of the pillars which support the arch hang two festoons of fruit and leaves held by small amorini. Above the heads of these boys two small tablets are suspended, one containing the date, “1516,” and the other the now illegible remains of the painter’s monogram. Across the bottom is the inscription, “Ioannes Herbster pictor oporini pater,” the last words referring to his son, the well-known scholar of Basel, who afterwards turned printer, and Latinised his name to Oporinus. Herbster himself, like the Burgomaster Meyer, had taken his part in the Italian wars, and was in the battle of Pavia in 1512. In addition to several drawings already described, the Basel Gallery also possesses a charming study in silver-point and red chalk of a young girl, inscribed “Anne,” and dated 1518, in which a very tender, delicate feeling for the beauty of childhood is shown (Pl. [19]);[^[146]] the head of a young woman in a hood in profile to the left;[^[147]] a very fine drawing of the head of a young man turned slightly to the left, wearing a black cap on the side of his head, signed and dated 1517;[^[148]] and a design for painted glass, representing the foundation of the city of Basel (Pl. [20]),[^[149]] a pen drawing lightly touched with colour, which was formerly attributed to Hans. In the centre are the arms of Basel, supported by basilisks, under an archway in course of building, which is decorated with a series of empty shields for coats of arms. In the landscape background on either side are men engaged in erecting buildings on the river bank, and in the foreground is a boat filled with soldiers. The commander of this troop, the legendary founder of the town, has the name “Basilius” engraved upon his breastplate.

One of the most important of the few paintings by him which have been so far traced, is the portrait of an unknown young man in the Royal Hermitage Gallery in St. Petersburg (Pl. [21]).[^[150]] The sitter is turned three-quarters to the left, under a Renaissance arcading, and is wearing a green dress and white shirt ornamented with lace. On his black hat are the initials “F. G.” or “C. I. E.” (?). His right hand rests on the iron pommel of his sword. In the distance is a mountainous landscape with a palace or large building of elaborate Renaissance architecture, and on a column hangs a tablet with the inscription, “Etatis. sve. xx. m.d. xviii.” From the arch above his head is suspended a garland of leaves bound round with ribbon, to which is attached a small cartouche with the monogram AHB, of which the H is the most distinct letter.[^[151]] The drawing, mentioned above, signed and dated “1517 AH,” was considered by Woltmann to be a study for this portrait, and there is certainly a strong likeness between the two. The arrangement of the foreground architectural setting, and the position of the garland supporting the cartouche, of which only the left-hand loop is shown, prove that the picture formed one of a pair, the missing half in all probability containing a portrait of the young man’s wife.

Vol. I., Plate 19.

PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG GIRL, “ANNE,” 1518
Silver-point and red chalk drawing
Ambrosius Holbein
Basel Gallery

Vol. I., Plate 20.

THE FOUNDING OF BASEL
Design for Painted Glass
Ambrosius Holbein
Basel Gallery

Vol. I., Plate 21.

PORTRAIT OF AN UNKNOWN YOUNG MAN
1518
Ambrosius Holbein
Royal Hermitage Gallery, St. Petersburg

Vol. I., Plate 22.

ILLUSTRATION TO SIR THOMAS MORE’S “UTOPIA”
Ambrosius Holbein
From a woodcut in the British Museum

AMBROSIUS HOLBEIN

In addition to works of this nature, Ambrosius produced, during the few years he was in Basel, a considerable number of designs for title-pages, initial letters, and other decorations for books, issued by Froben, Cratander, Adam Petri, Thomas Wolff, and Pamphilus Gegenbach. One of the best known is the “Calumny of Apelles,”[^[152]] the painting described by Lucian, which bears the monogram of Ambrosius and the date 1517. It was first used in Erasmus’ version of the New Testament, published by Froben in 1519. He had a share, too, in the numerous illustrations and ornaments which Froben provided for the first edition of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, upon which work his brother, Urs Graf, and others, were also engaged. Ambrosius was the designer of the charming little picture representing the scene in the garden of Petrus Ægidius in Antwerp in which Raphael Hythlodæus, the traveller, is describing to his host and Sir Thomas his adventures in the island of Utopia.[^[153]] A larger woodcut, with a bird’s-eye view of the island, on which the chief places are marked as given in the text, with Hythlodæus in the foreground pointing out its features to Ægidius and More, is also his work (Pl. [22]).[^[154]] It is difficult in every case to separate the designs of the two brothers in this field of art, more particularly as in many instances they have been so badly cut that much of the beauty of the original line has been lost. In book-illustration the art of the two young men had much in common, though Ambrosius was never as powerful or varied in conception as Hans, nor possessed of as great a mastery of technical execution. His woodcuts are not so thoroughly imbued with the true spirit of the Italian Renaissance, nor had he the same gift of producing the effect of largeness of design within an inch or two of space. His figures, too, are often too short, with the head out of proportion to the body. Yet much of his decorative work has considerable charm, and fulfils its purpose admirably. Some forty woodcuts after his designs, including a number of initial letters, are known, of which it is impossible to attempt any description here.[^[155]] His skill as a designer for glass-painting has been already noted; and among his few drawings are two small roundels, in the Karlsruhe Gallery, of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” and “Hercules and Antæus,”[^[156]] which are very pleasing, and in their delicate and somewhat “pretty” handling have great resemblance to a number of the marginal drawings to the Praise of Folly which are now given to him.

In painting he was overshadowed by his younger brother. Like Hans, he had inherited a considerable gift for portraiture from his father, as the few works of this nature which remain show very clearly. In his studies for portraits the draughtsmanship is looser and more free than in the corresponding work of the younger Hans in his earlier Basel period, and there is less searching after exact truth of line. His portraits, nevertheless, display an original talent of no mean order, which, had he lived, would have gained for him a place of some distinction among the leading German painters of his day. Such a drawing as the “Anne” is filled with a very tender feeling, and a sympathetic expression of the wistful charm of childhood; and much of the same appreciation of youthful character is to be seen in the portraits of the two small boys in the Basel Gallery, while there is a careful and realistic drawing of the head and body of a baby, supported by the mother’s hand, in the British Museum, evidently a study for a Madonna and Child, which is very attractive. It is inscribed “Hans Holbein, 1522,” by some later hand, over some earlier signature, now obliterated. According to Dr. Hes, however, it is not by Ambrosius.[^[157]]

The records of Hans Holbein’s residence in Lucerne are scanty ones, but such as they are, they extend from 1517 to 1519. Shortly after his arrival he joined the painters’ guild, the Brotherhood of St. Luke, which had been formed in 1506. In the book of the confraternity his name is entered as having paid one gulden for admission: “Meister Hanns Holbein hat j gulden gen.” Unfortunately the year-date is not given. The original book has disappeared, but a copy exists which was made by Zacharias Bletz, the town registrar, in 1541, but in transcribing it he has omitted the dates which would fix the exact details of Holbein’s membership.

His first recorded commission was a badly-paid one. On the Sunday before the feast of Saints Simon and Jude (October 28), 1517, he received one florin nine shillings for a design for a glass window. In the same year, on December 10, an entry in the town records shows him engaged in less reputable occupation. He and a certain Caspar, a goldsmith, were each fined five livres for fighting in the streets. “Item Caspar goldschmid vnnd der Holbein soll jeder 5 ll. buss als sy vber ein andern zuckt hand.” This same Caspar, one learns from the town books, was by nature a brawler, for he was in trouble of the same kind on more than one occasion. The punishment in this particular case was heavy, so that the disturbance must have been a serious one, and it has been suggested that on account of it Holbein left Lucerne for a time, in order that the affair might blow over, and that he took the opportunity of paying a visit to Lombardy. It is not likely, however, that he crossed the Alps in the winter.

PAINTINGS OF HERTENSTEIN HOUSE

In one of the rooms of the Hertenstein house, at the time of its demolition early in the last century, there still remained the date 1517 on one of the wall decorations, which suggests that his work in the interior of the mansion was well advanced, if not completed, during that year. The outer walls were still unfinished when Holbein left Lucerne, for what reason is not known, but it does not seem probable that he would have abandoned an important commission for several months merely on account of some small trouble with the town authorities. The visit to Italy, it seems certain, took place in the spring or early summer of 1518, after the decorations of the Hertenstein house had been well advanced. These decorations, as far as can be judged from the few existing remains, show a certain Italian influence, but for the greater part not so strongly that it cannot be accounted for by the teaching of his father, the study of prints and engravings, and other second-hand sources. There is, however, a drawing in the Basel Gallery, described below, a preliminary study of architectural decoration for the lower part of the façade of the house, which, as Dr. Ganz points out, must have been made after Holbein’s return from Italy, for in it this new influence can be seen much more clearly and strongly, just as it can in similar work undertaken by him in Basel a year or two later, after a visit to Lombardy had brought him into personal contact with the works of some of the leading Italian masters in painting and architecture. It is clear, therefore, that the journey over the Alps formed an interlude of some duration between two sojourns in Lucerne, each extending over several months, and that during the second period he completed the Hertenstein wall-paintings.

Lucerne was one of the first towns in Switzerland to feel the influence of the Italian Renaissance, and the fashion, copied from the southern country, of decorating the fronts of its houses with wall-paintings, had been adopted before Holbein worked there. As early as 1435 the Frey family owned a house which was covered with such paintings; a second house with sixteenth-century decorations was demolished in 1871, while others of the same period retained traces of wall-paintings until comparatively modern times. Certain fragments of this early wall-painting still exist, and there has been a revival of the art in Lucerne in recent years. Augsburg was probably the first town outside Italy to adopt this method of house decoration, to which the painters who practised it owed so much of the freedom of their style; but many of the towns immediately to the north of the Alps followed suit in course of time, and modified the architecture of their buildings in order to meet the requirements of the new fashion, abandoning to a certain extent the structural Gothic decorative forms to which they were accustomed, in order to make room for the provision of large flat wall surfaces, broken only by plain rectangular windows and doors, upon which the painters would have free scope for their work. It became the habit, too, among the wealthier of the citizens, to decorate the inner walls of their mansions in the same way.

Jakob von Hertenstein, who, when he gave the commission to Holbein for the painting of his new house, was the chief magistrate of Lucerne, was a member of one of the oldest families in Switzerland. His father, Caspar von Hertenstein, held many important civic and military offices, and led the Swiss rearguard at the battle of Murten. His son inherited many of his dignities, and was also a notable soldier, and in 1515, in which year he was mayor, commanded the men of Lucerne at the battle of Marignano. His ancestral castle stood on a steep rock on the shore of the lake of Lucerne, near Weggis, and from it the family took its name. Jakob was married four times, in each instance to a lady of a patrician Swiss family, and in the decoration of the façade of his new dwelling, Holbein introduced the coats of arms of all four of them. In 1511 he purchased of Hans Wolf an old wooden house which stood on the Kappelplatz at the corner of a small street leading to the Sternen Platz, near the Corn Market, and in the heart of the city. This house he pulled down, and erected in its place a fine stone mansion, which was finished, and ready for its decorations, by 1517.

It has been suggested that Holbein obtained this commission through the good services of Oswald Molitor, who was a friend of one of Hertenstein’s sons; but, however it may have been gained, it was one of great importance to so young an artist, and he made the most of his opportunities. The house was one of four storeys, and the whole of its frontage he covered with paintings. It was still standing in 1824, with its decorations for the greater part well preserved; but it was then pulled down, and all that remains of its painted glories is comprised in a number of very inadequate copies of certain portions, a single fragment of one of the original paintings, together with a small study for one of the pictures, and the architectural design already mentioned for part of the ground floor decoration, both from Holbein’s own pencil. It is thus to-day almost impossible to obtain any adequate impression of the actual effect of the painter’s earliest undertaking of importance, as it was in the days of its first freshness and beauty.

PAINTINGS OF HERTENSTEIN HOUSE

The ground floor was left undecorated, with the exception of the painting of certain architectural details, and on the floor above, which had numerous windows of varying sizes, and little wall space, Holbein’s work was confined to three single female figures, one at each corner, and one between the windows in the middle. Immediately over the windows on the left, which were irregular in arrangement, the decoration consisted of ornaments and figures adapted to fit the window crowns; and on the right, where the windows were considerably higher and stood in a straight line, a long frieze of fighting children was introduced. All these decorations were painted in grisaille, but between the two groups was a larger picture in colours, the upper part of which extended to the floor above. This picture was so arranged that its framework had the appearance of a large projecting bay, semicircular in shape, with an arched opening supported by pillars, through which a view was obtained of what appeared to be a large inner chamber of the house. Within this room Holbein depicted a story from the Gesta Romanorum, the one which tells of the old king who tested the love of his three sons and their right to succeed him by offering his dead body as a target to their arrows. This picture was still in a fairly good condition at the time of the destruction of the house, so that from the copy then made it is possible to gain an idea of the artist’s conception of the scene. He represented the white-haired monarch, death-pale in face, still seated upright on his throne, though his heart has ceased to beat. Two of the sons have shot their arrows, and one points to the cruel wound he has made, and claims the crown; but the third, rather than aim at such a target, breaks his bow in indignation, and is acclaimed the victor by the assembled courtiers. On the third storey, between the windows, were placed the coats of arms of Hertenstein and his four wives, within arched openings with hanging wreaths.

Between the windows of the third storey and those of the floor above it, there ran a long triumphal procession from right to left, broken up into groups by pilasters placed at intervals, giving the effect of an open arcading through which the passing show was seen. This design was borrowed in its main details and arrangement from Andrea Mantegna’s engraved “Triumph of Caesar.” In this he followed his original so closely as to clothe the figures in antique costumes, whereas in the pictures drawn from classical sources painted on other parts of the building, he made use of the costumes of his own day. On the topmost storey five pictures were placed between the windows reaching up to the cornice of the roof. These, too, were chosen from classical literature, apparently for the purpose of providing moral lessons, not only for the members of Hertenstein’s own family, but for all the citizens of Lucerne who paused to admire their mayor’s new residence. They included the stories of the treacherous schoolmaster who attempted to betray the town of Falerii to Camillus, Tarquin and Lucretia, the self-sacrifice of Marcus Curtius, Mucius Scævola before Porsenna, and Leæna, who bit off her tongue rather than betray her lover Aristogiton to the judges after the murder of Hipparchus.

The only original study for these painted stories now remaining is the one for the last-named subject, which is preserved in the Basel Gallery (Pl. [23] (1)).[^[158]] It is a washed monochrome drawing, in which Leæna, in the costume of Holbein’s own day, stands before her two judges, her hand lifted to her tongue in sign of her determination to keep silence. The story is told with the aid of but few figures. A gaoler stands near Leæna, and behind the two judges are two other seated men. The scene takes place in a vaulted hall with open archways at the back, and has been cleverly arranged to fill in the irregular spaces between the brackets supporting the cornice. This study is of great interest, as it marks a great advance in Holbein’s power of drawing the human figure when compared with the schoolmaster’s sign-board of the previous year, and shows much greater freedom of draughtsmanship. The heads of one or two of the figures still retain something of the grotesqueness of type which characterises those of the early Passion series of pictures, but the figure of Leæna is a graceful one, and the judge in the centre, in a furred robe and cap, with one finger lifted in admonition and a rod of justice or sword grasped in his left hand, is natural and dignified. The only fragment of the actual wall-painting itself which now remains is a small portion of the Tarquin and Lucretia fresco,[^[159]] showing the latter’s hand grasping the dagger, the figure of her husband before whom she is about to kill herself, the right arm of a woman attendant who stands behind her, and part of the architectural background. This fragment was built into the wall of the house which replaced the older one, and can still be seen on the upper floor of the façade. It is insignificant enough in itself, and has greatly darkened with age and exposure, but it is of value as the only actual evidence of the broad and vigorous manner in which the whole façade was painted.[^[160]]

Vol. I., Plate 23.

DESIGNS FOR THE WALL-PAINTINGS OF THE HERTENSTEIN HOUSE
1. Leaena and the Judges 2. Architectural Decoration of the Ground Floor
Basel Gallery

A second original drawing by Holbein in the Basel Gallery is a study for a part of the ground-floor façade of this house (Pl. [23] (2)).[^[161]] It is a pen and wash drawing slightly touched with colour. Groups of pillars support a frieze with flat carving in the Gothic manner. Above the pointed doorway on the left he has thrown a circular arch, round which the pattern of the frieze is continued, filled in with grotesque sculptured figures supporting a tablet for a date. On the right he has placed an open loggia, to which a flight of stone steps descends, with square pillars, inlaid with marble panels, on either side supporting a wide, flattened arch richly ornamented. The space over the frieze on the right is filled in with a procession of naked boys, some dragged along by their comrades, and others carried on litters, and above this again, hanging garlands of leaves with swinging putti, one blowing a trumpet. According to Dr. Ganz, this last motive, as well as other parts of the architectural design, are reminiscent of details to be seen in the cloisters and on the façade of the Certosa of Pavia, and suggest that Holbein must have taken them directly from that building.[^[162]] If this be so, it proves that a part at least of the wall decoration of the Hertenstein house was not finished until after Holbein’s visit to Lombardy.

PAINTINGS OF HERTENSTEIN HOUSE

It seems certain that Holbein began his work in the interior of the house, and that he covered the walls of at least five rooms, chiefly on the third floor, with paintings. In 1825 many of them still remained in an excellent state of preservation. In contradistinction to those on the outer walls, they consisted of religious pictures, and scenes from ancient fables and from everyday life in which humour found a prominent place. The sacred decorations were in a large hall which served as the family chapel. One of them represented the legend of the fourteen saints who are said to have appeared to a shepherd in 1445 at a church in the neighbourhood of Bamberg. Holbein depicted them in an elaborate landscape, with mountains and a church in the background, grouped on their knees round the Infant Christ, with the shepherd, a striking figure, kneeling in adoration with his sheep round him. A second picture in this room contained portraits of Hertenstein, his wife, and three sons, very diminutive figures, kneeling before seven saints, among them St. Benedictus, the patron saint of Lucerne. A third picture showed a religious procession, with a bishop and other ecclesiastics, headed by banners, issuing from the walls of a town in a hilly country. In the large hall of the house, on the third floor, which at the time of the demolition was still in its original state, were a number of landscapes with hunting scenes, in one of which, a stag-hunt, the ancient castle of the Hertensteins on a hill by the lake of Lucerne was introduced. In these scenes portraits of the chief magistrate and members of his family were included. In one of them Hertenstein, his fourth wife, and two sons, Benedikt and Leodegar, all mounted, are hunting wild ducks by the side of the lake, accompanied by dogs. Husband and wife appear again in the painting representing a stag-hunt in the woodland below the castle at Weggis. In a third scene hares are being hunted with a pack of hounds over hilly country. Near the fireplace was a representation of a subject which was popular with German painters—the Fountain of Youth. In this a certain amount of latitude was permitted, and Holbein depicted some of the incidents with a rough, unrefined humour. Nude men and women are sitting crowded together in a small circular fountain, some still old, others already rejuvenated by its waters. In the centre of the basin rises a pillar with a banner bearing the arms of Hertenstein and his fourth wife. From all sides old people come crowding and hurrying up, some in carts, some on donkeys, one pushed in a wheelbarrow, and others carried in litters or on the backs of less feeble seekers after perpetual youth. In one instance an ugly old woman, seated in a basket slung on the back of a sturdy young man, holds in her arms an equally old and ugly dog, in order that it, too, may benefit from the bath. A second painting next to it continued the story. Other old men and women are crowded into a long cart drawn by four horses, into the back of which a lame man has scrambled, while a second limps painfully after it. In other rooms the decorations were so dilapidated and damaged that it was impossible to make copies of them; but they included battle scenes, and various Renaissance ornaments and devices. In one of these latter rooms occurred the date 1517 under the family shield.[^[163]] In one of the chambers was a wooden pillar, carved with the likeness of Heini von Uri, court fool of Duke Leopold of Austria, for which Holbein appears to have supplied the design from which the carver worked. Hollar made an etching from this drawing, or from a woodcut of it, as he has inscribed it, “H. Holbein incidit in lignum,” when it was in the Arundel Collection, in 1647.[^[164]]

In carrying out this monumental work, Holbein, in addition to possible help from his brother, must have employed more than one assistant. He made, no doubt, designs for every part of it, and painted the principal pictures himself, but much of the remainder was very probably done by others under his personal direction. North of the Alps such work was not particularly well paid, nor was great care displayed in carrying it out. Both artist and employer were satisfied if a good decorative effect in design and colour was produced; the former, considering the large amount of surface to be covered, could not waste much time over the careful painting of details, nor was the latter prepared to pay more than a very moderate price for it. There is no doubt, however, that Holbein’s work in this field was far in advance of anything hitherto carried out in Switzerland, more particularly in the elaborate architectural settings in which he placed his wall pictures, and in the use made of perspective, so that the scenes depicted appeared to be taking place within the rooms of the house itself, and the eye was deceived into supposing that a building of somewhat plain design was in reality a mansion erected in the richest style of the Italian Renaissance.

DESTRUCTION OF WALL-PAINTINGS

In 1825 the Hertenstein house came into the possession of a Lucerne banker named Knörr, who pulled it down in order to replace it by a more modern building. In spite of the efforts of a few art-lovers, this work of demolition was carried out, and the town authorities made no attempt to stop such an act of vandalism, or to save the only surviving record they possessed of the art of by far the greatest artist their walls had ever sheltered—a record which to-day would be rightly regarded as one of their greatest treasures. It was only through the efforts of Colonel May von Büren and Colonel Karl Pfyffer von Altishofen, who employed certain local artists to make copies of the frescoes before the house was finally destroyed, that any record at all of the decorations remains. Time and the damp climate had so dimmed them, however, that it was found necessary to wash them down with the town’s fire-engine before they could be seen clearly enough for the artists to copy them. The copies, which were made by the Lucerne painters Schwegler, Ulrich von Eschenbach, Eglin, Marzohl, and an Italian, Trolli von Lavena, had to be hurriedly done, and they naturally possess little or nothing of the combined delicacy and force of the originals. Much of the purely decorative work, the scroll and wreath ornament, and details in the Renaissance style, in the use of which Holbein was to become so great a master, had to be left uncopied, attention being concentrated on the pictures and figure subjects. Still, what was done was sufficient to show something of the ideas Holbein brought to the undertaking, the influences he came under in his choice of subjects, and the methods he employed in carrying them out. Colonel May persuaded Usteri, the painter and poet, to visit Lucerne in order to give his opinion as to the value of the paintings, but he was unable to do so until 1825, when the demolition had already begun. Usteri directed the making of the copies, and saw to it that the artists adhered as faithfully as possible to the originals. No “restoration” was permitted; those parts which had perished were left blank in the copies. The latter were made with the view of publication, but they proved too inadequate, and the scheme was dropped. In 1851 they were presented by Colonel May to the town library of Lucerne, together with Usteri’s letters concerning them.[^[165]]

Vol. I., Plate 24.

BENEDIKT VON HERTENSTEIN
1517
Metropolitan Museum, New York

BENEDIKT VON HERTENSTEIN

Before turning to Holbein’s journey across the Alps in 1518, reference must be made to a portrait painted by him during his first residence in Lucerne, which is the only one by him so far discovered bearing the date 1517. This work, of considerable importance to the student making a careful study of Holbein’s early development, is a likeness of Benedikt von Hertenstein, one of the sons of his new patron, who was twenty-two years of age at the time of the sitting. He was a member of the Council in the year he was painted, and was slain at the battle of Bicocca in 1522. This portrait was acquired from a private collection in England in 1906 for the Metropolitan Museum of New York (Pl. [24]).[^[166]] He is represented standing, facing the spectator, with his left hand resting on the pommel of his sword. He wears a black under-dress and a white shirt with an embroidered edge. His cloak or overcoat with wide upper sleeves is of crimson, trimmed with dark green bands, and lined with bright myrtle-green silk. His left hand is half hidden by the sleeve and the right arm hangs down, the hand not being shown. His cap is of black and scarlet velvet with gold tags, and a plain chain of gold links hangs from his neck. He wears six rings on his left hand, the one on his first finger being a signet ring with a coat of arms now almost illegible. The pommel of his sword is of gold and silver ornamented with a design in imitation of Cufic script in the fashion of Italian goldsmith’s work of the period. His bushy hair almost hides the ears, and his eyes are small and bright. The background, as in the Meyer portraits, is a study in perspective, for Holbein has placed him within the angle of a wall, along the two sides of which, over the sitter’s head, runs a stone frieze carved with a representation of a Roman triumph, crowded with small figures, in which the victor is seated in a chariot drawn by prancing horses, and in front of him, among the soldiers and trumpeters, a number of prisoners led captive. It has suffered rather severely from repainting. The design, an imitation of an antique bas-relief, was no doubt based upon Mantegna’s “Triumph,” which Holbein was at the same time adapting for the façade of the Hertenstein house. A somewhat similar design, though later in date, is to be seen on the drawing of a dagger sheath in the Basel Gallery (Vol. ii., Pl. 46 (2)).[^[167]] The wall on the left is in shadow, and on it, immediately below the frieze, is inscribed: “DA · ICH · HET · DIE · GESTALT · WAS · ICH · 22 · JAR · ALT · 1517 · H · H · PINGEBAT.” This inscription is interesting as the only one in German to be found on any one of his portraits, with the exception of that of Fallen at Brunswick, and the addresses on the letters in some of the other Steelyard portraits. The picture is painted in oils on paper, and afterwards mounted on a panel, a method not infrequently employed by Holbein in his earlier practice. The technical skill displayed in it is already of a high order, though the draughtsmanship is still a little laboured, and lacking in that ease and certainty to which he afterwards attained, while the flesh tints are paler and flatter than in his later work. It shows, nevertheless, a distinct advance when compared with the Meyer portraits of the preceding year. The draughtsmanship is firmer, the colour tones softer, and the general effect produced is one of greater naturalness, though still far behind the “Bonifacius Amerbach,” painted two years later, in subtlety of line and harmony of colour. When the picture was purchased in 1906 the name of the sitter was unknown, and beyond the fact that at the beginning of the last century it was in the possession of the Burckhardt family, its history has not been traced; but by means of the coat of arms on the ring it was identified three years later as Benedikt von Hertenstein.[^[168]] In 1826 Ulrich Hegner saw in Lucerne a portrait of his father, Jakob von Hertenstein, of the same date, 1517, still in the possession of one of his descendants, which he considered to be an original work by Holbein, which would indicate that the artist, in addition to including portraits of various members of the family in the wall-paintings in the interior of the house, was also commissioned to paint individual portraits of more than one of them. The portrait seen by Hegner has now disappeared, but others of Hertenstein still remain in the Town Hall and the Library of Lucerne. These, however, are not contemporary likenesses, but later copies, possibly after an original by Holbein now lost.

THE VISIT TO LOMBARDY

The great likelihood—indeed, the certainty—that Holbein, before these wall-paintings were finally completed, paid, during 1518, a short visit to Italy, is now generally acknowledged by most writers. It is true that Carel van Mander distinctly states that “Hans Holbein never travelled in Italy,” and the artist’s earliest biographer was, no doubt, correct, if his words are to be understood as meaning that Holbein never made any long sojourn in that country, or studied for a considerable period under some Italian painter. This statement, however, in no way precludes a visit of several months’ duration to Lombardy, of which Van Mander was ignorant. From Lucerne the journey to the foot of the Alps was only a matter of a few days, while traces of his presence in Altorf, which is on the route to the St. Gotthard Pass, still remain. From Altorf the Italian side of the mountains could be easily reached. The influence of both Mantegna and Leonardo and the Milanese school of painting is unmistakable in certain of his pictures, and though some of this may have been due to earlier influences in his Augsburg days, received through Hans Burgkmair and other German painters who had worked in Italy, and to the study of engravings, they are not strong enough to account satisfactorily for the very marked Italian influence to be seen in such pictures as the early “Last Supper,” or the “Venus” and “Lais Corinthiaca” of 1526. The indications of personal acquaintance with Italian painting and architecture are even more strongly marked in numerous designs for glass paintings, dealt with in a later chapter.[^[169]] It is therefore assumed that he crossed the Alps and penetrated into the country at least as far as Milan and its neighbourhood. Indeed, the careful researches of Dr. Ganz have removed all doubts on the question.

The “Last Supper” in the Basel Gallery (No. 316) (Pl. [25]),[^[170]] which must not be confounded with the still earlier version of the same subject on canvas already described,[^[171]] although badly damaged, bears in its composition so striking a reminiscence of Leonardo’s celebrated fresco in the refectory of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, that it appears almost certain that Holbein must have seen it. This panel painting, apparently the central part of a triptych, when it came into the possession of Amerbach was already in a badly-damaged state, due, no doubt, to injuries received during the religious disturbances of 1529, which finally helped to drive Holbein for a second time from Basel. It had been cut in two, and then roughly joined together, while a piece was missing from either side, so that to-day only nine apostles remain, though the hands and feet and parts of the bodies of the others are still to be seen at the sides. It is described in the Amerbach inventory as “ein nachtmal vf holtz mit olfarb H. Holbein. Ist zerhöwen vnd wider zusammengeleimbt aber unfletig.” In 1750 it was again reset by Nikolaus Grooth, who repainted and restored it in a hard and crude fashion, so that it is now very difficult to form any adequate idea of the original scheme of colour, though the heads still retain something of their original vigour and expression. The scene is set in a loggia of plain Renaissance architecture, the blue sky seen through its arched openings, against which branches of fig or vine stand out, and a distant tower on the right. Christ, seated in the centre of the table, with hands spread out before him, is depicted at the moment when he exclaims, “One of you shall betray me.” This figure, both in the expressive gesture of the hands, the position of the body, and the type of features, follows closely the greater figure which evidently inspired it. The group of St. John, St. Peter, and Judas is also based on the corresponding group in Leonardo’s fresco. The youthful St. John, seated next to the Saviour, and turning round to listen to St. Peter, who stands behind him with his hand resting on St. John’s shoulder, is admirably conceived and full of character. Judas, seated in front on the left, rests his chin on his left hand, his strongly marked, almost grotesque, face, convulsed with conflicting passions, and his right hand pressed against the seat as though he were about to spring up and rush from the table. The picture, in spite of the damage it has received, shows a great advance upon the earlier “Last Supper,” both in power of expression and technical execution. In its style of painting it has considerable affinity with the “Noli Me Tangere” in Hampton Court, more particularly with the distant figures of St. John and St. Peter in the last-named picture, while the head of St. James, seen in profile, bears a close resemblance to that of the Risen Christ. The background, too, displays a decided Italian influence.[^[172]]

Vol. I., Plate 25.

THE LAST SUPPER
Central Panel of a Triptych
Basel Gallery

THE VISIT TO LOMBARDY

Still stronger evidence of this journey to Lombardy is to be found in Holbein’s numerous designs for painted glass,[^[173]] which he produced during the next six or seven years, designs which, in most cases, are filled round the borders and in the backgrounds with rich and elaborate architecture based upon Renaissance models. It is difficult to understand how he could have produced so much work of this nature, so filled with the beauty and dignity of the style upon which it was founded, had he not had at least some personal acquaintance with the original examples upon the far side of the Alps, which these drawings of his so often suggest. A close comparison of certain of these studies with the architectural details of some of the splendid Renaissance buildings which he must have seen if this journey across the plains of Lombardy did in reality take place, makes it almost certain, although there are no documentary proofs, that he made drawings and sketches of some of the principal edifices of Milan, the façade and interior of the Certosa of Pavia, the monumental tombs of architectural design which are to be met with throughout Northern Italy, and such cathedral churches as those of Como and Lugano;[^[174]] and that he must have studied also the use made by the Italian painters of similar architectural features in the backgrounds of their frescoes and paintings. It is difficult to believe that his intimate knowledge of the true principles of that style were gained merely by the study of a few engravings or isolated pictures. Here and there, too, in those glass designs in which the background is a landscape, there is more than one Alpine scene. In the one with the figure of a Pope or Bishop, in the Basel Gallery (No. 334),[^[175]] there is a view of the old Devil’s Bridge on the Andermatt route, and the same bridge is to be seen in the “Table of Cebes” woodcut. There is a view of the Rigi in the background of the woodcut of “Jacob’s Ladder” in Thomas Wolff’s edition of the Pentateuch, 1523, and, again, a representation of Lucerne in the woodcut of the “New Jerusalem,” in the same publisher’s edition of the New Testament, 1523 (Pl. [70] (3)).[^[176]]

In the course of his journey to and from Lombardy he probably made short halts in more than one Swiss town. Hegner mentions pictures by him in Coutrai, Zürich, Altorf, and Berne, but the works he enumerates, with the exception of the painted table at Zürich, are not the work of Holbein. There are, however, indications that he spent some time in Altorf, in the canton Uri, from which district it has been suggested that his family originally came, for the Holbein arms are almost identical with those of that canton. In the church is a “Head of Christ,” which local tradition gives to Holbein, and in the Convent of the Capuchins still hangs a copy of the “Christ in the Tomb” of the Basel Gallery. The “Head of Christ” has suffered so severely that it is impossible to-day to say whether it is from his hand; the church archives, which are said to have contained proofs of its authenticity, were lost in a fire which occurred in 1799, and did a great amount of damage, destroying, among other things, an altar-piece of the “Crucifixion,” attributed to Holbein, painted on canvas, one of the chief treasures of the church. The version of the “Christ in the Tomb” in the monastery shows material differences from the original at Basel. The body of Christ is no longer rigid in death. He has conquered it, and the artist, whoever he may have been, has represented him as the giver of eternal life, by means of rays of light which emanate from the recumbent body. Above the figure is a medallion with the Burial, which bears little likeness to Holbein’s work. M. Pierre Gauthiez suggests that this Christ was painted by Holbein when under the immediate influence of certain Lombard painters, but that it became so badly damaged in course of time that it was restored and repainted by some not very skilful worker.[^[177]]

DESIGNS FOR PAINTED GLASS

Wherever Holbein may have wandered in search of work, he was back again in Lucerne early in 1519. The town books contain records of payments made to him for the painting of certain banners and pennons in the spring of that year. It was a custom of the Lucernois to plant banners on the gables and summits of their street fountains, as a signal for assembly whenever there was question of war; and, in addition to this custom, small flags of painted cloth were usually to be seen hanging in such places.[^[178]] On the 19th February 1519, Holbein was paid twelve schillings for two flags of this kind, which were hung near the cathedral, and on the 21st May of the same year he received one livre, one schilling, six heller for banners for the fountain near the convent of the Franciscans. It was round this fountain of the Cordeliers that the shoemakers and sellers of various merchandise had their stalls, and the neighbouring street was the quarter of the glass-painters. For these latter craftsmen Holbein made several designs. There is one of these in the Basel Gallery (No. 354), which, however, is not from Holbein’s own hand, but merely a good workshop copy. It represents the standing figure of the Virgin with the Child in her arms, under an arch with hanging garlands, supported by pillars and pilasters with Renaissance ornament in low relief, and appears to have been drawn in Lucerne, for the background consists of an admirable little landscape study with a view of the towers and roofs and the old covered bridge of that city, and cloud-capped mountains in the background.[^[179]] It was, however, designed for some citizen of Basel, and may, therefore, have been done after he had left Lucerne, and the background sketched in from memory. It forms the left-hand half of a double window containing the patron saints of Basel, of which the right-hand half still exists in the original glass in the cloisters of Wettingen, representing the Emperor Heinrich II holding a model of the minster, and with a shield containing the arms of Basel at his feet. In its architectural details this window agrees with the “Virgin and Child” drawing in the Amerbach Collection, which is in pen and wash and lightly coloured.

A second window design, also in the Amerbach Collection, dated 1518, and signed “H.H.,” represents the arms of State-councillor Holdermeier of Lucerne.[^[180]] Under an open archway with pillars inlaid with marble stand three peasants with grotesque head-dresses, busily talking, conceived by the artist with considerable humour. One rests on his scythe, another carries a sack over his shoulder, while the one in the middle holds a basket of eggs. Over the centre of the arch is a small tablet with the date, and on either side of it, in the spandrils, peasants are shown at work in the fields, mowing and reaping. In the centre foreground is placed a shield with the Holdermeier arms. A third design for painted glass of this period with the arms of Hans Fleckenstein of Lucerne, and dated 1517, is in the Brunswick Gallery, and was lent to the Holbein Exhibition in Basel in 1897-8.[^[181]]

Two other existing designs appear to belong to Holbein’s Lucerne period. The first is the very beautiful drawing in the Basel Gallery of the Archangel Michael as the Weigher of Souls (Pl. [26]).[^[182]] It is evidently a drawing for a wooden statue. The Archangel Michael as the Soul Weigher was the patron saint of the cloisters of Beromünster, near Lucerne, and most probably, according to Dr. Ganz, this design was a commission from Holbein’s patrons, Peter and Jakob von Hertenstein. Jakob was feoffee of the cloisters, and Peter, canon of Basel, was from 1483 until his death in 1519 also canon of the minster. He had his own private chapel, to which he presented various works of art, including a window of painted glass with a representation of the Archangel, which is now in the Lucerne Museum.[^[183]] The winged figure of the youthful saint stands erect upon a slight carved bracket, raising a great sword over his head with one hand, and with the other holding a large pair of scales just clear of the ground, in one of which is Satan, with wings and a long curled tail, and in the other a naked child with a nimbus, representing the soul. St. Michael, too, wears a nimbus above his masses of curled hair, and gazes down with a smile on the upturned face of the Evil One, whom he is about to strike with his sword. He is clad in clinging drapery, which leaves one leg bare, and a breastplate richly chased with a Renaissance flower-and-leaf design, a long cloak falling from his shoulders to the ground. The figure displays extraordinary grace and energy, and in the beauty of its conception and its draughtsmanship recalls the best work of the Italian painters, and was evidently accomplished immediately after his return from Lombardy, when the stimulus of that journey was still at its highest and strongest.

The second drawing, in Indian ink, with pen and bistre outlines, in the British Museum (No. 14), is a round composition nearly nine inches in diameter, representing miners at work on the face of a mountain side (Pl. [27]).[^[184]] In the foreground is a rocky platform on which two men are driving wedges into the rock with hammers with long pliant handles. Others are working with smaller hammers, and one, with a lantern fastened to his cap, is mounting to the platform by a ladder. Above them another man is ascending in the same way to a higher part of the quarry, while from an opening on the right a miner is pushing a truck full of ore along a wooden bridge, and another, down below, is raking the stone into a tray. Various wooden huts are placed here and there on the ledges. According to Dr. E. His, this drawing was in Basel in the sixteenth century, and was then copied by an unknown artist as an illustration to a manuscript book on mining by Andreas Ryff. It was probably made by Holbein in the neighbourhood of the St. Gotthard Pass, on his way to or from Lombardy.

Vol. I., Plate 26.

THE ARCHANGEL MICHAEL AS WEIGHER OF SOULS
Drawing in Indian ink
Basel Gallery

Vol. I., Plate 27.

MINERS AT WORK
Drawing in Indian ink, pen, and bistre
British Museum

SACRED PICTURES FORMERLY IN LUCERNE

Patin mentions five pictures painted by Holbein which in his day were in the church of the Augustines in Lucerne—a “Nativity,” the “Adoration of the Kings,” “Christ disputing with the Doctors,” a “Sancta Veronica,” and a “Taking down from the Cross,”[^[185]] but Hegner could find no traces of them. They probably formed a triptych. M. Gauthiez suggests that these pictures were the result of his study of the paintings of the Lombard masters, the titles alone suggesting a list of works by Luini.[^[186]]

The last-named of these pictures, the “Taking down from the Cross”—in which, according to Patin’s description, Christ’s body was on the ground, the head resting on the Virgin’s lap, and surrounded by Mary Magdalene, Saint John, Nicodemus, and other persons, with the two thieves still on the Cross—was still in the church in the middle of the seventeenth century. Two sketches exist, with notes as to the colour, and an inscription stating that they were drawn in Lucerne from Holbein’s altar-piece in the church of the Augustines by C. Meyer in 1648. Dr. Ganz has recently published a copy of this picture,[^[187]] which is in Palermo, and draws attention to the fact that it agrees in dimensions with the lost original, which was in the possession of the painter Marquard Wocher in Basel in 1834, at which time it was copied by the painter Hieronymus Hess. Another copy, half the size of the original, was exhibited at the Exhibition of Early German Art at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1906, and a third is still in the sacristy of one of the Lucerne churches. In addition, there is a drawing of the group of the two chief figures, Christ and the Virgin, in the Basel Gallery,[^[188]] a free copy of the central group of Christ and the Virgin, signed H. H. W. and H. H. It was done towards the end of the sixteenth century either by Hans Jörg Wannewetsch of Basel, or Hans Heinrich Wegmann of Lucerne.