Word: holbein
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First Commerce's main product was stock of an outfit called DeVoe-Holbein International, a company that boasted a very interesting technology: one that could essentially extract gold and other valuable minerals from wastewater and seawater. It was a lure reminiscent of the medieval alchemists who claimed to be able to transform base metals into gold, with equally unimpressive results. Dutch authorities raided First Commerce in 1986 and forced it into bankruptcy the following year. Thousands of investors lost money, including many Americans living abroad...
...preoccupation with death and judgment. In Northern Renaissance Art (Abrams; 560 pages; $45), Art Historian James Snyder examines the intertwining paths of faith and art with erudition and style, aided by nearly 700 illustrations, from anonymous 14th century sculptures to the eloquent engravings and paintings of Albrecht Durer, Hans Holbein and Lucas Cranach. Most of the art dwells on religious themes, including some of Europe's most arresting Nativity scenes...
There is a drawing of Thomas More dating from 1527, just eight years before Henry VIII had him beheaded for refusing to recognize the King's right to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Hans Holbein's sketch shows a prosperous Londoner in a fur-trimmed robe, surrounded by his family and his possessions-silver dishes in the cupboard, and a shelf or two of those rare luxuries, books. Mounted on the wall, dangling above More's head like a sword, hangs a clock...
...Holbein could not have chanced upon a more fitting symbol, if a reader follows the gracefully conceived, somewhat revisionist argument of Richard Marius, one of the editors of The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More and now an English professor at Harvard. It is Marius' persuasive thesis that, far from being the serene humanist made popular by Robert Bolt in his play A Man for All Seasons, More was a soul tormented by the little death knells of ticktocking time, and haunted even more by the silences of eternity...
...Great Painters (Putnam; $15.95), Italian Artist Piero Ventura ranges through history from the pottery of ancient Greece to the murals of Picasso. Along the way he stops to consider almost every major artist; he shows how Dürer worked in woodcuts, the techniques of Holbein (seen painting the clothes of a straw model because the King is too busy to pose), the hidden Christian imagery of Goya, the palette of the impressionists, the contained violence of the fauves and cubists. Ventura augments photographs of the paintings with his own sketches of the artists at work, explains such terms...