The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Not just a 16thcentury photo
Holbein’s phenomenal precision stuns us – but the real genius is the impish, mocking spirit behind it
THE KING’S PAINTER by Franny Moyle 576pp, Apollo, T £30 (0844 871 1514), RRP £35, ebook £8.99
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We can safely say that, of Hans Holbein the Younger’s greatness as a painter, there is no end. His portraits’ material richness, wit and sheer believability, mixed with insistent mystery, put them among the supreme artistic works of any era. His religious and satirical paintings and drawings, and his architectural, book and object designs are their equal. A subsidiary but pleasing aspect of his greatness is that our knowledge of his life is as thin as his art is deep – thinner even, if that were possible, than the lips of Thomas Cromwell in the deliberately cartoonish portrait Holbein painted of him in 1532.
What makes our ignorance of Holbein’s life pleasing is that it frees us to concentrate on his boldness, on the unsurpassed detail and vivid ambiguity that made him – though he founded no school, and was not much noticed until the 18th century – the father of modern painting in England. In Franny Moyle’s resplendently produced and otherwise comprehensive account, the one shame is that she excavates that biographical shallowness with busy fascination, often at the expense of our understanding of the depths of what made him the endlessly interesting painter he remains.
Moyle’s book is called The King’s Painter but its subtitle points to the artist’s “life and times”, not life and art. So we learn that, growing up in Augsburg, Germany, the boy Hans started drawing early, working in his father’s busy but struggling studio; we also hear a lot not only about the commercial ineffectiveness of artists’ guilds (the chief reason for Hans the Elder’s poverty), but also about Albrecht of Brandenburg’s purchase of the archbishopric of Mainz, the sale of St Peter’s indulgences, and Martin Luther’s protest against Catholic corruption.
Likewise, when Moyle discusses Holbein’s famously enigmatic 1533 work The Ambassadors – its subjects upstaged by the sickly diagonal blob in the foreground that lunges out at the viewer as a human skull when viewed from the painting’s right edge – the author’s valuable descriptions are half-buried under lengthy expository passages about Francis I’s court, Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, Boleyn’s coronation and pageant, and impregnable sentences such as this: “Other members [of a reformist circle at the French court] who remained loyal Catholics but nevertheless saw reform in a positive light included Jean’s brother, the bishop of Auxerre, and a rising star in
French politics, Georges de Selves, the young Bishop of Lavaur, to whose father d’Étaples had dedicated his Psalterium David in 1524.” TL;DR, you might say.
The point about the Holbein of 500 years ago, surely, is that today he would be just as magnificent a portrait painter – and then some. His fame may rest partly on the notability of his sitters, from Henry VIII (who forgave him his flattering portrait of Anne of Cleves) to Thomas Cromwell (whom Henry did not forgive), Thomas More, Erasmus and others. Holbein has given us not just Tudor England’s but humanist Europe’s photo album. But his breathtaking brushwork that reached its zenith in his late miniatures, his capacity for verisimilitude, and mastery of perspective and colour are allied to a quality that truly leads us on to his genius: a permanently mobile, exploratory cast of mind that, on the one hand, is restlessly interrogating our mortality – humanity’s existential predicament of being then nothingness – and on the other hand always wanting to tease or overturn traditions, mock pretension, expose vanity and tyranny – and be paid for it.
His definitive image of Henry VIII, legs planted apart, a swollen king in slashed silk, quietly exudes cruel power. His portrait of Thomas Cromwell – a pampered schemer in profile – is as flat, he hints, as his sitter’s personality (sorry, Hilary Mantel). In person, Holbein was apparently without great sentiment, uncoupling himself from patrons such as Cromwell as their stars, and heads, fell, nimbly navigating the astral storms of the 16th century’s religious and temporal convulsions. He hardly saw his family, who lived in Basel, during the 1530s, leaving his wife, Elsbeth, to bring up their children, and by 1541 he had another family in London.
Yet with every portrait he communicates his subject’s humanity (or lack) with a reality that can warm and unsettle the viewer equally. His treatment of his subjects, from monarchs to Christs, naked goddesses to merchants decked in finery, undoes the deferential world of representation that preceded him. His ceaseless layering of allusion and ambiguity, from the direct questioning of his sitters’ gaze to his accessorising and staging of each picture, goes on pricking our modern curiosity.
Moyle’s book is a lavish, unflagging catalogue and summary of the state of our knowledge of Holbein, but to my mind misses the modernity of his genius. Her account is nevertheless full of clues about whom, in our age, he most resembles: an artist taught to draw very young by his father, whose influences were very wide, the foundation of whose genius is that he was a superb draughtsman; a prolifically inventive artist who insisted that to spend your life searching for the truth in painting is pointless, the important thing is to keep finding something new. The artist in question is of course Pablo Picasso. My own biographical speculation about Holbein the man is that he would not mind the comparison.