The Dawn Of The Reformation

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The careful reader will have observed that no paintings are given above for the years 1523 to 1525, and indeed these were bad years for all painters. When Guilio de’ Medici was elected Pope as Clement VII in 1523, he found, as a historian has said, ‘the world in confusion, a great movement going on in Germany, a great war just begun between the three most powerful Christian monarchs—a war to which he himself was pledged.’ Two months after he had signed the treaty of alliance, Francis I of France was defeated and taken prisoner at Pavia, and Emperor’s troops—thousands of Protestants among them—headed for Rome. All the diplomatic wiles of the Pontiff were unavailing, and in May 1527 a horrified world beheld Christian troops, Germans, Spaniards, and Italians, engaged in the sack of Rome.

Basle, then a city of the Empire, though not exposed to the full force of the currents of war, was not untouched by these events, and Holbein, like a shrewd man of the world, began to look out for a shelter from the storm that was convulsing Europe. His native Germany was out of the question, for there paintings already in existence were being destroyed by zealots desirous of ‘purifying’ Protestant churches. During this time of waiting, when commissions for pictures were scarce, Holbein began that series of wood-engravings which have done as much as any of his paintings to make his name illustrious.

No works of Holbein have held a more lasting place in the popular imagination than his little woodcuts illustrating ‘The Dance of Death’. As remote in its origin as the ‘morality play, this picturing of the fact that all living beings must die was probably in its beginning a monkish device to compel those who could not read to realize their inevitable fate. This lesson was driven home by the universality with which the theme was expounded. In the older prints of this subject the highest and lowest in the land were shown each dancing with a dead partner of the same rank and calling, a king dancing with a dead king, a bishop dancing with a dead bishop, a merchant with a dead merchant, a laborer with a dead laborer. Whoever you were you could not escape death, that was always dancing at your heels. This was the age-old theme to which Holbein gave new life, and if his versions of the Dance of Death has eclipsed all other versions it is because Holbein was the first to present Death as an abstraction, common to all prints in the series, and because no other treatment of the theme has excelled his in the pictorial elements of design. Each of these prints is itself a perfect little picture—see how beautiful is the landscape with the setting sun in ‘The Husbandman’. As for its value as preaching, Holbein’s series serves a double purpose, emphasizing by the skeleton that accompanies all alike, Pope, Cardinal, Miser, Husbandman, and what not, the equality as well as the universality of death. Holbein’s message is not only that ‘all flesh is grass’; but also that under their skin ‘the colonel’s lady and Judith O’Grady’ are very much alike.

In 1526 Holbein found the haven for which he had been looking in England, an isle remote from the European storm center. It is probable that he had become known through Erasmus to Sir Thomas Moore, and so was invited to come; his painting of ‘The Household of Sir Thomas Moore’ was one of the earliest and most important paintings executed by Holbein during his first stay in England. In 1528 he returned to Basle for three years, and having dispatched thence his gorgeous portrait of ‘George Gisze, Merchant of the Steelyard’ to show what he could do in portraiture, he returned to England in 1531.

This handsome and exceedingly ornate portrait of a young merchant in his counting-house was a deliberate showpiece which had exactly the effect the painter intended. In troublous and uncertain times princes and great nobles were unreliable patrons; at any moment they might be dethroned, killed or executed. Like a prudent man Holbein wished to establish a connection with a steadier, yet equally rich stratum of society, namely the great merchants. Therefore he cleverly set his cap at the wealthy German merchants settled in London, and showed them in this portrait that he could make a merchant look as splendid and imposing as any king or noblemen. He delivered his sample, and human vanity did the rest. The German ‘Merchants of the Steelyard’ as this Corporation was styled, flocked to his studio in London. Three years later his first English patron, Sir Thomas Moore, was sent to the scaffold by Henry VIII because he declined to declare the nullity of that royal reprobate’s first marriage with Catherine of Aragon.

To have been the friend of Moore was at this time no commendation to the favor of the Court; nevertheless, Holbein was not the man to miss any opportunity of ‘getting on’ for want of a little tact and diplomacy. Firmly based on the support of the German merchants, he tried another method of approach. Very soon we find him painting his splendid portrait of ‘Robert Cheseman, the King’s Falconer’, painting first the minor and then the great courtiers, till at last, in 1536, he achieved what no doubt had been his aim from the first, and was appointed Court Painter to King Henry VIII.

The Dawn Of The Reformation (continued)