Word: holbeins
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...Duerer", says Professor Burkhard, "turned partly Italian, Holbein became cosmopolitan, Gruenewald remained German." Hence the archaic nature of Gruenewald's work. Nothing of the new formal dignity of the South is in it, no compromise with the fashionable standards of Renaissance art that Holbein surrendered to, and even Duerer did not escape. Instead, one finds all the intensity of the medieval religion of the North. Every work of Gruenewald has a religious subject. He paints a gaunt Christ, suffering the torments of the martyrs--and this in the years when the Raphaels and Peruginos were turning out the sweet, peaceful...
...apprentice in Basle young Holbein found a friend and patron in the great Theologian Erasmus whom he painted many times. The younger Holbein made a name for himself in Basle. Came the depression of the 1520's, however, and Erasmus sent him packing off to England with a letter of introduction to Sir Thomas More (Utopia). Holbein's first series of English portraits were not of court celebrities but of the scholars of More's circle...
Back in Switzerland in 1528 he swanked it about Basle in furs and velvets, bought a fine house for his wife and family, then returned to England in 1530. As far as is known it was the Tudor tycoon Thomas Cromwell (whose portrait by Holbein now hangs in Manhattan's Frick Gallery) who first introduced this skillful German to bluff King Hal. Henry took to Holbein immediately, made him his court painter in 1537, trusted him sufficiently to send him to Duren in 1539 to paint a reportorial portrait of Anne of Cleves whom Henry was thinking of making...
...Hans Holbein took time off from his royal work to find a piece of board no bigger than a man's hand, paint his own picture on it to send to his family in Basle. Year later he died of the plague in London...
...little self-portrait remained in the Holbein family for generations, was not known to the world of art until 1930 when Art Expert Dr. Paul Ganz cleaned it, published its photograph in a magazine. Since then museums and private collectors in a dozen countries have been anxious for it. The only other absolutely authentic Holbein self-portrait is a watercolor in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence...