80 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
THEA RT WORLD
HEAD ON
The portraits of Hans Holbein the Younger.BY PETERSCHJELDAHL
hands-down masterpiece of the great
humanist whom Henry had recently
appointed the Chancellor of the Duchy
of Lancaster and would soon elevate to
Lord High Chancellor of England, and
“Thomas Cromwell” (1532-33), a rather
sullen depiction of the King’s chief power
broker. (The More is in the Morgan show;
the Cromwell isn’t.) That both men would
have their heads lopped off to Henry’s
satisfaction—More’s in 1535, for object-
ing to Henry’s religious policies, and
Cromwell’s in 1540, on rumored suspi-
cions that he was plotting to usurp the
throne—is an incidental piquancy. Those
were treacherous times, fomented by Mar-
tin Luther’s theological revolt, beginning
in 1517, against the universal sway ofRoman Catholicism in Europe and racked
by sporadic, bloody warfare.
You can’t deduce much about the pe-
riod’s upheavals, except obliquely, from
Holbein’s career as a hired-gun celebrant
of whoever employed him, most deci-
sively Henry. Holbein can appear ideo-
logical only by glancing association with
Christian humanists in the circle of Eras-
mus of Rotterdam, the illegitimate son
of a priest and a towering intellectual
who strove to refine rather than to upend
Catholic doctrine and bitterly contested
the more radical Luther. Testifying to
flexible convictions, the Morgan show
includes a rondel painting by Holbein,
circa 1532, of Erasmus’s thin-faced, pointy-
nosed mien, and also a small portrayal,
circa 1535, of Luther’s most efficacious
disciple, Philipp Melanchthon. Holbein
left no telltale writings and evinced no
view of Henry VIII’s rupture with Rome
and his founding of the Church of En-
gland, with himself as its “Supreme
Head,” in the aftermath of Pope Clem-
ent VII’s refusal to annul his first mar-
riage, to Catherine of Aragon. (It was
never a smart move to exasperate Henry.)
Holbein’s relation to contemporane-
ous religious and political trends might
have developed in any number of ways
after his early years of precocious and
remunerative celebrity in the Swiss city
of Basel, a thriving center of artistic pa-
tronage and publishing. A son of a late-
Gothic painter, he had arrived from his
native Bavaria while a teen-ager. Tan-
talizing hints of unfulfilled potential at-
tend much of his tyro work, notably one
of the most indelibly shocking images
of all time, “The Dead Christ in the
Tomb” (1521-22). The painting, measur-
ing a foot high and six and a half feet
wide, depicts a gruesomely putrefying
corpse that, if unearthed, could present
only a sanitation problem. Famously,
Dostoyevsky’s encounter with the pic-
ture, in 1867, shook his Christian faith
and obsessed him thereafter, figuring as
a philosophical provocation a year or so
later in his novel “The Idiot.” (The work
is not in the Morgan show, but I will
not forget, no matter how hard I try, my
own first look, in the Kuntsmuseum
Basel, at that ... what? That thing.) Of
related fascination are “Images of Death,”
gleeful woodcuts that Holbein worked
on in the fifteen-twenties, which illus-
Holbein’s masterpiece “Sir Thomas More,” from 1527, shows the great humanist. trate all manner of personages being in- COURTESY THE FRICK COLLECTION
T
here’s a new old painter in town:
Hans Holbein the Younger, the
dazzling Renaissance German specialist
in portraiture, with his first major Amer-
ican show of paintings, “Holbein: Cap-
turing Character,” at the Morgan Li-
brary & Museum. It has been a long wait
since 1543, when the artist died, at about
the age of forty-five (his birth year is un-
certain), probably of the plague, while in
service to England’s Henry VIII. Why?
Holbein is an awkward fit in art history—
overqualified, in a way, for the sixteenth
century’s march of eclectic Mannerist
styles toward the aesthetic revolution of
the Baroque. He is familiar hereabouts
mainly from two portraits in the Frick
Collection: “Sir Thomas More” (1527), a