The Dawn Of The Reformation

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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After Durer’s death many carried on the tradition he had bequeathed to his country as an engraver—the prints of Aldegraver, Beham, and other followers are still treasured by collectors—but none of them won great fame in painting. Matthew Grunewald, Durer’s contemporary, had a pupil Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), who was much esteemed by his fellow citizens of Wittemberg and was appointed Court Painter to the Protestant prince Frederick of Saxony; but we have only to look at the doll-faced ‘Portrait of a Young Lady’ by him in the National Gallery to see how far Cranach’s art fell below that of Durer.

Only one other painter of German origin beside Durer has so far succeeded in capturing the world’s attention, namely Hans Holbein the Younger, who when Durer died in 1528 was a young man of thirty one, painting in England. No more than twenty six years separate the birth of Holbein from that of Durer, yet within the space of that one generation so great had been the revolution in men’s minds that the two artists seem to belong to different ages. Holbein grew up during the greatest Wonder-Time in world’s history. We who have benefited by and taken for granted the astounding discoveries made during what is known as the Epoch of Maximilian (1493-1519), which approximates to the opening of the reign of our Henry VIII, find it difficult to realize the crash of old ideas and the bombardment of new ones which filled the world during this epoch:

That time (as Lord Bryce has told us)—a time of change and movement in every part of human life, a time when printing had become common, and books were no longer confined to the clergy, when drilled troops were replacing the feudal militia, when the use of gunpowder was changing the face of war—was especially marked by one event to which the history of the world offers no parallel before or since, the discovery of America....The feeling of mysterious awe with which men had regarded the firm plain of the earth and her encircling ocean ever since the days of Homer vanished when astronomers and geographers taught them that she was an insignificant globe which, so far from being the center of the universe, was itself swept round in the motion of one of the least of its countless systems.

Nothing but an appreciation of these historical facts can teach us rightly to comprehend the essential difference between the art of the two great German masters: for as the ‘feeling of mysterious awe’ with which all his work, whether painted or engraved, is impregnated, makes Albert Durer the last and supreme expression of medievalism, so an inner consciousness of man’s insignificance and a frank recognition of material facts makes Holbein the first exponent in art of Modern Science.

The great Hans Holbein was the son of an artist of the same name, Han Holbein the Elder, a poor and struggling painter of religious pictures in the flourishing city of Augsburg. Here Hans Holbein the Younger was born in 1497. There was never any doubt as to his calling, for he belonged to a family of painters. Not only his father, but his uncle and his brother were painters also. His father, who was chiefly influenced by the Flemish painter Roger van der Weyden, had little to teach the son, and when he was seventeen or eighteen young Hans left his father’s house in company with his elder brother Ambrosius, and began a foreign tour which eventually ended as Basle. Owing to the lack of any exact records and the constant confusion of the two Holbeins, father and son, the details of Hobleins early life are still a matter of conjecture and controversy. Some hold that the elder Holbein with his family moved from Augsburg to Lucerne about 1514, but the one thing certain is that young Holbein was at Basle in 1515, where he at once found work as a designer with the printer and publisher Frobenius. Through Frobenius he came to know Erasmus, who had recently left France and now graced Basle with his universal fame as a scholar; and soon the young artist found plenty of employment both as a book illustrator and portraitist. One of the earliest and most loyal of his patrons was the Basle merchant Jacob Meyer, whose portrait and especially the splendid sketch for the same foreshadowed the future greatness of the artist as a portrait painter. About 1516 or 1517 Holbein the Younger was in Lucerne, where he decorated a house, and it is conjectured that about this time he also traveled in Italy; but there is no sure proof, and we can only guess at his movements till he reappears at Basle in 1519. Though but twenty two, he is now a man and a master. In 1520 he became a citizen of Basle—a necessity if he wished to practise painting in that city—and about the same time he married a widow with two children.

He was a master, but a master of another order to Durer. Holbein was a pure professional painter, anxious to do a day’s work and do it as well as he possibly could; but he did not attempt to show how life should be lived or to penetrate its mysteries: he was content to paint what he saw, paint it truly and splendidly, but like the wise child of a sophisticated age he refrained from a futile endeavor to dig beneath the surface. Holbein can show you the character of a man, as in his portrait of Jacob Meyer; but Durer would have tried to read his soul.

In 1521 he painted his masterly, though to many unattractive picture, ‘The Dead Man,’ horribly realistic some would say, yet in truth it is not morbid. For this outstretched corpse is painted with the calm detachment of a student of anatomy; it is a manifestation of the sceptical, inquiring, but unmoved gaze of Science confronted with a Fact. In 1522 he painted ‘Two Saints’ and a ‘Madonna’ in the following year a ‘Portrait of Erasmus,’ in 1526 a ‘Venus’ and a gay lady styled ‘Lais Corinthiaca’ and in 1529 he painted a great ‘Madonna’ for his friend Jacob Meyer.

The Dawn Of The Reformation (continued)