Holbein Part 1

Holbein.

by Beatrice Fortescue.

CHAPTER I

HOLBEIN'S PERIOD, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY WORK

Historical epoch and antecedents--Special conditions and character of early Christian art--Ideals and influence of the monk--Holbein's relation to mediaeval schools--His father, uncle, and Augsburg home--Probable dates for his birth and his father's death--Troubles and dispersion of the Augsburg household--From Augsburg to Basel--His brother Ambrose--Erasmus and the _Praise of Folly_; some erroneous impressions of both--Erasmus and Holbein no Protestants at heart--Holbein and the Bible--Ill.u.s.trated vernacular Bibles in circulation before Luther and Holbein were born--Holbein's earliest Basel oil paintings--Direct and indirect education--Historical, geographical, and scientific revolutions of his day--Beginning of his connection with the Burgomaster of Basel--Jacob Meyer zum Hasen--Holbein's woodcuts--His studies from nature--Sudden visit to Lucerne--Italian influence on his art--Work for the Burgomaster of Lucerne.

The eighty-three years stretching from 1461 to 1543--between the probable year of the elder Hans Holbein's birth and that in which the younger, the great Holbein, died--const.i.tute one of those periods which rightly deserve the much-abused name of an Epoch. The Christian era of itself had known many: the Yellow-Danger of the fifth century making one hideous smear across Europe; the _Hic Jacet_ with which this same century entombed an Empire three continents could not content; the new impulse which Charlemagne and Alfred had given to Progress in the ninth century; the triumphant establishment of Papal Supremacy, that Napoleonic idea of Gregory VII.--_Sanctus Satanas_, of the eleventh, and grand architect in a vaster Roman Empire which still "humanly contends for glory"; and lastly, at the very threshold of the Holbeins, the invention of movable printing types about 1440, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which combined to drive the prodigies and potencies of Greek genius through the world.

Each of these had done its own special work for the advancement of man--as for that matter all things must, whether by help or helplessness. Not less than Elijah did the wretched priests of Baal serve those slow, sure, eternal Purposes, which include an Ahab and all the futile fury of his little life as the sun includes its "spots."

But although the stream of History is one, and its every succeeding curve only an expansion of the first, there has probably been no century of our era when this stream has been so suddenly enlarged, or bent so sharply toward fresh constellations as in that of the Holbeins,--when Religion and Art, as well as Science, saw a New World upon its astonished horizon. So that we properly call it a transition period, and its representative men "transitional."

Yet we shall never get near to these real men, to their real world, unless we can forget all about the pose of this or the other Zeitgeist--that tale

_Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing._

For we must keep constantly in mind that what we call the Middle Ages or--worse yet--the Dark Ages, made up the Yesterday of the Holbeins and was the flesh and blood transmitted to them as their own flesh and blood with all its living bonds toward the Old and all its living impulses toward the New.

A now famous New Zealander is, we know, to sketch our own "mediaevalism"

with contemptuous pity for its darkness. But until his day comes, our farthing-dips seem to make a gaudy illumination. And, meantime, we are alive; we walk about; we, too, can swell the chorus which the Initiated chant in every century with the same fond confidence: "We alone enjoy the Holy Light."

The New is ever becoming old; the old ever changing into New. And if we ask why each waxes or wanes just when it does and as it does, there is, in the last a.n.a.lysis, no better answer than Aurora's explanation for chancing on the poets--

_Because the time was ripe._

And the Holbein century is one of stupendous Transitions because the time was ripe; and not simply because printing was invented, or Greek scholars were driven from Constantinople to scatter abroad in Europe, or Ferdinand and Isabella wanted a direct route to Cathay, or Friar Martin nailed ninety-five Theses to the door of Wittenberg's church, and built himself thereby an everlasting name as Luther.

And because the time was ripe for a new Art, even more than because this or that great painter entrained it, it also had its transition period, and Holbein is set down in manuals as a transitional painter. Teutonic, too; because all Christian art is either Byzantine or Italian or Teutonic in its type.

When it first crept from the catacombs under the protection of the Constantinople Court it could but be Byzantine; that strange composite obtained by stripping the Greek "beast" of every pagan beauty and then decking it out with crude Oriental ornament. But who that prizes the peculiar product of that fanaticism would have had its cradle without this sleepless terror, lest for the whole world of cla.s.sic heathendom it should lose the dear-bought soul of purely Christian ideals? Or who, remembering that in thus relentlessly sacrificing its entire heritage of pagan acc.u.mulation it put back the clock of Art to the Stone Age, and had to begin all over again in the helpless bewilderment of untaught childish effort,--could find twice ten centuries too long for the astounding feat it achieved? Ten centuries, after all, make but a marvellous short course betwixt the archaic compositions of the third century and the compositions of Giotto or Wilhelm Meister.

A great deal of nonsense is talked about the "tyrannies" which the Monastic Age inflicted on Art. Of course, monasticism fostered fanaticism.

It does not need the luminous genius that said it, to teach us that "whatever is necessary to what we make our sole object is sure, in some way or in some time or other, to become our master." And with the monk, the true monk in his day of usefulness, every knowledge and every art was good or bad according as it served monastic ideals. But it is absurd to say that the monk--_qua_ monk--"put the intellect in chains." The whole body of his oppression was not so paralysing as the iron little finger of Malherbe and his school of "cla.s.sic" despots. To charge upon the monk the limitations of his crude thought and cruder methods is about as intelligent as it would be to fall foul of Shakespeare because boys played his women's parts.

The springs of Helicon were the monk's also, as witness Tuotilo and Bernard of Clairvaux; but it was by the waters of Jordan that his miracles were wrought. As Johnson somewhere says of Watts, "every kind of knowledge was by the piety of his mind converted into theology." And for the rest,--by the labour of his hands, by his fasting from the things of the flesh, by his lofty faith--however erring or forgotten or betrayed, in individual cases,--by every impressive lesson of a hard life lived unto others and a hard death died unto himself, century after century it was the monk who taught and helped the barbarian of every land to turn the desolate freedom of the wild a.s.s into a smiling homestead and the savage Africa of his own heart into at least a better place. The marvel is that he could at the same time find room or energy to make his monastery also a laboratory, a library, and a studio. And yet he did.

To say that he abhorred Greek ideals is to say that the shepherd abhors the wolf. His life was one long fight with the insidious poison of the Greek. He did not,--at any rate in his best days--believe at all in Art for Art's sake; and had far too intimate an acquaintance with the "natural man" to do him even justice. What he wanted was to do away with him.

Yet with all its repellent features, it is to this unflinching exclusiveness of the monkish ideal that we owe one of the most exquisite blossoms on the stock of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,--their innocent and appealing art; an art as original and as worthy of reverence, within its own peculiar province, as the masterpieces of Greece or Italy. You must turn from the beauty of Antinous to the beauty of, say, the Saint Veronica, among the works of the Cologne school at Munich, before you can estimate the Gulf of many things besides time which for ever divides the world of the one from the world of the other. And then you must essay to embody the visions of Patmos with a child's colour-box and brushes, before you can compare the achievements--the amazing achievements--of the monkish ideal with the achievements of cla.s.sic paganism.

With the school of Wilhelm Meister this tremendous revolution had accomplished itself; and solely through the indomitable will of the monk. The ideal of Greece had been to show how G.o.ds walk the earth. This Christian ideal was to show how devout men and women walk with G.o.d.

Their ineffable heavenly faces look out from their golden world--

_Inviolate, unwearied, Divinest, sweetest, best,_

upon this far-off, far other world, where nothing is inviolate, and divinest things must come at last to tears and ashes.

But the monk had had his day as well as his way. The so-called Gothic architecture had expressed its uttermost of aspiration and tenuity; and painting had fulfilled its utmost accommodation to the ever more slender wall-s.p.a.ces and forms which this architecture necessitated. And once again, in the fifteenth century, the time was ripe for a new transition.

Art was now to reveal the realities of this world, and to concern itself with Man among them. And just as the law of reaction flung the mind into religious revolt from the outworn dogmas and overgrown pretensions of the monkish ideal, so did it drive the healthy reaction of art into its own extravagances of protest. And we shall see how even a genius like Holbein's was unable to entirely free itself from this reactionary defect. For with all his astonishing powers, imaginative and technical, he never wholly overcame that defect of making his figures too short and too thick-set for grace, which amounted to a deformity in the full-length figures of his early work, and was due to his fierce revolt from the unnaturally elongated forms of an earlier period.

Yet we should make a grave mistake if we were to regard Holbein as cut off by this reaction from all affinities with the monkish ideals of the Cologne school. On the contrary. We shall see, especially in his religious pictures, how many of those ideals had fed the very springs of his imagination and sunk deep into his art; only expressing themselves in his own symbolism and in forms unlike theirs.

In the Augsburg Gallery there is a painting by Holbein's father, the "Basilica of St. Paul," in which there is a group introduced after the fashion of the period, which has a special biographical interest. This group, in the Baptism of St. Paul, is believed by many authorities to be a portrait-group of the painter himself,--Hans Holbein the Elder, and his two young sons, Ambrose (or Amprosy, as it was often written) and Johannes, or "Hanns." The portrait of the father is certainly like Holbein's own drawing of him in the Duke d'Aumale's Collection, which Sandrart engraved in his account of the younger Holbein; while the heads of the two boys are very like those which we shall find later in a drawing in the Berlin Gallery. From the p.r.o.nounced way in which his father's hand rests on little Hans' head, while the left points him out,--and even his elder brother "Prosy" shows by his att.i.tude the special notice to be taken of Hans,--it is clear that if this is a portrait-group either it was painted when the boys were actually older, or the younger had already given some astonishing proof of that precocity which his early works display; for in this group the younger boy cannot be more than eight or nine years old.

Hans Holbein the Elder, who stands here with his long brown hair and beard falling over his fur gown, was a citizen of Augsburg, living for a while in the same street with the honoured Augsburg painter, Hans Burgkmair, and occasionally working with him on large commissions. That he was a native of Augsburg, and the son--as is generally believed--of "Michel Holbain" (Augsburg commonly spelt _Holbein_ with an _a_), leather-dresser--I myself cannot feel so sure as others do. There is no doc.u.mentary evidence to prove that the Michael Holbein of Augsburg ever had a son, and there is both doc.u.mentary and circ.u.mstantial evidence to prove that the descendants of Hans Holbein the Elder claimed a different origin. That a man was a "citizen," or burgher, of any town, of course proves nothing. It was a period when painters especially learned their trades and practised it in many centres. And this, when guilds were all-powerful and no one could either join one without taking citizenship with it, or pursue its calling in any given place without a.s.sociation with the guild of that place, often involved a series of citizenships.

The elder Holbein was himself a burgher of Ulm at one time, if not of other cities in which he worked.

But that Augsburg was his fixed home for the greater part of his life is certain; and the rate-books show that after the leather-dresser had disappeared from their register of residents in the retail business quarter of the city, in the neighbourhood of the Lech ca.n.a.ls, Hans Holbein the Elder was, in 1494, a householder in this very place. For some years the name of "Sigmund, his brother," is bracketed with his; but about 1517 Sigmund Holbein established himself in Berne, where he acc.u.mulated a very respectable competence, which, at his death in 1540, he bequeathed to his "dear nephew, Hans Holbein, the painter," at that time a citizen of Basel. Sigmund also was a painter, but no unquestioned work of his is known.

There is nothing to show who was the wife of Sigmund Holbein's elder brother, Hans. But by 1499 this elder Hans had either a child or children mentioned with him (_sein kind_, applying equally to one or more). In all probability this is the earliest discoverable record of Hans Holbein the Younger, and his elder brother Ambrose. In all probability, too, Hans was then about two years old, and "Prosy" a year or two older. At one time it was vaguely thought that the elder Hans had three sons; and Prosy, or "Brosie," as it was sometimes written, got converted into a "Bruno" Holbein. But no vestige of an actual Bruno is to be found. And as Ambrose Holbein's trail, whether in rate-books or art-records, utterly vanishes after 1519, it will be seen that for the most part of the younger Holbein's life he had no brother. Hence it is easy to understand how his uncle Sigmund's Will speaks only of "my dear nephew."

Hans the elder lived far on in his younger son's life. His works attest that he had talents and ideals of no mean order. But I do not propose to enter here upon the vexed question as to how far the "Renaissance"

characteristics of the later works attributed to his hand are his own or his son's. Learned and exhaustive arguments have by turns consigned the best of these works to the father, to the son, and back again to the father. In at least one instance of high authority the same writer has, at different periods, held a brief for both sides and for opposite opinions! In this connection, as on the battlefield of some of the son's greatest paintings, the single-minded student of Holbein may not unprofitably draw three conclusions from the copious literature on the subject:--First, that a working hypothesis is not of necessity the right one; secondly, that in the matter of his p.r.o.nouncements the critical expert also may occasionally be regarded as

_Un animal qui s'habille, deshabille et babille toujours;_

and thirdly, that in default of incontestable doc.u.mentary proofs the modest "so far as I have been able to discover" of Holbein's first biographer, Van Mander, is a capital anchor to windward, and is at any rate preferable to driving forth upon the howling waters of Cla.s.sification, like Constance upon the Sea of Greece, "Alle sterelesse, G.o.d wot."

But my chief reason for not pursuing the Protean phantom of Holbein's Augsburg period is that,--apart from my own disagreement with many accepted views about the works it includes, and the utter lack of data or determining any position irrefutably,--it is comparatively unimportant to the purpose of this little book. For wherever the younger painter was born,--whether at Augsburg or Ulm or elsewhere,--and whatever I believe to be his rightful claim to such paintings as the St.

Elizabeth and St. Barbara of the St. Sebastian altar-piece at Munich, Fame, like Van Mander, has rightly written him down Holbein _Basiliensis_.

It is true that his father's brushes were his alphabet. It may be true, though I doubt it, that his father's teaching was his only technical school. But if he was, as to the last he gloried in being, the child of the Old Period, he was much more truly the immediate pupil of the Van Eycks than of his father's irresolute ideals; while Basel was his university. And whatever may have been his debt to those childish years when the little Iulus followed his father with trembling steps, his debt to Basel was immensely greater. The door-sill of Johann Froben's printing-house was the threshold of his earthly immortality.

When he turned his back on the low-vaulted years of Augsburg, it was because for him also the time was ripe. The Old Period had cast his genius; the New was to expand it to new powers and purposes.

_Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year's dwelling for the new; Stole with soft step its shining archway through, Built up its idle door, Stretch'd in his last-found home and knew the old no more._

It may easily have been the elder Hans' continuous troubles, whether due to his fault or his misfortune it is idle now to inquire, which made his sons leave Augsburg. Certain it is that he but escaped from the clutches of one suit for debt after another in order to tumble into some fresh disaster of the sort, until his own brother Sigmund appears among his exasperated creditors. After 1524 Hans Holbein the Elder vanishes from the records. Probably, therefore, it was at about this date that he paid,--Heaven and himself only knowing how willingly,--the one debt which every man pays at the last.

At all events his sons did leave Augsburg about 1514; or, at any rate, Hans did, since there is a nave little Virgin and Child in the Basel Museum, dated 1514, which must have been painted in the neighbourhood of Constance in this year,--probably for the village church where it was discovered. As everything points to the conclusion that Holbein was born in 1497, he would have been some seventeen years old at this time, and "Prosy" eighteen or nineteen. Substantially, therefore, they must have looked pretty much as in the drawing which their father had made of them three years before; that precious drawing in silver-point which is now in the Berlin Collection (Plate 2). Over the elder, still with the curly locks of the group in the "St. Paul Basilica," is written _Prosy_; over the younger, _Hanns_. The age of the latter, fourteen, may still be deciphered above his portrait, but that of Ambrose has quite vanished.

Between the two is the family name, written in Augsburg fashion, Holbain. At the top of the sheet stands the year of the drawing, almost illegible, but believed to be 1511.

Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE 2

"PROSY" AND "HANNS" _HOLBAIN_ [_Drawn by their father, Hans Holbein the elder_]

_Silver-point. Berlin Cabinet_

Of the elder brother all that is certainly known may be said here once for all. In 1517 he entered the Painters' Guild at Basel, where he is called "Ambrosius Holbein, citizen of Augsburg." He made a number of designs for wood-engraving, t.i.tle-pages, and ornaments, for the printers of Basel--all of fair merit. He may also have worked in the studio of Hans Herbster, a Basel painter of considerable note. Herbster's portrait in oils, long held to be a fine work of the younger brother,--now that it has pa.s.sed from the Earl of Northbrook's collection to that of the Basel Museum, is attributed to Ambrose Holbein. But little else is known of him; and after 1519, as has been said, the absence of any record of him among the living suggests that he died in that year.

In the late summer of 1515 came that momentous trifle which has for ever linked the name of young Hans Holbein with that of Erasmus. Whether, as some say, the scholar gave him the order, or, as seems more likely, some friend of both had the copy, now in the Basel Museum, on the margins of which the lad drew his spirited pen-and-ink sketches,--it is on record that they were made before the end of December, and that Erasmus himself was delighted with their wit and vigour. And, in truth, they are exceedingly clever, both in the art with which a few strokes suggest a picture, and in that by which the picture emphasises every telling point in the satire. But a great deal too much has been built upon both the satire and the sketches; a great deal, also, falsely built upon them.