Varnish and Virtue

Summary

It’s an irony to savour: the man who invented the Tudors was a German. If Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors, it is because we can all picture them so clearly. That, in turn, is due to an extraordinary sequence of portraits and drawings produced between the late 1520s and early 1540s by Hans Holbein of Augsburg (c 1497–1543), many of which have become instantly recognisable. This familiarity, as Elizabeth Goldring notes at the outset of her superb and ground-breaking biography, means it is harder to appreciate just how novel Holbein’s portraits appeared to the first people who saw them. They marvelled, even more than we do, at Holbein’s ability to make viewers feel that they have been ‘granted access to the sitter’s inner thoughts and feelings, that Holbein has distilled the essence of the sitter’s nature and temperament in visual form’. That Holbein is remembered as a portraitist is partly a reflection of modern artistic priorities, biased towards painting. One of the merits of Goldring’s appraisal is the attention she pays to Holbein’s other cultural output: book illustrations, window schemes, sets for court festivities and various forms of metalwork – there are hundreds of surviving designs for jewellery and utensils. Holbein’s arc towards portraiture was nonetheless a reflection of the times. Having migrated to the Swiss city of Basel in his youth, he specialised in the production of altarpieces for local churches until, with the arrival of Protestant reform, the market for devotional imagery dried up. In 1526, Holbein travelled to England with a letter of introduction from Basel’s most famous resident, Erasmus, to his English friend Thomas More. Portraits of the More family and other notables brought Holbein to the attention of the court, and he was commissioned to produce a painting of Henry VIII triumphing over the French for the Banqueting House at Gree...