Holbein Part 3

But in 1520, when Holbein was just married, Oporinus was still a student and Bonifacius unmarried. Erasmus, too, did not permanently take up his home with Froben until the following year, and was now at Louvain. Yet what a true university was that little house _zum Sessel_ (now 3, Todtenga.s.slein, the little lane where the old post-office stood) to an intelligence such as Holbein's! And what a circle was that of Froben's staff! From Froben himself, above whom Erasmus alone could tower in scholarship, down through every member to the youngest, and from such men as Gerard Lystrius on the one hand and the literally "Beatus" Rhena.n.u.s on the other, what things were not to be learned!

And what discussions those were that drew each man to give of his best in the common talk! Venice sent news of the "unspeakable" Turk, whom she had such good cause to watch and dread. For fifty years his name had ceased to blanch the cheek of other nations; but now it was said, and said truly, that the dying Selim, "the Grim," had forged a thunderbolt which Suleyman II. would not be slow to hurl. No man could know the worst or dared predict the end, as to that Yellow Terror of Holbein's time. And closer still, to keen eyes, were the threats of the coming Peasant Terror. Wurtemberg had battened down the flames, it is true; but the deck of Europe was hot under foot with the pa.s.sions that were soon to make the Turks' atrocities seem gentle in comparison.

The death of Maximilian and the election of Charles V. were a year old now. But none knew better than the Basel printers how much the League of Swabia and the Swiss Confederation had weighed in the close contest of claims between those three strangely youthful compet.i.tors for the Emperor's crown;--Charles, but nineteen; Francis I., one-and-twenty; and Henry VIII., not twenty-five. Basel also knew that Charles had only bought his triumph by swearing to summon the Diet of Worms. All the more, therefore, was she intensely alive to the possible issues of the Arabian-Nights-Entertainment which had but just concluded on the dreary Calais flats when Holbein became one of Basel's citizens. Erasmus had come back full of it. Marco Polo's best wonders made but a dingy show beside the "Field of the Cloth of Gold," where in this June the two defeated candidates for imperial honours had kissed each other midway between the ruined moat of Guisnes and the rased battlements of Arde.

Then, on top of this, came the rumours of the English King's undertaking to answer Luther's most formidable attack on Rome. It was in 1520, the year after his great disputation with Eck at Leipzig, that Luther published his cataclysmic addresses: "To the Christian n.o.bles of Germany" and "On the Babylonian Captivity,"--the latter of which itself contains the whole Protestant Reformation in embryo. "Would to G.o.d,"

exclaimed Erasmus of it, "that he had followed my counsel and abstained from odious and seditious proceedings!" Bishop Tunstall, then in Worms, had also written of it:--"I pray G.o.d keep that book out of England!" But before the year was out "that book" had reached England, and Henry VIII.

had sworn to annihilate its arguments and to triumphantly defend the dogmas of Rome. The eagerly-awaited "Defence" did not get printed, and would remain in Pope Leo's hands for a year yet. But Basel knew, through More and Erasmus,--whose canny smile probably discounted its critical quality,--pretty much its line of defence. Nor was Froben's circle one whit more surprised than its royal author when its immediate reward was that formal style and t.i.tle--_Defender of the Faith_,--to which a few years more were to lend so different a significance.

By this latter date Ulrich von Hutten had fled to Basel, only to find that his violent "heresies" had completely estranged Erasmus, and closed Froben's door, as well as all other Roman Catholic doors, against him for ever. He lodged, therefore, at the Blume until the Basel Council requested him to leave the town, a little before his death, in 1523. But in 1520 Hutten was still at Sickingen's fortress, digging with fierce ardour the impa.s.sable gulf between him and the band of friends and Churchmen among whom Holbein ever ranged himself.

Among the five lost works which Patin says Holbein painted, there was a "Nativity" and an "Adoration of the Kings." It is impossible now to say what resemblances, if any, existed between these and the same subjects, executed not much later, which are now in the University Chapel, Freiburg Minster. These latter are the only known works of Holbein that still hang in a sacred edifice. They were evidently designed to fold in upon a central altar-piece with an arched top, thus making, when open, the usual triptych; but the central painting has vanished. This large work was a gift to the Carthusian monastery in Klein-Basel; and the arms of the donor, Hans Oberriedt, are displayed below the Nativity, as well as the portraits of himself and his six sons. Below the corresponding right wing, the Adoration, are the arms of his wife and her portrait, with her four daughters.

In both wings what I can only describe as the atmosphere of Infancy,--and a touching atmosphere it is too--is strengthened by keeping all the figures small and heightening this suggestion by contrast with a grandiose architecture. In both, too, the sacred scenes reveal themselves like visions unseen by the Oberriedt family, who face outward toward the altar and are supposed to be lighted by the actual lights of the church.

The whole work must once have been a glorious creation, with its rich colours, its beautiful architectural forms, and its mingling of purest imagination with realism. What would one not give to see the lost work these wings covered?

Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE 8 THE NATIVITY _Oils. University Chapel, Freiburg Cathedral_

In the left wing, the Nativity (Plate 8), Holbein has remarkably antic.i.p.ated the lighting of Correggio's famous masterpiece, not finished until years after this must have been painted, by the conditions of Oberriedt's history and Basel's as well. The Light that is to light the world lights up the scene with an exquisite enchanting softness,--yet so brilliantly that the very lights of heaven seem dimmed in comparison.

The moon, in Holbein's deliberate audacity, seems but a disc as she bows her face, too, in worship. Shining by some compulsion of purest Nature, the divine radiance glows on the ecstatic Mother; and away above and beyond her--"How far that little candle shines," and shines, and shines again amid the shadows! It illumines the beautiful face of the Virgin, touches the reverent awe of St. Joseph, plays over marble arch and pillar, discovers the wondering shepherd peering from behind the pillar on the left, and irradiates the angel in the distance, hastening to carry the "glad tidings." The happy cherubs behind the Child rejoice in it; and as they spring forward one notices how Holbein has boldly discarded the conventional, and attached their pinions as if these were a natural development of the arm instead of a separate member.

The same union of unfettered fancy symbolism and realism displays itself throughout the right wing,--where the Virgin is enthroned in front of crumbling palaces. The sun's rays form a great star, of such dazzling light that one of the attendants shades his eyes to look upward, and an old man with a n.o.ble head, wearing an ermine cape, presents his offering as the chief of the three kings; while a Moorish sovereign, dressed in white, makes a splendid figure as he waits to kneel with his gift, and his greyhound stands beside him. The colouring of both paintings must have had an extraordinary beauty when the painter laid down his brush.

To carp at such conceptions because their architecture is as imaginative and as deeply symbolical as the action, is to demand that Holbein shall be someone else. These pictures, beyond the portraits below them, are the farthest possible from aiming at what we demand of Realism, though their own realism is astonishing. Holbein all too seldom sounds them, but when he does choose to stir only a joyous elation in the heart he rings a peal of silver bells. Here all is glad thanksgiving. The Divine has come into a sick and sorry world; and, behold, all is changed!

Nothing sordid, nothing shabby, consists with the _meaning_ of this miracle. Therefore it is not here. All is transformed; all is a New Jerusalem--splendour, peace, ineffable and mysterious Beauty.

With the dominance of the anti-Catholic party, which unseated Meyer zum Hasen in 1521, his friend Oberriedt also fell into trouble. And soon after Erasmus and Bonifacius Amerbach,--disgusted with the iconoclast fanaticism of 1528 and 1529,--took refuge in Catholic Freiburg-in-the-Breisgau, Oberriedt also left Basel for that city. He took these wings with him to save them from the destruction which probably overtook the central work. The latter was, perhaps, too large to conceal or get away. During the Thirty Years' War they were again removed, and safeguarded at Schaffhausen. And so great was their fame that they were twice expressly commanded to be brought before a sovereign; once to Munich, to be seen by Maximilian of Bavaria; and again to Ratisbon for the Emperor Ferdinand III. In 1798 they were looted by the French, and were only restored to Freiburg in 1808.

Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE 9 THE Pa.s.sION _Eight-panelled Altar-piece Oils. Basel Museum_ I _Gethsemane_ II _The Kiss of Judas_ III _Before Pontius Pilate_ IV _The Scourging_ V _The Mocking_ VI _The Way to Calvary_ VII _"It is finished"_ VIII _The Entombment_

Another great religious picture, once no less renowned than Oberriedt's altar-paintings, has suffered a worse fate. This is the eight-panelled altar-piece of the Pa.s.sion, now in the Basel Museum (Plate 9). So far back as is known it was preserved, probably after being hidden from the fury that attacked all church pictures, in the Rathaus. Maximilian I., of Bavaria, the zealous collector of Durer's works, offered almost any price for this altar-piece by Durer's great contemporary. But Basel, unlike Nuremberg, was not to be bribed; and the world-famous painting remained to draw art-lovers from every country in Europe. Nor did the most competent judges fail to envy Basel her jewel, and to eulogise its perfections. Painters such as Sandrart, looking at it after it had survived a hundred and fifty years of vicissitude, could exclaim: "It is a work in which the utmost that our art is capable of may be found; yielding the palm to none, whether of Germany or Italy, and justly wearing the laurel-wreath among the works of former times."

Alas! this laurel, too, has been filched from Holbein's fame. In 1771 the altar-piece was consigned to the collection where it now is; and it was then decided to gild the gold and paint the lily. The work was subjected to one of those crude "restorations" which respect nothing save the frame. And no monarch will ever again compete for its possession.

Red is over red and blue over blue, doubtless; but in place of Holbein's rich harmony a jangle of gaudy conflicting colours now sets one's teeth on edge. So that only in a photograph can one even enjoy the composition--all that is left of the Master.

But here it can be seen with what art the painter has so combined eight separate and distinct pictures, each a gem, into one, by such a distribution and balance that the whole is as integral as a pearl. The scene on the Mount of Olives, which a great critic once p.r.o.nounced worthy to compare with Correggio's work, is only to be surpa.s.sed by the Entombment. And in every scene--what freedom, action, verve! From the first to the last all pa.s.ses with the swift step of Calamity, yet all with n.o.ble dignity.

The Basel Museum possesses also a set of ten washed drawings in Indian ink,--scenes of the Pa.s.sion designed for gla.s.s-painting,--which must be conned and conned again before one can "know" Holbein at all in his deepest moods. They are a great Testament, though they seem unbearably harsh at a superficial glance. But put aside your own ideas and humbly study the ideas of Holbein,--sure that they must be well worth the reverence of yours or mine,--and little by little you will be made free of that Underworld where Holbein's true self has its home; you will pierce its gloom and find its clue and understand its tongue. It is a small matter whether you and I find ourselves in sympathy with that world, or can never be acclimatised. The great matter, the only matter, is to understand it; to see in its skeletons something more than lively bones, in its graves something besides Horror.

Without mastering the logical sequence of these ten drawings,--where scene by scene the Divine recedes before our eyes, and the Son of Man a.s.sumes more and more the whole burden of Sin and Death,--it is inevitable that the life-size painting of Christ in the Grave, also in the Basel Museum (Plate 10), should seem just a ghastly and "unpardonable"

piece of realism. Realism of the most ghastly truthfulness, as to a corpse in the grave, it certainly is. But although it may be questioned whether such a picture should ever be painted, no one who looks through the form to the thought that shapes it would p.r.o.nounce even this awful utterance "unpardonable."

There have been those who could see in this dead Christ,--lying rigid in a green sarcophagus that throws over the waxen flesh the ghastly threat of that decay which would follow if no miracle intervened,--there have been those, I say, who could see in it only superb technique. And others see only the negation of all idealism, if not of all faith.

Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE 10 CHRIST IN THE GRAVE _Oils. Basel Museum_

Yet put this painting,--the acme of technical beauty as well as of ruthless realism,--at the close of the ten Pa.s.sion drawings, and I venture to believe that the one coherent conception that runs through them all will legitimately find its conclusion here.

Here He lies that surrendered Himself to the punishment of Sin and the penalty of Death--for all men and all time. His pale lips are set with the superhuman agony of the cry with which He paid the uttermost farthing of that bond. Man has died for man, martyrs for faith; here G.o.d has died unto Himself, for us. There has been no playing at death. All the pitiless terrors of the grave are here, with Him who for love of us has chosen to know Mortality "like at all points" with mortal men. What He bore for us, shall we shrink from so much as realising? The great eyes are fixed in a look whose penetrating, almost liquid sweetness not even the rigor of the final anguish could obliterate. Divine devotion,--devotion more than mortal,--still lingers in those sockets.

The heart may well dilate before this sight; the soul fall on its knees.

By each of those bloodstained steps, by the sting of this death, we have been paid for. Here, here only,--as Holbein saw it,--is the leverage the heathen philosopher vainly sighed for to move the world; G.o.d's leverage, Infinite Love.

This is anything but a theological tangent. A great artist has bequeathed us his beliefs,--drawn and painted in many works, with every patient, virile, expressive power at his command. There has been enough and to spare of shrieks or scoffs. A little humility and a little study is in place, too. For the rest, let us not forget that this large painting was made for some altar; and that many a weeping penitent, many a devout heart, has been pierced with its message. On the edge of the stone coffin, which is tinted a warm green within, and lit by some opening at the foot, is the inscription in gold letters: "JESUS NAZARENUS REX JUDaeORUM." The stigmata are painted with unsparing truth.

The work is dated 1521.

There is in the Hampton Court Gallery a little painting which has only comparatively recently been recognised as Holbein's, but which forms the beautiful and fitting close of this set of religious pictures. As is the case with so many of his works, the critics are not unanimous upon it.

But the authorities who have no doubts as to its being a genuine Holbein of this period are so weighty that I need not argue the point in support of my own convictions.

In the Hampton Court Catalogue it is styled "Mary Magdalen at our Lord's Sepulchre," but I prefer to call it the Risen Christ (Plate 11). It must once have been supremely beautiful; for even now its ideal loveliness shines through all the evil fortunes which have once again defaced the handiwork of Holbein. The type of Christ, and indeed the work throughout, bears a marked resemblance to the eight-panelled Basel altar-piece.

The painter has chosen the moment recorded in the twentieth chapter of St. John. In that early dawn, "when it was yet dark," Mary has brought spikenard in a marble cup, if not to anoint the sacred Dead at least to pour it on the threshold of the sealed tomb, with tears and prayers. She has fled to tell St. John and St. Peter of the sacrilege of the open tomb,--has followed them back, still mechanically clasping her useless spikenard,--has seen them go in where her trembling knees refused to follow, and then go homeward, as we can see them in the distance, arguing the almost incredible fact.

Poor Mary has had no heart for discussion. She has stayed weeping by the empty grave until two pitying angels have appeared to recall her from despair, and she has "turned herself back,"--too frightened to stay for comfort. And then she has seen near her a Face, a Form, she was too dazed to recognise until the unforgettable Voice has thrilled through her, and she has flung herself forward with the old, instinctive cry, "Master!" to touch, to clasp that Hand, so dear, so familiar, so all-protecting, and find it a reality.

It is this tremendous moment that Holbein has seized. And with what exquisite feeling for every detail of the scene, every great emotion!

Had the painting been preserved, as it deserved to be, surely it too could claim a part of that laurel wreath which Sandrart averred could not be torn from the Basel altar-piece by any rival, whether Italian or German.

Ill.u.s.tration: Plate 11 THE RISEN CHRIST _Oils. Hampton Court Gallery_

The misty landscape, with the crosses of Golgotha and the eastern hills catching the first brightness of the new Day dawning over mortality; the broken clouds of night, scattered like the conquered horrors of the grave, and the illuminated tomb where Hope and Faith henceforth ask us why we weep; the hurrying agitation of St. Peter and the trusting serenity of St. John, expressed in every gesture; the dusky trees; Mary's quivering doubt and rapture, touched with some new awe; and the simple majesty with which our Lord stays that unconscious innocent presumption, _Touch me not_.

What forbidding tenderness in that Face lighted by the grave He has pa.s.sed through! What a subtle yet eloquent suggestion of the eternal difference, henceforth, between Love and love is in these mortal lineaments that have evermore resumed their divinity! No face, no type, no art, can ever realise Christ; yet when this little painting was first added to the great roll of Holbein _Basiliensis_, it must have gone as near to realising its subject as the colours of earth can go.

But every man, happily for himself, has a material as well as an immaterial world with which he must be concerned. To transpose Bagehot's profound little saying,--Each man dines in a room apart, but we all go down to dinner together. And though Holbein knew the pinch of narrow means, he had no lack of good cheer as well as austere food in his art.

On March 12th, 1521, the Great Council held its first meeting in the new Rathaus; and Meyer zum Hasen, who presided over it as Burgomaster, entrusted to his protege the enviable task of decorating the Council Chamber. Fifty-six years after Holbein's work was completed these wall-paintings were described as "representations of the n.o.blest subjects--done by the German Apelles." By this t.i.tle the painter was everywhere recognised throughout the greater part of his lifetime.

In all, there would seem to have been six large pictures or set pieces; but two were not done until years later. One wall being too broken up by windows to be suitable, there remained three,--of which "the back wall"

adjoining Meyer's house was not touched at this time. Ostensibly the reason was want of funds; but as a matter of fact the Protestant party (to antic.i.p.ate this name), which grew strong enough to unseat Meyer before the year was out, was at this time indifferent to art when not positively inimical to it.

Whether treating a facade or an interior it was Holbein's custom to make a flat wall-s.p.a.ce a.s.sume the most solid-looking forms of Renaissance architecture. Iselin once said of a facade of Holbein's, that there was a dog painted on it so naturally that the dogs in the street would run up and bark at it. And so astounding was the realism with which he threw out balconies, and added windows, cornices, and statues, and the richest carvings, pillars, arches, and vistas of every sort, that no eye could credit them with illusion. Horses neighed in the courtyards, flowers bloomed in the gardens, dogs leaped beside master or mistress, and children played in the s.p.a.cious balconies, or moved to and fro between the splendid marble pillars and the distant wall. To study the copies that remain of such works is to be astounded by their feats of perspective.

Inside would be kindred illusions. Large pictures would seem to be actually taking place without, and beheld through beautifully carved archways or windows; while the apparent walls would have niches filled with superb marble statues and the ceiling be supported by pillars, behind which people walked and talked or leaned out to watch the chief scenes.

And so it was with the Council Chamber. But nothing now remains of these works except fragments and a few drawings for the princ.i.p.al features. So far as can be judged, each wall had two large scenes; the four pictures of this period being chosen from the heroic legends of the _Gesta Romanorum_; the two painted later, from the Old Testament.

But while these large works were going forward Holbein was busy with many others; private commissions for Froben, occasionally for other printers, and for altar-pieces or portraits. All through his life his industry and accomplishment left him small time for leisure or the dissipations of leisure. Nor is there any year of his life when his work does not attest a clear eye and a firm hand. These things are their own certificate of conduct; at any rate, of "worldly" conduct.

In 1522 occurred two important events in his life. His first child, the son he called Philip, was born; and he painted an altar-piece which is in some respects the most beautiful of his extant works. The latter--now in the Solothurn Museum, and therefore called the "Solothurn Madonna"

(Plate 12)--has had one of the most extraordinary histories to be found in the records of art.

Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE 12 THE SOLOTHURN, OR ZETTER'SCHE, MADONNA _Oils. Solothurn Museum_

The background of this picture,--a ma.s.sive arch of grey sandstone supported by iron stanchions,--was evidently designed to suit the surrounding architecture of some grey-walled ancient structure. On a das covered with a green carpet, patterned in white and red and emblazoned with the arms of the donor and his wife, sits the lovely Madonna with the Child held freely yet firmly in two of the most exquisite hands which even Holbein ever painted. Her dress is a rich rose-red; her symbolical mantle of universal Motherhood, or "Grace," is a most beautiful ultramarine, loaded in the shadows and like a sapphire in its lights. The flowing gold of her hair shimmers under its filmy veil, and the jewels in her gold crown flash below the great white pearls that tip its points. Where the sky-background approaches Mother and Child, its azure tone is lost in a pure effulgence of light; as if the very ether were suffused with the sense of the Divine.