Word: basel
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Short Circuit. One point on which the Socialists are clearly determined to do better was the emotion-charged issue of reunification of East and West Germany. Fortnight ago, Germany's most eminent living philosopher, craggy Professor Karl Jaspers, 77, who now teaches at Switzerland's Basel University, flatly told a West German television audience that he believed the demand for reunification "un realistic." The excesses of the Hitler era, said Jaspers, had made a unified Germany unacceptable to the rest of the world and probably undesirable for Germans themselves. In 1960, he added, the only thing that made...
Younger Holbein's father, Hans the Elder, of Augsburg, Germany, was one of the most sought-after religious painters of his day, and his younger brother Sigmund for several years worked as his assistant. For the current show, Basel could find only a handful of oils and sketches that may have been by Sigmund, while Hans the Elder is represented by 79. The most dazzling is the famed Fountain of Life (see color), which once belonged to the wife of Britain's Charles...
Bitterness & Flattery. In 1511 Holbein the Elder did a memorable drawing of the somber-looking junior Hans, aged 14. A few years later young Hans and his brother Ambrosius were seeking their fortunes as artists in Basel, which, largely because of the presence of the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, was soon to call itself "the city of humanists." Once the young Hans so flattered Erasmus with a portrait sketch that the aging celibate declared if he really looked that good, he would go right out and marry. Ambrosius is believed to have died around the age of 25, leaving Hans...
...Basel could not hold him forever: the bitterness that swept over the city at the time of the Reformation so stifled intellectual life that Erasmus complained to a friend in England, "The arts are freezing in this city." Armed with letters of introduction from the old scholar, Hans finally settled in England, where he painted everyone from Sir Thomas More to King Henry VIII himself. He made a couple of visits home, but each time returned to his fatter commissions in England, and there in 1543 he died of the plague...
...joined the collection of Basilius Ame-bach, whose wise and scholarly father, Bonifacius (see color), began rounding up Holbein canvases during the first convulsive years of the Reformation. After Basilius' death, the city and the university bought the Amerbach collection, which they own to this day. It is Basel's permanent tribute to an illustrious family -and to the son it lost...