Hans Holbein
9781465655042
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
HANS HOLBEIN was born, in 1497, at Augsburg, in Swabia, Southern Germany, to which town his grandfather, Michael Holbein, had moved, some time before 1454, from the neighbouring village of Schönenfeld. His father, known to-day as Holbein the elder, to distinguish him from his more celebrated son, was one of the leading painters of Augsburg, and an artist of importance in the history of German art. The elder Holbein was one of the first of German painters strongly influenced by the Italian Renaissance, and a chronological study of his pictures shows very clearly how great a change was gradually taking place north of the Alps both in artistic ideals and technical methods, through an increasing knowledge of what the great painters of the Southern peninsula had accomplished. In his early work he shows himself to be a follower of Rogier van der Weyden and his school, but towards the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century the Gothic qualities of his painting, with its many hardnesses and angularities, begin to disappear, and a closer observation and a more truthful rendering of nature to take their place. He threw off one by one his Rhenish traditions, and replaced them by the methods of the Van Eycks, which reached him indirectly through the mellowing influence of the earlier Venetian painters. He developed, too, a fondness for rich architectural decoration of the Renaissance type for the backgrounds and settings of his pictures, in the use of which his son, later on, became so perfect a master. As a result of certain forged documents and false inscriptions, a number of interesting works, formerly ascribed rightly to the father, were taken from him and given to the son, and hailed as signs of precocious genius. Even the father’s masterpiece, The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian at Munich, did not escape the enthusiasm of the younger artist’s biographers. Modern criticism, however, has restored to the father a series of works which place him among the leading painters of Germany at the dawn of the new movement in art. Hans Holbein the younger seems to have received no artistic training except that which he gained in his father’s studio or workshop, where his elder brother Ambrosius was also engaged. His uncle Sigismund, too, was an Augsburg painter, and may have helped in his instruction. His father, though constantly in debt and difficulties, seems to have received numerous orders for altar-pieces and other sacred pictures, so that the workshop was a busy one, and no doubt young Hans began at an early age to help in such minor details as the painting of draperies and backgrounds. Much of his genius was inherited from his father, particularly that remarkable power of portraying character with a few vivid strokes of the pencil which is one of the crowning glories of his art. In those days a young painter generally finished his education by a year or two of travel before settling down as a master painter in the guild of his native town. Ambrose and Hans Holbein seem to have followed the prevailing fashion, leaving Augsburg towards the end of 1514 or early in 1515. In the latter year the father went to Issenheim in High Alsace to paint an altar-piece, and the two young men may have gone with him. There is some probability, too, that the whole family settled in Lucerne about this time. In any case, the two sons were residing in Basle before the end of 1515, any plan of extended travel being cut short by the prospect of plenty of work. At that time Basle was the northern centre of the great revival of literature and learning, and several of its printers were of European reputation.
