CHAPTER II

HOLBEIN BASILIENSIS

1519-1526

_Holbein Basiliensis_--Enters the Painters' Guild--Bonifacius Amerbach

and his portrait--The Last Supper and its Judas--The so-called

"Fountain of Life" at Lisbon--Genius for design and symbolism in

architecture--Versatility, humour, fighting scenes--Holbein becomes a

citizen and marries--Basel in 1519--Froben's circle--Tremendous events

and issues of the time--Holbein's religious works--The Nativity and

Adoration at Freiburg--Hans Oberriedt--The Basel Passion in eight

panels--Passion Drawings--Christ in the tomb--Christ and Mary Magdalen

at the door of the sepulchre--Rathaus wall-paintings--Birth of Holbein's

eldest child--The Solothurn Madonna: its discovery and rescue--Holbein's

wife and her portraits--Suggested solutions of some biographical

enigmas--Title pages--Portraits of Erasmus--Journey to France, probably

to Lyons and Avignon--Publishers and pictures of the so-called "Dance

of Death"--Dorothea Offenburg as Venus and Lais Corinthiaca--Triumph of

the Protestant party--Holbein decides to leave Basel for a time--The

Meyer-Madonna of Darmstadt and Dresden, and its portraits.

And now it is 1519, and with it the true Hour of Holbein's destiny is

striking. Take away the coming seven years and you will still have what

Holbein is too often thought to be only--a great portrait-painter. No

greater ever etched the soul of a man on his mask. His previous and his

after achievements would still amply justify the honour of centuries.

But add these seven years, from 1519 to 1526, and dull indeed must be

the intelligence that cannot recognise the great Master, without

qualification and in the light of any thoughtful comparison with the

very greatest.

His Basel career may be said to begin here; his earlier work furnishing

the Prologue. On the 25th September, 1519, when he was about

two-and-twenty, he joined the Basel Guild of Painters; that same "Guild

of Heaven" (_Zunft zum Himmel_) which his brother Ambrose had joined two

years earlier and from which he seems to have passed to the veritable

guild of Heaven at about this latter date.

And hardly is the ink dry upon the record of his membership than Holbein

painted one of the most beautiful of his portraits--that of Bonifacius

Amerbach (Plate 6). He stands beside a tree on which is hung an

inscription. Behind him is Holbein's favourite early background,--the

blue of the sky, here broken by the warm brown and green of the branch,

and the faint glimpse of far-away mountains. Under his soft cap, with

a cross for badge, his intensely gleaming blue eyes look out beneath

grave brows. The lips are softly yet firmly set; the mouth framed by the

sunny beard which repeats the red-brown of his hair. The black scholar's

gown, with its trimming of black fur, discloses his rich damask doublet

and white collar.

Illustration: PLATE 6

BONIFACIUS AMERBACH

_Oils. Basel Museum_

Well may the inscription assert--above the signature, the name of the

sitter and the date 14th October, 1519--

_"Though but a painted face I am not far removed from Life; but rather,

By truthful lines, the noble image of my Possessor.

As he accomplishes eight times three years, so faithfully in me also

Is Nature's work proclaimed by the work of Art."_

For here in truth is a work of Nature which is no less a work of Art.

This is the Amerbach who began and inspired his son Basilius (so named

after Bonifacius's brother) to complete the Holbein Collection, which

the Basel Museum bought long afterwards. And such was the love of

both that they included, perhaps deliberately, much that has small

probability of claim to be Holbein's work. They would reject nothing

attributed to him; thinking a bushel of chaff well worth housing if it

might yield one genuine grain. And in view of these expressive facts, it

is hardly necessary to argue in behalf of the tradition that more than a

conventional friendship bound the two young men together,--printer's son

and painter's son, musician-scholar and scholar-painter, Churchman and

Churchman; the one twenty-four, the other twenty-two.

Bonifacius was the youngest of Johann Amerbach's three gifted sons. As

all the world knows, Johann had been also a scholar as well as a printer,

and great in both capacities. The most eminent scholars of his day

gravitated as naturally to this noble personality as they afterwards did

to that of his protege and successor, Johann Froben. He had educated his

sons, too, to worthily continue his life-work and maintain his devout

principles. Bonifacius was the darling of more than one heart not given

to softness. He had been more the friend than the pupil of Ulrich Zasius

at the University of Freiburg, before he went to Avignon to complete his

legal studies under Alciat. Five years after this portrait was painted

he became Professor of Law in the Basel University. "I am ready to die,"

writes Erasmus of him, "when I shall have seen any young man purer or

kinder or more sincere than this one."

Very possibly it was for Bonifacius himself that Holbein painted his own

portrait about this time (Plate 1, frontispiece). It is a worthy mate,

at all events. In the Amerbach Catalogue it was simply called "Holbein's

counterfeit, in dry colour" (_ein conterfehung Holbein's mit trocken

farben_); the frame, too, was catalogued, though the painting was kept

in a cabinet separately when the Basel Museum acquired it with the

Collection.

The vigour and finish of this portrait on vellum, done in crayons or

body-colour, make it a gem of the first water. The drawing was done in

black chalk, and the tints have been rubbed in with coloured crayons or

given with the point where lines of colour were required. The work has

the delicacy of a water-colour and the strength of oils. The broad,

soft, red hat, though so fine a bit of colour, is clearly worn as part

of a simple everyday habit. There is no suggestion of studying for

effect, or even caring at all about it. He wears his hat pulled soberly

down over his brown hair exactly as when he wore it thus about the

business of the day. The plastic modelling of the puckered brow and

the mobile mouth is beautifully indicated. The bluish tone left by the

razor is just hinted. In his drab coat with its black velvet bands, with

his shirt, on which the high lights have been applied, slightly open at

the throat, Holbein himself seems to stand before one as in life.

Among the "early works" of the Amerbach Catalogue there is one which

shows strong traces of Leonardo's and even more of Mantegna's influence

on him at this time. It is a Last Supper, painted in oils on wood. But

it was so mutilated in the iconoclastic fury of 1529, and has been so

cobbled, re-broken, re-set, and "restored" generally, that it can no

longer be called Holbein's work without many reservations. There is also

another Last Supper, one of a coarsely painted set on canvas, which

is attributed to him on much more doubtful grounds, to judge by the

composition and colouring. Myself I should be inclined to see the

inferior hand of Ambrose, Hans the elder, or perhaps even Sigmund

Holbein in these, if they are genuine Holbein works at all.

But there are still to be seen the traces of his own hand and mind in

the Last Supper in oils on wood. St. John's head must originally have

been very beautiful; very manly, too,--dark with sudden anguish and

recoil. There is a separate head of St. John, in oils, in the same

collection, which shows how fixed was this noble originality of type in

Holbein's conception of "the beloved apostle." But it is in Judas that

the patient student will find, perhaps, most of Holbein's peculiar cast

of thought, when once the initial repulsion is overcome.

By a very natural arrangement he is brought into the immediate foreground

and sits there, already isolated, already damned, in such a torment

of body and soul as haunts the spectator who has had the courage to

reconsider the dictum of authorities who call him "a Jew of frightful

vulgarity." Frightful he may be; but it is a strange judgment which can

find him vulgar. Unfortunately, the painting is no longer in a condition

to justify reproduction; but such as study this yellow-robed, emaciated,

shivering, fever-consumed Judas will, I venture to assert, find food for

thought in it even under all the injuries the work has undergone.

It is a demon-driven soul if ever there was one. He is in the very act

of springing to his feet and rushing away anywhere, anywhere out of this

Presence;--no more concerned about his money-bag than about the food he

loathes. Thirty pieces of silver! If the priests have lied, if this is

in very truth the Messiah his heart still half believes Him, will thirty

pieces of silver buy his soul from the Avenger? Is there time still to

escape? What if he break the promise given when he was over-persuaded in

the market-place the other day? But did not the High Priest himself

declare that this is Beelzebub in person,--this fair, false, dear,--oh!

still too dear Illusion? Up! Let him be gone out of this!--from the

sound of that Voice, from the sight of that Face, get the thing over and

done, done--done one way or another! If God's work, as the priests

swear, well and good. He will have earned the pity of God Himself. If

the devil's, as his heart whispers, well, too! Let him take his price

and buy himself a rope long enough to house his soul in any Hell, rather

than sit on in this one! It is all painted, or was once; all written on

that sunken cheek, that matted hair and clammy brow; in that cavernous

socket, that eye of lurid despair; on the whole anatomy of a lost soul.

The hand that did it was very young, very immature; but it had the youth

and the immaturity of a Master.

There is another and a very different work, an oil painting, in the

Royal Collection at Lisbon, signed IOANNES HOLBEIN FECIT 1519, which,

if by the younger Hans, would almost put the question as to whether

the painter knew the landscapes of Italy, beyond doubt; so southern is

the type of its background. The work, however, has been rejected by

Woltmann, on the strength of an old photograph not quite perfect. He

held the signature to be spurious, and attributed the picture to the

school of Gerard David. And he gave to the work the name by which it is

now generally styled in English works: "The Fountain of Life" (_Der

Brunnen des Lebens_[3]). He did so from the inscription within the rim

of the well immediately in the foreground; but a literal translation of

this inscription, PVTEVS AQVARVM VIVENCIVM, is, I think, to be

preferred: _The Well of Living Waters_.

The majority of those competent to form a judgment in such matters are

inclined to attribute the work to Hans Holbein the Elder, who did not

die until some years later, and who made use of a very similar form of

signature. And for myself I find it hard to see how anyone familiar

with Hans the Younger could accept it as his work at any period of

his career; least of all at the date given in the signature. So that

equally whether Woltmann is right in believing the signature itself

spurious, or those are right who hold it to be the genuine signature of

Hans the Elder,--a more detailed description of the composition does not

fall within the scope of this little volume. But the whole matter is

most clearly set forth, and a very beautiful reproduction in colours

given of the painting itself, in Herr Seeman's article upon it, which

will be found in the appended List of References.

* * * * *

Considerably before 1519, as has been said, Holbein had begun to

develop his special genius for Design, and to apply it to glass or

window-paintings, as well as to metal and wood-engravings. The beautiful

drawings, whether washed, or etched with the point, in chalks or Indian

ink, of which examples may be seen in almost every great collection,

private as well as public, that year after year were created by that

fertile brain and ever more masterly hand, constitute an Art in

themselves. And since so many (perhaps the greater number as well as the

greater in subject) of his paintings have perished, it is chiefly in his

drawings that the progression of his powers can be followed, or the

plane and scope of his imagination recognised at all. There is seldom

a date on them; but they will be found to date themselves pretty

accurately by certain features. In his earliest, for instance, that

defect of which mention has been made,--the short thick figures due

to the energy of his rebound from Gothic attenuation is a grave fault.

There is a Virgin and Child among his washed drawings for glass-paintings

in the Basel Museum, for example, which, when you cut it off at the

knees, is one of the most charming pictures of Mother and Child to be

found in any painter's treatment of this subject. And behind them is a

gem of landscape. Yet the whole, as it stands, is utterly marred by the

Virgin's dwarfed limbs. But although Holbein never entirely overcame

this fault, he did very greatly do so, as the years passed.

His architectural settings, too, tended to greater simplicity in his

later years. Yet this is not a safe guide. Some early designs have

simple forms; some comparatively late ones, a very ornate architecture.

For the truth is that these architectural backgrounds and settings

remained, so long as his fancy had any free field for disporting itself,

an integral part of his conception. But only as inseparable from the

Symbolism, the under-tow, of his imagination. To my thinking, at any

rate, they make a gravid mistake who look for "realism" in these things.

His stately pillars and arches, his fluid forms of ornament, are not his

idea of the actual surroundings of the characters he portrays, any more

than they are your idea, or mine, of those surroundings. Is it to be

supposed that he thought the dwellings of our Lord were palaces? Or

that he could not paint a stable? Those who maintain that Holbein was a

Realist in the modern sense of the word must reconcile as best they can

the theory with the facts. But when we see the stage set with every

stately circumstance,--the Babe amid the fading splendours of earthly

palaces, our Lord mocked by matter as well as man,--I dare to think that

we shall do well to cease from insisting on an adobe wall, and to study

those "incongruous" circumstances to which the will and not the poverty

of Holbein consents. We shall, at least, no longer be dull to "the tears

of things" as he saw them.

But it would be no less a mistake to think of Holbein as one without a

sense of laughter as well. His drawings of open-mouthed peasants

gossiping in a summer's nooning, or dancing in some uncouth frolic,--and

still more his romping children, dancing children, and the chase of the

fox running off with the goose,--all of these are full of boyish fun.

Would that they could be given here without usurping the place of

more important works! But that is impossible. And so, too, with the

costume-figures of Basel, among which is the charming back view of a

citizen's wife, with all the women bent far backward in the odd carriage

that was then "the latest fashion" among them.

He was particularly happy, also, in his drawings of the _Landsknechte_,

those famous Mercenaries of "Blut und Eisen"; always ready to drink a

good glass, and a-many; to love a good lass after the same liberal

fashion; to troll a good song or fight a good fight; and all with equal

zest. He had not mixed with these masterful gentry for nothing; nor they

with him to wholly die. There are a number of drawings where they are

engaged in combat, too, which show that Holbein's heart leapt to the

music of sword and spear as blithely as does Scott's or Dumas's--as

blithely as did the hearts of the _Reislaeufer_ themselves. Look at

the mad rush, the hand-to-hand grapple, in a drawing of the Basel

Collection, for instance (Plate 7). The blood-lust, the heroism, the

savagery, the thrust, the oath, the dust-choked prayer, the forgotten

breathing clay under the bloodstained foot; the very clash and din of

the fray;--all is told with the brush. And yet not one unnecessary

detail squandered. It is as if one watched it from some palpitating

refuge, just near enough to see the forefront figures distinctly and

to make out the interlocked hubbub and fury where the ranks have been

broken through. It would be a great day for Art could we but chance

upon some lost painting for which such a study had served its completed

purpose.

* * * * *

On the 3rd of July, 1520, Holbein fulfilled what was then the

requirement of almost every guild, and purchased his citizenship; a

citizenship to reflect unfading honour on Basel, and of which she has

ever been justly proud. And somewhere about the same time he married

Elsbeth Schmidt, a tanner's widow, who had one child, Franz.

Illustration: PLATE 7

FIGHT OF LANDSKNECHTE

_Washed Drawing. Basel Museum_

For the past four or five years Basel had been steadily becoming more

and more democratic. And at a period when its _elite_ were scholars and

printers and civic officials of every origin,--when the illegitimate son

of a Rotterdam doctor was the true prince, and Beatus Rhenanus, the

grandson of a butcher, was his worthy second in the reverence of

Basel,--the widow and son of a reputable tanner and a rising young

artist, who had already the suffrages of the most influential citizens,

would find no doors closed to them on the score of social disabilities.

The friendship of such men as Erasmus, Froben, Bonifacius Amerbach,

and the Mayor,--all conspicuous stars in the Church party,--would

have ennobled a man of less genius than Holbein in the eyes of his

fellow-citizens; and rightly. But as to the exact locality in which

Holbein set up his first married roof-tree--that Bethel of sacred

or saddest dreams--no documentary evidence has yet come to light.

Circumstantial evidence, however, amounts to a strong probability in

favour of the _Rheinhalde_ of Great-Basel.

If there was an emblem peculiarly abhorrent to the Basilisk (the Device

of Basel) it was the Crescent-and-star. But nothing could better serve

to recall the rough outline of Basel in Holbein's day than this very

emblem. As the Rhine suddenly swerves from its first wild rush westward

and races away, northerly, to the German Ocean, it shapes the hollow of

the crescent in which Little-Basel (_Klein-Basel_) nestled as the star;

and, appropriately enough, since it was here that the Catholic's Star of

Faith rallied when overcome across the river, where curved the crescent

of Great-Basel (_Gross-Basel_). And the relative proportions of the two

would be fairly enough represented by the symbols respectively used.

Great-Basel's northern face was protected by the Rhine, while the stout

city wall secured its convex curve. Of this wall the eastern horn was

St. Alban's Gate; its north-west was St. John's Gate (_St. Johann

Thor_); beside which stood the decaying Commandery of the Knights of

Malta, which had contributed a large sum toward the expanded wall, in

order to be included within it. And just as these spots still mark the

horns of the old crescent, the _Spalen Thor_ shows where it had its

greatest depth, midway between the other two.

A straight line running due north-east from this Spalen-Thor would cross

the big square of the Fish-market (_Fischmarktplatz_) pretty nearly as

the uncovered stream of the Birsig, or "Little Birs," did before the

quaint little bridge, which then united the two halves of the Fischmarkt,

was absorbed in the paving over of stream and square before Holbein's

day. This same straight line would of itself draw the "Old Bridge"

(_Alte Bruecke_) with approximate exactness, the even then ancient bridge

which centred the star of Klein-Basel to its crescent. And in the

Historical Museum, where the Barefooted Friars worshipped then, we may

still see the grotesque piece of clockwork, the wooden "Stammering King"

(_Laellenkoenig_), that for centuries used hourly to roll great eyes and

stick out its tongue a foot long across the river from the Gross-Basel

end of the bridge. It is often said that this monster was set up as a

public token of the hatred which the triumphant Protestantism of the

south bank felt for the stubborn Catholicism of Klein-Basel. But the

thing was a famous ancient joke before party feeling turned it into a

gibe.

Bonifacius Amerbach's home, the "Emperor's Seat" (_Kaiserstuhl_, now 23,

Rheingasse), was in Klein-Basel. Johann Amerbach had bought it, near to

his beloved friends, the Carthusians. In 1520 the good old man had slept

for six years in the cloisters of the monastery; where to-day the

children of the Orphan Asylum play above his grave.

But all the conditions of Holbein's daily life would lead him to prefer

Basel proper, and to choose the quarter in which he bought a home eight

years later. This was then the western quarter of Gross-Basel, along the

river-face of which ran the high southern and western bank of the Rhine,

the _Rheinhalde_, now _St. Johann Vorstadt_. About where the present

_Blumenrain_ ends stood the arch, or _Schwibbogen_. Further on still

stood the "Gate of the Cross" (_Kreuzthor_), by the House of the Brothers

of St. Anthony, the ancient _Kloesterli_ of Basel. Before the Commandery

of St. John got themselves included within the city wall the Kreuzthor

was its western gate. The whole district of _ze Crueze_, so called

because its boundaries were crosses before towers replaced them, has

however become absorbed in the St. Johann Vorstadt, while the Kreuzthor

has disappeared altogether. The quarter was a favourite one with members

of the Fishers' Guild and with decent folk of small mean

s.

As early as 1517 the Fishers' Company had extended itself so greatly as

to become a notable institution of the Vorstadt, including many members

from Klein-Basel also; while its military record was a proud one. But

it was in this year, while Holbein was making his visit to Lucerne

and beyond, that this guild took the more truly descriptive name

which it bears to this day, that of the "Vorstadt Association"

(_Vorstadtgesellschaft_). And to this association, which in after years

gave him a famous banquet, Holbein, we know, belonged later on, if not

now.

Every day would take him to the Fischmarkt,--the great square humming

with activity, crowded with inns, public-houses, shops, booths,

dwelling-houses,--the trade mart of every nationality. The Cornmarkt

near by, now the _Marktplatz_, with its almost finished Rathaus, was

the centre of official civic life. When the great bell clanged on the

Rathaus, and its flag was flung out, not only every professional

soldier, but every guild and every male above fourteen, knew his

appointed place at the wall, and took it. But every day, and all day,

the Fischmarkt flung out its peaceful standards, or rallied men to

this side or to that with the tocsin of its presses,--the old Amerbach

printing-house "of the Settle" (_zum Sessel_), which was Johann Froben's

home and printing-house in 1520.

Morning after morning, and year upon year, Holbein turned his back upon

St. Johannthor, and walked eastward along the Rheinhalde;--the river

racing toward him on his left hand, the University rising in front of

him beyond the bridge, and the delicate Cathedral towers beyond the

University. For the Basel Minster was still the Cathedral of the great

See of Basel. Passing the wall of the Dominican Cemetery, on which was

painted the ancient Dance of Death with which his own after-creations

were so often to be confused, Holbein must many a time have studied the

famous old copy. For though the Dominican painting was then nearly a

century old, it was a copy of a still older original in the Klein-Basel

nunnery of _Klingenthal_, a community under Dominican direction.

But he would pass another spot--one day to be of far more living

importance to him. In 1520 it was a corn warehouse, known by the name of

_ze Cruez_, which belonged to Adam Petri, the printer, who had inherited

it from his uncle, the famous printer Johann Petri, by whose ingenious

improvements the art of printing was so greatly facilitated. Two years

later, in 1522, Froben bought this granary, ze Cruez, and converted it

into the book-magazine which was known all over Europe as "Froben's

Book-house." And in this latter year Adam Petri, greatly to Luther's

disgust, pirated Luther's translation of the New Testament, which had

appeared three months before.

Holbein drew a superb title-page, ante-dated 1523, for this "enterprise"

of Petri--the New Testament "now right faithfully rendered into

German,"--with the symbols of the Evangelists at the four corners, the

arms of Basel at the top, the device of the printer at the foot, and the

noble figures of St. Paul and St. Peter on either side; figures which

will bear comparison with Duerer's "Four Temperaments" of a later date.

Later still he designed another striking title-page for Thomas Wolff's

translation; and his beautiful title-pages and ornaments for Froben,

with whom his connection was not a temporary matter such as these

others, would need a volume to themselves.

Holbein's only rival, if he could be called such, in work of this sort

was the talented goldsmith, Urs Graf, who, as an exceedingly loose fish,

lived most appropriately in the Fischmarkt in his own house near the old

Birsig Bridge, when he was not in the lock-up for one or another of his

constant brawls and scandals. But to compare the best work of both

is to recognise a difference in kind as well as degree: the essential

difference between even negligent genius and the most elaborate talent.

High talent Urs Graf had unquestionably; though stamped,--I think,--with

the lawless caprices of his own character. Holbein's every design has

not only what Urs Graf lacked--that ordered imagination which is

Style--but over and above all, the subtle expression of Power.

Many a time, too, just where he would turn away from the Rhine for the

business centre of Gross-Basel, the artist would make some little pause

at the old "Flower" Inn (_zur Blume_), which gave its name to the

Blumenplatz, and is still commemorated in the greatly extended Blumenrain

of to-day. All the world now knows the famous hotel of "The Three

Kings"; and where it reaches nearest to the Old Bridge stood the "Blume"

of Holbein's time, even then the oldest of the Basel inns. This Blume,

not to be confused with later inns of the same name, shared with its no

less famous contemporary,--"The Stork," in the Fischmarkt,--the special

patronage of the chief printers. Basilius Amerbach, for instance, the

brother of Holbein's friend Bonifacius, lived at the Blume; and often

the painter must have turned in for a friendly glass with him and a chat

about Bonifacius, away at his law studies in Avignon.

As for the Stork, its very rooms were named in remembrance of the envoys

and merchant traders who flocked to it on all great occasions. There

was a "Cologne Room," for instance, and a "Venetian Room," among many

others. The men of Venice, indeed, had a particular affection for it.

Here Holbein met with all nationalities, and learned much of the great

centres of other countries. Here came all the Basel magnates and

printers. And here, a few years later on, came that bizarre personage

who was for a very brief time Basel's "town physician," the Paracelsus

Theophrastus Bombastus to whom we owe our word _bombastic_. Holbein

was on a visit to England during the latter's short tenure of office,

when the combined scholarship and poverty of Oporinus made him the

hack of Paracelsus and the victim of many a petty tyranny. At that time

Oporinus,--the son of that Hans Herbster, painter, whose portrait is

now attributed to Ambrose Holbein,--was glad to place his remarkable

knowledge of Greek at Froben's service. He was not yet a printer, as

later when Holbein drew a clever device for him. And neither he nor the

painter could know that one day the daughter of Bonifacius Amerbach

should marry him out of sheer pity for his unhappy old age,--somewhat as

he himself, when but a lad of twenty, married an aged Xantippe from

gratitude.

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, Todtengaesslein, 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" Rhenanus 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 passions 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 competitors 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 Nobles of

Germany" and "On the Babylonian Captivity,"--the latter of which itself

contains the whole Protestant Reformation in embryo. "Would to God,"

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 God 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 title--_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 impassable 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?

Illustration: PLATE 8

THE NATIVITY

_Oils. University Chapel, Freiburg Cathedral_

In the left wing, the Nativity (Plate 8), Holbein has remarkably

anticipated 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 noble 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.

Illustration: PLATE 9

THE PASSION

_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 Passion, 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 Duerer's works, offered almost any

price for this altar-piece by Duerer's great contemporary. But Basel,

unlike Nueremberg, 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 pronounced

worthy to compare with Correggio's work, is only to be surpassed by the

Entombment. And in every scene--what freedom, action, verve! From the

first to the last all passes with the swift step of Calamity, yet all

with noble dignity.

The Basel Museum possesses also a set of ten washed drawings in Indian

ink,--scenes of the Passion designed for glass-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

assumes 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 pronounce 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.

Illustration: 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 Passion 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 God

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; God'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.

Illustration: 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

passed 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 noblest

subjects--done by the German Apelles." By this title 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 anticipate 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-space assume 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 spacious 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 principal 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.

Illustration: PLATE 12

THE SOLOTHURN, OR ZETTER'SCHE, MADONNA

_Oils. Solothurn Museum_

The background of this picture,--a massive arch of grey sandstone

supported by iron stanchions,--was evidently designed to suit the

surrounding architecture of some grey-walled ancient structure. On a

dais 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.

The Child is drawn and painted superbly. The carnations are exquisite;

the gravity of infancy is not exaggerated, yet fittingly enforces the

gesture of benediction. The left hand is turned outward in a movement so

peculiar to happy, vigorous babyhood that it is a marvel of observation

and nature. The little foot is admirably foreshortened, and the wrinkled

sole a bit of inimitable painting. But perhaps most wonderful of all is

the art with which, amid so many splendid details, the Child is the

centre of interest as well as of the picture. How it is so, is Holbein's

own secret.

To right and left of the Virgin stand two fine types of spiritual and

temporal authority. Behind and at her right, almost hidden by the

amplitude of her mantle, kneels a poor wretch who is introduced here by

some necessity of the commission itself, but is skilfully prevented from

obtruding his needs on the serene beauty of the scene. Dropping gold

into his alms-bowl with a hand effectively contrasted with his brown

thumb, stands "the sinner's saint"--the good Bishop of Tours; while some

other condition of the work has embroidered St. Martin's red mitre with

the figure of St. Nicholas. There is one other striking circumstance

about St. Martin; and that is that, although he is in the Virgin's

presence, he wears the violet chasuble of an Intercessor. The chasuble

is lined with red, and it and the rich vestments, on which scenes of

the Passion are displayed, are the patient verisimilitude of ancient

vestments. In St. Martin's gloved left hand is his crozier and the right

glove, which he has drawn off to bestow his alms.

Opposite to him stands the patron-saint of Solothurn,--St. Ursus, a

hero of the Theban legend,--dressed from head to foot in a suit of

magnificently painted armour. His left hand grasps his sword-hilt; his

right supports the great red flag with its white cross. Nor is that flag

of the year 1522 the least interesting detail of this work. With the

crimson reflections of the flag streaking the cold gleams of his

glittering armour, his stern dark face and the white plumes tossing

to his shoulder, St. Ursus is a figure that may well leave historical

accuracy to pedants. Below his foot are the initials H.H., and the date,

1522; as if cut into the stone.

This work was commissioned by Hans Gerster, for many years Town

Archivist of Basel, in which capacity he had to convey important state

papers to other councils with which that of Basel had negotiations. From

this it came about that from the year when Basel entered the Swiss

Confederation, in 1501, Gerster was almost as much at home in the "City

of Ambassadors" as in his own, and the Dean or _Probst_ of the Solothurn

Cathedral--the "Cathedral of St. Ursus and St. Victor"--became not only

his spiritual director, but one of his most intimate friends. Many

circumstances which cannot be given here make it pretty evident that in

1522 Gerster, probably under the advice of the Probst, the Coadjutor

Nicholas von Diesbach, made this picture an _expiatory_ offering for

some secret sin of grave proportions. There are hints that point to

treachery to the Basel troops, in the Imperial interests, sympathy with

which finally cost him, as well as his friend Meyer zum Hasen, his

official position. Gerster himself was not a native of Basel, although

his wife, Barbara Guldenknopf, was.

Be this as it may, it is apparently in direct connection with this

confessed sin that "the sinner's saint," St. Martin of Tours, is chosen

as Intercessor for Gerster, wearing the prescribed chasuble for this

office. And it seems likely that the addition to his mitre of the figure

of St. Nicholas was Gerster's wish, in order to specially associate the

name-saint of his friend--Nicholas von Diesbach--with this intercession.

It is assumed by those who have patiently unearthed these details of

circumstantial evidence, that the beggar is introduced to mark the

identity of the boundlessly charitable Bishop of Tours. But I venture to

suggest still another reason: this is, that in the uplifted, pleading

face of the mendicant, whose expression of appeal and humility is a

striking bit of realism in these ideal surroundings, we may have the

actual portrait of the donor, Hans Gerster himself. That this should be

so would be in strict accord with the methods of the period. There is a

striking parallel which will occur to all who are familiar with the St.

Elizabeth in the St. Sebastian altar-piece at Munich. Here the undoubted

portrait of Hans Holbein the elder is seen as the beggar in the

background.

It is, as has been said, a marvellous story by which this glorious

painting,--in which the introduction of the patron-saint of Solothurn

proves that it was created for one of her own altars,--was completely

lost to her, and to the very histories of Art, and then returned to the

city for which it was originally destined; all by a chain of seemingly

unrelated accidents. But only the skeleton of that story can be given

here.[4]

In all probability this Madonna was executed for the altar of the ancient

Lady Chapel of the Solothurn Cathedral. A hundred and twenty-six years

after it was painted, this chapel was pulled down, to be replaced by a

totally different style of architecture; and as the picture was then

smoke-stained and "old-fashioned" it would in all likelihood drop into

some lumber-room. At all events, it must have become the property of the

Cathedral choirmaster,--one Hartmann,--after another five-and-thirty

years. For at this time he built, and soon after endowed, the little

village church of Allerheiligen, on the outskirts of the industrial town

of Grenchen, which lies at the southern foot of the Jura.

_Facilis descensus!_ Another turn of the centuries' wheel and the gift

of this chapel's founder was once again thought unworthy of the altar to

which it had been presented. When Herr Zetter of Solothurn first saw it

in the queer little Allerheiligen chapel, it hung high up on the choir

wall; blackened, worm-eaten, without a frame, suspended by a string

passed through two holes which had been bored through the painted panel

itself. Yet his acute eye was greatly interested by it. And when, during

an official visit in 1864, he heard that the chapel was undergoing a

drastic renovation, he was concerned for the fate of the discoloured old

painting. At first it could not be discovered at all. Finally he found

it, face downward, spotted all over with whitewash, under the rough

boards that served for the workmen's platform. A few hours later and it,

too, would have been irrevocably gone; carted away with the "old

rubbish"!

He examined it, made out the signature, knew that this might mean either

any one of a number of painters who used it, or a clumsy copy or

forgery, yet had the courage of his conviction that it was Holbein's

genuine work. He bought it of the responsible authority, who was glad

to be rid of four despised paintings, for the cost of all the new

decorations. He had expert opinion, which utterly discouraged his

belief; but stuck to it, took the risks of having it three long years

(so rotten was its whole condition) under repairs which might at any

moment collapse with it, yet leave their tremendous expenses behind to

be settled just the same; and finally found himself the possessor of a

perfectly restored chef-d'oeuvre of Holbein's brush, which, from the

first, Herr Zetter devoted to the Museum (now a fine new one) of

Solothurn.

To-day this work, which some forty years ago no one dreamed had ever

existed, smiles in all the beauty of its first painting; a monument to

the insight and generous enthusiasm of the gentleman whose name is rightly

connected with its own in its official title--"The Zetter-Madonna of

Solothurn." And it smiles with Holbein's own undebased handiwork

throughout. _Pace_ Woltmann's blunder,--its network of fine cracks, even

over the Virgin's face, attests that it has suffered no over-painting.

The work has been mounted on a solid back, the greatest fissures and the

holes filled up to match their surroundings, the stains and defacements

of neglect cleared away, and the triumph is complete. It might well be

the "swan song" of a veteran artist at such work. Whatever the mistakes

of Eigener's career, the restoration of the Solothurn Madonna was a

flawless achievement for himself and his associates.

This work, too, is the most precious of all that have come down to us of

Holbein's imaginative compositions, from the fact that his first-born,

Philip, who was born about 1522, was the model for the Child, and that a

portrait of Elsbeth, his wife, served as a study for the Virgin. This

portrait is an unnamed and unsigned drawing in silver-point and Indian

ink, heightened with touches of red chalk, now in the Louvre Collection.

(Plate 13.)

Illustration: PLATE 13

UNNAMED PORTRAIT-STUDY: NOT CATALOGUED AS HOLBEIN'S

_Silver-point and Indian-ink. Louvre Collection_

_Believed by the writer to be Holbein's drawing of

his wife before her first marriage, and the model

for the Solothurn Madonna_

That this is a portrait of Holbein's wife any careful comparison with

her portrait at Basel must establish. Feature for feature, allowing for

the changes of sufficient years, the two faces are one and the same. The

very line of the shoulder, setting of the head, and even the outline of

the fashion in which the low dress is cut, is alike in both. And equally

unmistakable is the relation between this Louvre drawing and the

Madonna of Solothurn.

Yet I am unable to accept Woltmann's theory that the drawing was made in

1522 "for" the Virgin. He assumes that the lettering which borders the

bodice in this drawing--ALS. IN. ERN. ALS. IN....--and the braids in

which the hair is worn are simply some "fancy" dress. But surely if ever

hair bore the stamp of unstudied, even ugly custom, it does so here.

Then, too, Woltmann himself, as are all who adopt this explanation, is

unable to reconcile the oldest age which can be assigned to this sitter

with the youngest that can be assumed for the Basel painting of 1529

upon a hypothesis of only seven years' interval. Temperament and trouble

can do much in seven years; but not so much as this. I say _temperament_

advisedly; because all the evidence of Holbein's life substantiates

the assertion of Van Mander, who had it from Holbein's own circle of

contemporaries,--that the painter's life was made wretched by her

violent temper. We shall find him far from blameless in later years; but

though it may not excuse him, his unhappy home must largely explain his

alienation.

Yet that it can explain such an alteration as that between the Louvre

drawing and the Basel portrait I do not believe. Nor could I persuade

myself either that any married woman of the sixteenth century wore her

hair in that most exclusive and invariable of Teuton symbols--"maiden"

plaits;--or that any husband ever thought it necessary to advertise upon

a picture of his wife that he held her "in all honour."

Myself, I must believe, then, that this portrait was made years before

1522; probably in the young painter's first months in Basel, in 1515;

and thus some fourteen years before the Basel group of 1529 was painted.

It may well have been that some serious misunderstanding between them

was at the bottom of that otherwise inexplicable departure in 1517, and

the two years' absence in Lucerne and still more southern cities. Of

course this is mere guesswork; so is every hypothesis until it is proved.

But all the simple commonplaces of first love, estrangement, separation,

and a renewed betrothal after Elsbeth's early widowhood with one child,

could easily have run a natural course between 1515 and their marriage,

somewhere about 1520.

As for the inscription,--it is a detail that Woltmann thinks represents

a repetition of the one phrase, and that I imagine to have suggested

what for some reason Holbein did not wish to proclaim:--"In all honour.

[In all love.]" But nothing can shake my conviction that in it we hear

the faint far-off echoes from some belfry in Holbein's own city of Is.

The realities of that chime are buried,--whether well or ill,--four

hundred years deep in the seas that roll over that submerged world of

his youth and passion. But living emotion, we may be sure, went to the

writing and the treasuring of this pledge to Elsbeth or himself; a

pledge redeemed when she became his wife.

Thus for the altar-piece of 1522 there would be this portrait of Elsbeth

in her girlhood ready to his hand. But even so, see how he has idealised

it, made a new creature of it, all compact of exquisite ideals! He has

eliminated the subtle sensuousness which has its own allure in the

drawing. Every trait is refined, purified, vivified, raised to another

plane of character. Genius has put the inferior elements into its

retort, and transmuted them to some heavenly metal far enough from

Holbein's home-life.

Throughout all these years, as has been said, he was busy for the

printers also. In 1522 he drew the noble title-page for Petri's edition

of Luther's New Testament, with the figures of St. Peter and St. Paul

at either side, of which mention has been made. And in Thomas Wolff's

edition of 1523 there is a series of his designs. His alphabets, borders,

illustrations of all sorts, continued to enrich the Basel press from

this date, and were often borrowed by printers in other cities. In 1523

there came to Basel that masterly wood-cutter who has been already

referred to,--Hans Luetzelburger. And from this time on, therefore,

Holbein's designs may be seen in their true beauty.

He had painted, besides portraits of Froben and others, at least three

portraits of Erasmus by 1524. For in June of this year the latter writes

to his friend Pirkheimer, at Nuernberg, to say that he has sent two of

these portraits by the "most accomplished painter" to England; while the

artist himself, he adds, has conveyed still a third to France.

The smaller of the two sent to England, two-thirds the size of life, is

probably the one now in the Louvre (Plate 14). It is a masterpiece of

penetration and technique. Erasmus is here seen in the most unaffected

simplicity of dress and pose; in profile against a dark-green tapestry

patterned with light green, and red and white flowers. The usual

scholar's cap covers his grey hair. The blue-grey eyes are glancing down

at his writing. Studies for the marvellously painted hands are among the

Louvre drawings. The very Self of the man--the lean, strong, _thinking_

countenance,--the elusive smile, shrewd, ironical, yet kindly, stealing

out on his lips,--is alive here by some necromancy of art.

Illustration: PLATE 14

ERASMUS

_Oils. The Louvre_

The portrait now in the Basel Museum, in oils on paper, afterwards

fastened to the panel, is in all likelihood that third portrait which

Erasmus told Pirkheimer the painter himself had taken to France. So

that Holbein must have painted it for, and carried it to, Bonifacius

Amerbach, who was then, in 1524, finishing a renewed course of study at

Avignon. Probably it was during this visit to France, too, that he made

the spirited sketches of monuments at Bourges. In that case it would

seem that he struck across by way of Dijon to the Cathedral City, in

connection with some matter not now to be discovered, and from there

took the great highway to Avignon by way of Lyons; carrying with him the

gift of his sketches from the monuments of Duke Jehan of Berri and his

wife. These were treasured in Amerbach's collection.

Whatever the reason that sent him abroad on this journey,--whether

unhappiness at home or the troubled state of public affairs during the

Peasants' War of 1524 and 1525,--or whether he simply had business in

France which delayed him there for a year or two--at all events, all

records fail as to his wanderings or work in this long interval. And

many circumstances go to show that it was at this time that he entered

upon the immortal work which was published at Lyons, by the Trechsel

Brothers, many years later;--those "Images of Death" which have borrowed

the old name in popular parlance, and are generally called Holbein's

"Dance" of Death.

Just why the Trechsels did not issue the publication until 1538 it is

impossible to say. As one of the largest Catholic publishing-houses of

France, they would be governed by circumstances entirely outside of

Holbein's history or control. But more than one circumstance presses the

conclusion that the designs were made between 1523 and 1526. And there

is a certain amount of evidence for the belief that they may have been

first struck off in Germany, possibly by some one of the multifarious

connections of the Trechsels, as early as 1527. But this is a large

subject, not to be dealt with as an aside.

All the world knows these wonderful designs; their beauty of line, power

of expression, and sparkling fancy. Among them all there are only two

where Death is a figure of violence; and but one,--the knight, transfixed

by one fell, malignant stroke from behind--where Death exhibits positive

ferocity. In both of these,--the Count, beaten down by his own great

coat-of-arms, is the other,--it is easy to read a reflection of the

actualities of the Peasants' War then raging.

For the rest, the grim skeleton wears no unkind smile; though that he

_is_ Death makes it look a ghastly-enough pleasantry. But toward the

poor and the aged he is better than merry; he is kind. His fleshless

hand is raised in benediction over the aged woman; and the bent

patriarch leans on his arm, listening to Death's attendant playing the

sweet old melodies of Long-Ago as he stands on the verge of the great

Silence.

But where a selection must be made, there are two drawings with their

own special claim to consideration. These are the Ploughman and the

Priest (Plates 14 and 15). The former has been cited by Ruskin as an

example of a perfect design for wood-engraving; but even higher than its

art, to my thinking, is its feeling. To the labourer of this sort,--poor,

patient, toilworn,--Holbein's heart is very gentle. And so is Death--who

muffles up his harsh features and speeds the heavy plough with a step

like that of Hope. And at the end of the long, last uphill furrow, see

how the setting sun shines on "God's Acre!"

Illustration: PLATE 15

THE PLOUGHMAN

_"Images of Death" Woodcut series_

THE PRIEST

_"Images of Death" Woodcut series_

The second selection, the Priest, is its own proof, if any were needed,

of how sharply Holbein distinguished cloth from cloth. In it, nearly a

decade after he had pointed Erasmus's satire on the unworthy prelate or

the unclean friar, may plainly be read that reverence for the true

priest which Holbein shared with all his best friends. In the quaint,

quiet street this solemn procession is too familiar a sight to draw any

spectator from the hearth where the fire of the Living is blazing

so cheerily. The good Father, very lovingly drawn, casts his kind

glance around as he passes on his Office with the veiled Pyx carried

reverently. Before him goes Death, his Server, hastening the last mercy

with eager steps. Under his arm is the tiny glass that has measured the

whole of a mortality; the sands have lost their moving charm, and all

their dazzle makes but a little shadow now. In his hand is the bell that

sounds Take heed, Take heed, to the careless; and Pardon, Peace, to

dying ears that strain to hear it. But largest of all his symbols is the

lamp in his right hand; his own lamp, the lamp that dissipates Earth's

last shadows--the Light of Death.

Holbein must have had his own solemn memories of the Last Office as he

drew this picture of the good parish priest. For it was just about this

time that the Viaticum must have been administered to his father. In

1526 the then Burgomaster of Basel wrote to the monastery at Issenheim,

where Hans Holbein the Elder had left his painting implements behind him

years before, in which he recalls to the Fathers how vainly and how

often "our citizen," Hans the Younger, had applied to get these costly

materials restored to their owner during his life; or to himself as his

father's heir afterwards. This application was no more successful than

Holbein's own, apparently; and the painter was told to seek his father's

gold and pigments among the peasants who had pillaged the monastery.

By 1526 Holbein was back in Basel; but two works of this year would go

to show that he was little less separated from his wife in Basel than

when away. The first of these, about one-third life-size, is a portrait

of a woman with a child beside her who grasps an arrow to suggest the

Goddess of Love attended by a wingless Cupid (Plate 16). The little

red-haired child does not do much to realise the ideal; but the woman,

though not an ideal Venus, might nevertheless well pose as a man's

goddess. A "fair" woman in more senses than her colouring. Her dark-red

velvet dress slashed with white; wide sleeves of dusky gold-coloured

silk; her close-fitting black head-dress embroidered with gold; the soft

seduction of her look; the welcoming gesture of that pretty palm flung

outward as if to embrace; these are all in keeping.

Illustration: PLATE 16

DOROTHEA OFFENBURG AS THE GODDESS OF LOVE

_Oils. Basel Museum_

This was a lady whose past career might have warned a lover that

whatever she might prove as a goddess, she could play but a fallen

angel's part. The annals of Basel knew her only too well. This was

Dorothea, the daughter of a knight of good old lineage,--Hans von

Offenburg. But the knight died while she was quite young, and her

mother, better famed for looks than conduct, married the girl to a

debauched young aristocrat,--Joachim von Sultz. His own record is

hardly less shameless than Dorothea's soon became,--though the latter

is chiefly in archives of the "unspeakable" sort. At the time when this

picture was painted she must have been about two-and-twenty.

Unhappy Holbein, indeed! The temper of Xantippe herself, if she be but

the decent mother of one's children, might work less havoc with a life

than this embroidered cestus. But "the German Apelles" was no Greek

voluptuary, ambitious in heathen vices, such as that other Apelles

whose painting of Venus was said to be his masterpiece. And when

Holbein inscribed his second portrait of Dorothea with the words LAIS

CORINTHIACA, the midsummer madness must have been already a matter of

scorn and wonder to himself. His whole life and the works of his life

are the negation of the groves of Corinth.

The paint was not long dry on the Goddess of Love--at any rate, her

dress was not worn out--before he had seen her in her true colours; "the

daughter of the horse-leech, crying Give, Give."

And so he painted her in 1526 (Plate 17); to scourge himself, surely,

since she was too notoriously infamous to be affected by it. As if in

stern scorn of every beauty, every allure, he set himself to record

them in detail: something in the spirit with which Macaulay set himself,

"by the blessing of God," to do "full justice" to the poems of Montgomery.

Lais is far more beautiful, and far more beautifully painted, than

Venus. No emotion has hurried the painter's hand or confused his eye

this time. In vain she wears such sadness in her eyes, such pensive

dignity of attitude, such a wistful smile on her lips. He knows them,

now, for false lights on the wrecker's coast. No faltering; no turning

back. He can even fit a new head-dress on the lovely hair, and add the

puffed sleeves below the short ones. He is a painter now; not a lover.

And lest there should be one doubt as to his purpose, he flings a heap

of gold where "Cupid's" little hand would now seem desecrated, and

inscribes beneath it the name that fits her beauty and his contempt.

The plague was raging in Basel all through that spring and summer,

but I doubt if Holbein shuddered at its contact as at the loveliness he

painted. The brand he placed upon it is proof of that--Lais Corinthiaca,

the infamous mistress of the Greek Apelles.

Illustration: PLATE 17

DOROTHEA OFFENBURG AS LAIS CORINTHIACA

_Oils. Basel Museum_

But in 1526 men sat among the ashes of far goodlier palaces and larger

interests than personal ones. The party in power was not friendlier to

Art than to the Church of Rome. In January the Painters' Guild had

presented a petition to the Council,--humbly praying that its members,

"who had wives and children depending on their work," might be allowed

to pursue it in Basel! And so hard was Holbein himself hit by the

fanatical excitement of the time that the Council's account-books show

the paltry wage he was glad to earn for painting a few shields on some

official building "in the borough of Waldenburg."

Small wonder that an artist such as Holbein should feel his heart grow

sick within him, and should turn his thoughts with increasing

determination to some fresh field. Even without the bitterness that now

must have edged the tongue of a wronged wife, or the bitterer taste of

Dead Sea fruit in his own mouth,--he must have been driven to try his

luck elsewhere. And of all the invitations urged upon him, the chances

which Erasmus's introductions could give him in England would probably

offer the greatest promise.

But before he set out with these letters, in the late summer of 1526, he

executed yet one more great commission for his old friend, Jacob Meyer

zum Hasen, now leader of the Catholic party in opposition. This was the

work known now to all the civilised world as "The Meyer Madonna." For

centuries the beautiful picture which bears this name in the Dresden

Gallery has been cited by every expert authority and critic as this

work. But since the mysterious appearance of the Darmstadt painting,

which suddenly turned up in a Paris art collector's possession, from no

one knows where in 1822, the tide of belief has slowly receded from the

Dresden painting. Until now there are only a few judges who do not

hold--especially since the public comparison of the two works at Dresden

in 1871--that the Dresden picture is "a copy by an inferior hand."

Unquestionably the painting now in the Schloss at Darmstadt is the

earlier version. And unquestionably, too, the changes introduced in the

Dresden copy,--the elevated architecture, slenderer figures, and less

happy Child,--are so great as to lend weight to the arguments of those

who still claim that no copyist would ever have made them. But, as has

been said, the contention that the Dresden work is a replica by Holbein

of the older Darmstadt altar-piece, is now maintained by only a very

small minority of judges. The painting of the Darmstadt work is admitted

by all to be more uniformly admirable, more completely carried out;

the details more finished (except in the case of the Virgin), and the

colours richer and more harmonious. Yet both works should be studied to

appreciate fully their claims and differences (Plates 18 and 19).

Illustration: PLATE 18

THE MEYER-MADONNA

_Oils. Grand Ducal Collection, Darmstadt_

Illustration: PLATE 19

THE MEYER-MADONNA

[_Later Version. Held by many to be a copy_]

_Oils. Dresden Gallery_

In the Darmstadt work the Virgin's dress is wholly different in tone

from her robe at Dresden; otherwise the colouring aims to be the same

in each. Here, in the original altar-piece, it is a greenish-blue. The

lower sleeves are golden, a line of white at the wrist, and a filmier

one within the bodice. Her girdle is a rich red; her mantle a

greenish-grey. Over this latter her fair hair streams like softest

sunshine. Above her noble, pity-full face sits her crown of fine gold

and pearls.

The woman kneeling nearest to the Madonna is commonly believed to be

Meyer's first wife, who had died in 1511, the mother of one child--a

daughter--by a previous husband. Between this stepdaughter and Meyer

there was considerable litigation over her property. The younger woman,

whose chin-cloth is dropped in the painting though worn like the others

in the drawing for her portrait, is Meyer's second wife, Dorothea

Kannegiesser, whom he married about 1512, and with whom he was painted

by Holbein in 1516. The sombre garments of both women are echoed by the

black of Meyer's hair and coat, the latter lined with light-brown fur.

Meyer's face, in its manly intensity of devotional feeling, is a

wonderful piece of psychology in the Darmstadt picture.

In the drawing for the young girl, Anna Meyer, who kneels beside her

mother with a red rosary in her hands, she has her golden-brown hair

hanging loose down her back, as befits a girl of thirteen. But in

the painting it is coiled in glossy braids beneath some ceremonial

head-dress; this is richly embroidered with pearls, with red silk tassel

and a wreath of red and white flowers above it. This head-dress is

painted with much more beautiful precision in the older work, and the

expression of the girl's face is much more deeply devout; her hands,

too, are decidedly superior to those of the Dresden work.

This is true also of the carpet, patterned in red and green, with

touches of white and black, on a ground of deep yellow. The Dresden

carpet is conspicuously inferior in finish and colour to that of

Darmstadt, so much so that Waagen and others, who believe the former a

replica, think a pupil or assistant may have been responsible for this

and other details, which for some reason Holbein himself was unable to

finish.

The elder boy, with the tumbled brown hair, dressed in a light-brown

coat trimmed with red-brown velvet, and hose of cinnabar-red, with

decorations of gold clasps and tags on fine blue cords, has a

yellowish-green portemonnaie, with tassels of dull blue hanging from his

girdle. All the carnations are superb, and in the Darmstadt picture the

infant Christ wears a sweet and happy smile. In that of Dresden He looks

sad and ill; a fact which has given rise to the theory Ruskin

adopted--that the Virgin had put down the divine Child and taken up

Meyer's ailing one. But the absence of wonder on the faces of Meyer's

family, and, indeed, the familiar affection of the elder boy, would of

itself negative this theory. I have my own ideas as to this point, but

it would serve no useful purpose to go into them in this place. Of these

two sons of Meyer there is no other record. Anna alone survived her

mother, who married again after Meyer's death. Anna's daughter married

Burgomaster Remigius Faesch, or Fesch, whose grandson--Remigius Faesch,

counsellor-at-law--was the well-known art collector whose collection and

manuscript are also in the Basel Museum, where there is an oil-copy of

the Dresden Meyer-Madonna.

Even the cool eye of Walpole was warmed by this great work of 1526, as

he saw it in the Dresden painting then hanging in the Palazzo Delfino

at Venice. "For the colouring," he exclaims, "it is beautiful beyond

description; and the carnations have that enamelled bloom so peculiar to

Holbein, who touched his works till not a touch remained discernible."

Twenty years earlier Edward Wright had written of Meyer's youngest

boy--"The little naked boy could hardly have been outdone, if I may

dare to say such a word, by Raphael himself." And in our own day that

fine and measured critic, Mrs. Jameson, has spoken for generation upon

generation who have thought the same thought before the Meyer-Madonna

of Dresden, when she says of it: "In purity, dignity, humility and

intellectual grace this exquisite Madonna has never been surpassed; not

even by Raphael. The face, once seen, haunts the memory."

When Wright and Walpole saw this Dresden work at Venice, it was supposed

to be "the family of Sir Thomas More"--_Meier_ having slipped into

"More" in the course of centuries, which had retained only the vivid

impression of Holbein's association with the latter, and knew that

the painter had drawn him in the midst of his family. That living

association was now, late in the summer of this year, about to begin.