THE RENAISSANCE IN THE NORTH
The Renaissance involved a change of outlook towards the whole world
which could not long remain confined to Italy. There were then, as
now, roads over the passes of the Alps by which merchants and scholars
were continually travelling from Italy through Germany and Flanders
to England, communicating to the northern countries whatever changes
of thought stirred in the south.
In Germany, as in Italy, men speedily awoke to the new life, but the
awakening took a different form. We find a different quality in the
art of the north. Italian spontaneity and child-like joy is absent;
so, too, the sense of physical beauty, universal in Italy. You remember
how the successors of the Van Eycks in Flanders painted excellent
portraits and small carefully studied pictures of scriptural events
in wonderful detail. They were a strictly practical people whose
painting of stuffs, furs, jewellery, and architecture was marvellously
minute and veracious. But they were not a handsome race, and their
models for saints and virgins seem to have been the people that came
handiest and by no means the best looking. Thus the figures in their
pictures lack personal charm, though the painting is usually full of
vigour, truth, and skill.
When Flemings began to make tours in Italy and saw the pictures of
Raphael, in whom grace was native, they fell in love with his work
and returned to Flanders to try and paint as he did. But to them grace
was not God-given, and in their attempt to achieve it, their pictures
became sentimental and postured, and the naive simplicity and everyday
truth, so attractive in the works of the earlier school, perished.
The influence of the Van Eycks had not been confined to Flanders.
Artists in Germany had been profoundly affected. They learnt the new
technique of painting from the pupils of the Van Eycks in the fifteenth
century. Like them, too, they discarded gold backgrounds and tried
to paint men and women as they really looked, instead of in the old
conventional fashion of the Middle Ages. Schools of painting grew up
in several of the more important German towns, till towards the end
of the fifteenth century two German artists were born, Albert Durer
at Nuremberg in 1471, and Hans Holbein the younger at Augsburg in 1497,
who deserve to rank with the greatest painters of the time in any
country.
Durer is commonly regarded as the most typically German of artists,
though his father was Hungarian, and as a matter of fact he stands
very much alone. His pictures and engravings are 'long, long thoughts.'
Every inch of the surface is weighted with meaning. His cast of mind,
indeed, was more that of a philosopher than that of an artist. In a
drawing which Durer made of himself in the looking-glass at the age
of thirteen, we see a thoughtful little face gazing out upon the world
with questioning eyes. Already the delicacy of the lines is striking,
and the hair so beautifully finished that we can anticipate the later
artist whose pictures are remarkable for so surprising a wealth of
detail. The characteristics of the Flemish School, carefulness of
workmanship and indifference to the physical beauty of the model, to
which the Italians were so sensitive, continued in his work. For
thoroughness his portraits can be compared with those of John van Eyck.
In the National Gallery his father lives again for us in a picture
of wonderful power and insight.
Durer was akin to Leonardo in the desire for more and yet more knowledge.
Like him he wrote treatises on fortifications, human proportions,
geometry, and perspective, and filled his sketchbooks with studies
of plants, animals, and natural scenery. His eager mind employed itself
with the whys and wherefores of things, not satisfied with the simple
pleasure that sight bestows. In his engravings, even more than in his
pictures, we ponder the hidden meanings; we are not content to look
and rejoice in beauty, though there is much to charm the eye. His
problems were the problems of life as well as the problems of art.
The other great artist of Germany, Hans Holbein the younger, was the
son of Hans Holbein the elder, a much esteemed painter in Augsburg.
This town was on the principal trade route between Northern Italy and
the North Sea, so that Venetians and Milanese were constantly passing
through and bringing to it much wealth and news of the luxury of their
own southern life. As a result the citizens of Augsburg dressed more
expensively and decorated their houses more lavishly than did the
citizens of any other town in Germany. After a boyhood and youth spent
at Augsburg, Holbein removed to Basle. He was a designer of
wood-engravings and goldsmiths work and of architectural decoration,
besides being a painter. In those days of change in South Germany,
artists had to be willing to turn their hands to any kind of work they
could get to do. North of the Alps, where the Reformation was upsetting
old habits, an artist's life was far from being easy. Reformers made
bonfires of sacred pictures and sculptured wooden altar-pieces. Indeed
the Reformation was a cruel blow to artists, for it took away Church
patronage and made them dependent for employment upon merchants and
princes. Except at courts or in great mercantile towns they fared
extremely ill. Altar-pieces were rarely wanted, and there were no more
legends of saints to be painted upon the walls of churches.
The demand for portraiture, on the other hand, was increasing, whilst
the growth of printing created a new field for design in the preparation
of woodcuts for the illustration of books. Thus it came to pass that
the printer Froben, at Basle, was one of the young Holbein's chief
patrons. We find him designing a wonderful series of illustrations
of _The Dance of Death_, as well as drawing another set to illustrate
_The Praise of Folly_, written by Erasmus, who was then living in Basle
and frequenting the house of Froben. Erasmus was a typical scholar
of the sixteenth century, belonging rather to civilized society as
a whole than to any one country. He moved about Europe from one centre
of learning to another, alike at home in educated circles in England,
Flanders, and Germany. He had lived for some time in England and knew
that there were men there with wealth who would employ a good painter
to paint their portraits if they could find one. Erasmus himself sat
to Holbein, and sent the finished portrait as a present to his friend
Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England.
In England, owing to the effects of the Wars of the Roses, good painters
no longer existed. A century of neglect had destroyed English painting.
Henry VIII., therefore, had to look to foreign lands for his court
painter, and where was he to come from? France was the nearest country,
but the French King was in the same predicament as Henry. He obtained
his painters from Italy, and at one time secured the services of
Leonardo da Vinci; but Italy was a long way off and it would suit Henry
better to get a painter from Flanders or Germany if it were possible.
So Erasmus advised Holbein to go to England, and gave him a letter
to Sir Thomas More. On this first visit in 1526, he painted the
portraits of More and his whole family, and of many other distinguished
men; but it was not till his second visit in 1532 that he became Henry
VIII.'s court painter. In this capacity he had to decorate the walls
of the King's palaces, design the pageantry of the Royal processions,
and paint the portraits of the King's family. Although Holbein could
do and did do anything that was demanded of him, what he liked best
was to paint portraits. Romantic subjects such as the fight of St.
George and the dragon, or an idyll of the Golden Age, little suited
the artistic leanings of a German. To a German or a Fleming the world
of facts meant more than the world of imagination; the painting of
men and women as they looked in everyday life was more congenial to
them than the painting of saints and imaginary princesses.
But how unimportant seems all talk of contrasting imagination and
reality when we see them fused together in this charming portrait of
Edward, the child Prince of Wales. It belongs to the end of the year
1538, when he was just fifteen months old, and the imagination of
Holbein equipped him with the orb of sovereignty in the guise of a
baby's rattle. It is in the coupling of distant kingship and present
babyhood that the painter works his magic and reveals his charm.
[Illustration: EDWARD, PRINCE OF WALES, AFTERWARDS EDWARD VI.
From the picture by Holbein, in the Collection of the Earl of Yarborough,
London]
If you recall for a moment what you know of Henry VIII., his masterful
pride, his magnificence, his determination to do and have exactly what
he wanted, you will understand that his demands upon his court painter
for a portrait of his only son and heir must have been high. No one
could say enough about this wonderful child to please Henry, for all
that was said in praise of him redounded to the glory of his father.
The following is a translation of the Latin poem beneath the picture:
Child, of thy Father's virtues be thou heir,
Since none on earth with him may well compare;
Hardly to him might Heaven yield a son
By whom his father's fame should be out-done.
So, if thou equal such a mighty sire,
No higher can the hopes of man aspire;
If thou surpass him, thou shalt honoured be
O'er all that ruled before, or shall rule after thee.[3]
[Footnote 3: Translated by Miss K. K. Radford.]
In justice be it said that the little Edward VI. was of an extraordinary
precocity. When he was eight years old he wrote to Archbishop Cranmer
in Latin. When he was nine he knew four books of Cato by heart as well
as much of the Bible. To show you the way in which royal infants were
treated in those days,--we read that at the time this picture was
painted, the little prince had a household of his own, consisting of
a lady-mistress, a nurse, rockers for his cradle, a chamberlain,
vice-chamberlain, steward, comptroller, almoner, and dean. It is hard
to believe that the child is only fifteen months old, so erect is the
attitude, so intelligent the face. The clothes are sumptuous. A piece
of stuff similar in material and design to the sleeve exists to-day
in a museum in Brussels.
In the best sense Holbein was the most Italian of the Germans. For
in him, as in the gifted Italian, grace was innate. He may have paid
a brief visit to Italy, but he never lived there for any length of
time, nor did he try to paint like an Italian as some northern artists
unhappily tried to do. The German merits, solidity, boldness, detailed
finish, and grasp of character, he possessed in a high degree, but
he combined with them a beauty of line, delicacy of modelling, and
richness of colour almost southern. His pictures appeal more to the
eye and less to the mind than do those of Durer. Where Durer sought
to instruct, Holbein was content to please. But like a German he spared
no pains. He painted the stuff and the necklace, the globe and the
feather, with the finish of an artist who was before all things a good
workman. Observe how delicately the chubby little fingers are drawn.
Holbein's detailed treatment of the accessories of a portrait is only
less than the care expended in depicting the face. He studied faces,
and his portraits, one may almost say, are at once images of and
commentaries on the people they depict. Thus his gallery of pictures
of Henry and his contemporaries show us at once the reflexion of them
as in a mirror, and the vision of them as beheld by a singularly
discerning and experienced eye that not only saw but comprehended.
This is the more remarkable because Holbein was not always able to
paint and finish his portraits in the presence of the living model,
as painters insist on doing nowadays. His sitters were generally busy
men who granted him but one sitting, so that his method was to make
a drawing of the head in red chalk and to write upon the margin notes
of anything he particularly wanted to remember. Afterwards he painted
the head from the drawing, but had the actual clothes and jewels sent
him to work from.
In the Royal Collection at Windsor there are a number of these portrait
drawings of great interest to us, since many of the portraits painted
from them have been lost. As a record of remarkable people of that
day they are invaluable, for in a few powerful strokes Holbein could
set down the likeness of any face. But when he came to paint the portrait
he was not satisfied with a mere likeness. He painted too 'his habit
as he lived.' Erasmus is shown reading in his study, the merchant in
his office surrounded by the tokens of his business, and Henry VIII.
standing firmly with his legs wide apart as if bestriding a hemisphere.
But I think that you will like this fine portrait of the infant prince
best of all, and that is why I have chosen it in preference to a likeness
of any of the statesmen, scholars, queens, and courtiers who played
a great part in their world, but are not half so charming to look upon
as little Prince Edward.