Word: holbeins
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...York, the unsurpassed portrait drawings of Holbein...
That Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) was one of the supreme portrait painters has never been in doubt. Anyone who has been to the National Gallery in London and seen his painting of The Ambassadors - two wary young traders amid their pellucid clutter of emblematic objects, with an anamorphic blur of a skull floating strangely across the inlaid floor -knows that at once. Together with his older contemporary, Albrecht Dürer, Hol bein represents the point at which German painting shook clear of its Gothic past and its folk ties, entering and interpreting the great Renaissance streams...
...time when most people lived and died within ten miles of their birthplace, when travel was dauntingly arduous and news of other countries was the most expensive commodity in Europe, Holbein was a completely international man: he worked in Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy and, especially, England. His work, despite its powerful integrity of style, was open to all kinds of influence: portrait proto types ranging from Leonardo to Titian, the work of the Fontainebleau mannerists, Quinten Massys, English court miniaturists, Darer and Mathi as Grünewald. It seems to range backward and forward in time, a web of discreet...
...seamless surfaces of Holbein's paintings hide the machinery, as they were meant to do. For the first impulses, the slow probings and swift appraisals of a face, one must consult the drawings: something easier said than done in America until now. Although there are paintings by Holbein in U.S. collections, the body of his graphic work is in England and on the Continent. The most important part of it belongs to the British royal family and is housed at Windsor; it comprises the many sketches Holbein made of the nobility and gentry at the court of Henry VIII...
...certain how far Holbein wanted these drawings to be taken as finished works of art, but the fact that he did not discard them even when they had been developed into paintings suggests that he placed more than instrumental value on them. But whatever the cause of their preservation, one can only be grate ful for it. No other group of Renaissance drawings offers so vivid a picture of a class. They are documents as fraught with human interest as any court memoir by Hervey or Saint-Simon. In celebrating Holbein's eye with such curatorial precision, the Morgan...