(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:
Never did that sovereign do a wiser or a better thing for himself than when he made Holbein his painter. Not only did the artist present that king to posterity in a manner that mitigates our judgement of his cruelties, but he has made the whole history of that period live for us, as no previous period in English history lives, by his series of portraits and portrait drawings of the English Court. Mr Ford Madox Hueffer has pointedly observed:
How comparatively cold we are left by the name, say of Edward III, a great king surrounded by great men in a stirring period. No visual image comes to the mind’s eye: at most we see, imaginatively, coins and the seals that depend from charters.
Mr Hueffer truly argues that Henry VIII and his men would be just as lifeless without Holbein, and the way he has made them live in our imagination is a tribute not only to Holbein but also to the preserving power of art.
While preparing the way for his advancement in England, Holbein did not neglect the connection he already had on the Continent, and three years before his appointment as Court Painter he sought to widen and enhance his foreign custom by painting another show piece: ‘The Ambassadors’ was painted deliberately to force an entry into diplomatic circles as the ‘George Gisze’ had been to secure him the custom of the men of commerce. This remarkable group of Jean de Dinteville, Lord of Polisy, on the left, wearing the French Order of S. Michel, and of Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur, in doctor’s cap and gown, on the right, fascinates all beholders by the brilliance with which the accessories are painted, the globe, the turkey rug, the tiling, the mandoline, the astronomical instruments and in the foreground the anamorphosis (or distorted representation) of a human skull. Many keen imaginations have set their wits to work to find an inner meaning to this curiously elongated death’s-head, but the most plausible explanation is found in the fact that Holbein’s own name means ‘skull’ in his native language, and this devise may consequently be regarded as a fanciful way of putting his seal or cipher on his work. Another interpretation is that here, as in other portraits by Holbein, the skull is introduced to reinforce the lesson of the ‘Dance of Death’, that to this all must come. Whatever the painter’s original idea may have been, his work is a complete success; he painted it to create a sensation, and it has created a sensation for centuries. It may be added that this elongated skull completes the design, by paralleling the line from the one ambassador’s hand (holding the dagger) to the head of the other ambassador.
After the death of Jane Seymour, when Europe was searched for marriageable princesses to console the royal widower, Holbein in February 1538 was sent to Brussels to paint his matchless portrait of King Christian’s daughter ‘Christina of Denmark’, who, fortunately for herself, escaped Henry VIII and afterwards married the Duke of Lorraine as her second husband. One of Holbein’s last works, this is by many accounted his greatest. Here he has painted no show-piece, but set forth with divine simplicity the grace and dignity of meditative girlhood.
From Brussels Holbein went to Burgundy, where he painted other portraits, and in December of the same year he returned to London. Almost exactly five years later he caught the plague. In November 1543 Holbein died in London, a victim of the same disease that had already killed Giorgione in his youth and was destined, thirty-three years later, to carry off Titian in his old age.
Just as Durer and Holbein had no great forerunners, so they had no great successors, and Europe had to wait thirty-four years before another great master of art was born, outside Italy, in the person of Peter Paul Rubens.
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