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THE NEWYORKER, FEBRUARY 28, 2022 81
terrupted by skeletons: surprise, surprise.
Holbein left Basel for London in 1532,
likely impelled by a terror of rampaging
iconoclasm—the wholesale destruction
of religious imagery and artifacts by over-
enthusiastic Protestants in the Swiss city.
Might Holbein have continued to evolve
as, temperamentally, a visual bard of mor-
tality had he stayed? Perhaps. But Basel’s
formerly open mind had snapped shut.
A sepulchral penchant resurfaced, briefly,
in “The Ambassadors” (1533), a double
full-length portrait of French agents with
a horizontal smear across it in white and
gray which, when viewed at angles from
the sides of the work, resolves into the
apparition of a skull. (That marvel hasn’t
travelled to the Morgan from its home,
in Britain’s National Gallery.) Such au-
dacities were otherwise quashed in Hol-
bein’s supervening duties to phlegmatic
patrons. He had already spent two pro-
ductive years in London between 1526
and 1528, lodging with Thomas More.
Among his first commissions on his re-
turn were portraits of Hanseatic mer-
chants—contented but hard men (you
would dread having one as your father)
thrust forward from f lattish grounds,
often blankly green or blue. Then he be-
came effectively—and soon officially—
the premier artist in Henry VIII’s court.
H
olbein proved very, very good at
modernizing the kicked-up real-
ism of Northern Renaissance styles, rou-
tinely executed in oils on wood panels,
that dated from Jan van Eyck, a cen-
tury earlier. Consider, and be wowed by,
Holbein’s renderings of skin, reminis-
cent of Hans Memling: aglow with light
that can appear, ambiguously, either to
fall upon or to radiate from within a
subject, if not somehow both at once.
His virtuosity with fabrics and heraldic
ornament stuns, preternaturally. Hol-
bein abridged Netherlandish portrai-
ture’s typically fancy compositions by
centering his sitters, either more or less
head on or in closeup profile. The Mor-
gan show’s proposition that Holbein
“captured character” seems a bit of a
stretch. The subjects register more in
terms of assigned or attained public dis-
tinction than of interior lives. They pro-
ject secular prestige. But their singular
physiognomies go bang at a glance.
The charming subject of the earliest
really striking portrait in the show, “A
Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling” (circa
1526-28), may have been Anne Lovell, the
wealthy wife of a functionary in Henry
VIII’s court. Holbein was sensitive but
cautiously unerotic in picturing women,
who are usually sombre. (You get a sense
that female vivacity was rarely counte-
nanced.) Forensic analysis has revealed
that the pictured animal and bird were
added later, probably as requested sym-
bols of the woman’s family traditions.
Holbein was not averse to pandering.
Eventually, he ran into trouble with Henry
by overdoing it. Ordered, in 1539, to scout
the German Anne of Cleves as a possi-
ble next bride for the King, he produced
a ravishing likeness. Thereby initially ex-
cited, Henry had the consequent mar-
riage annulled in short order. Still, Hol-
bein retained his official position at court.
Are you game for further grisly data?
Two other men, subjects of excellent
Holbein drawings in the show, would
keep appointments with the headsman.
We can only wonder about the artist’s
own fortunes had he survived the three
or so years between his demise and Hen-
ry’s, in 1547. There had been about their
situation a strange symbiosis, I feel, of
royal tyranny and artistic discipline. A
formulaic fealty, enforced by reasonable
jitters, seems to me part of what iso-
lates Holbein in comparison with ran-
gier, more historically mainstream peers
such as Pontormo and Bronzino, in
Medici Florence. Could Holbein have
been a greater artist if he’d been granted
imaginative license? Maybe and maybe
not. He would be different, and we
would both know a lot more about him
as a man and miss the monumentality
of his definitive achievement.
Enriching “Holbein: Capturing Char-
acter” are somewhat less strong though
rather livelier works by his Netherland-
ish near-predecessors Jan Gossaert and
Quentin Matsys. Those artists demon-
strate complexities of busy settings and
picture-window deep space that Hol-
bein eliminated from their shared genre.
In addition, examples of illustration and
decorative design by Holbein and oth-
ers illumine the varied functions of a six-
teenth-century court vocation. The show,
despite not being large, immerses us in
the creative climate of the time, in this
case at its icy English extreme. I came
away at once thrilled and frustrated by
the legacy of a flabbergasting talent.
