Chapter II: Holbein Basiliensis (1)

1519-1526

_Holbein Basiliensis_--Enters the Painters' Guild--Bonifacius Amerbach
and his portrait--The Last Supper and its Judas--The so-called
"Fountain of Life" at Lisbon--Genius for design and symbolism in
architecture--Versatility, humour, fighting scenes--Holbein becomes a
citizen and marries--Basel in 1519--Froben's circle--Tremendous events
and issues of the time--Holbein's religious works--The Nativity and
Adoration at Freiburg--Hans Oberriedt--The Basel Passion in eight
panels--Passion Drawings--Christ in the tomb--Christ and Mary Magdalen
at the door of the sepulchre--Rathaus wall-paintings--Birth of Holbein's
eldest child--The Solothurn Madonna: its discovery and rescue--Holbein's
wife and her portraits--Suggested solutions of some biographical
enigmas--Title pages--Portraits of Erasmus--Journey to France, probably
to Lyons and Avignon--Publishers and pictures of the so-called "Dance
of Death"--Dorothea Offenburg as Venus and Laïs Corinthiaca--Triumph of
the Protestant party--Holbein decides to leave Basel for a time--The
Meyer-Madonna of Darmstadt and Dresden, and its portraits.

And now it is 1519, and with it the true Hour of Holbein's destiny is striking. Take away the coming seven years and you will still have what Holbein is too often thought to be only--a great portrait-painter. No greater ever etched the soul of a man on his mask. His previous and his after achievements would still amply justify the honour of centuries. But add these seven years, from 1519 to 1526, and dull indeed must be the intelligence that cannot recognise the great Master, without qualification and in the light of any thoughtful comparison with the very greatest.

His Basel career may be said to begin here; his earlier work furnishing the Prologue. On the 25th September, 1519, when he was about two-and-twenty, he joined the Basel Guild of Painters; that same "Guild of Heaven" (_Zunft zum Himmel_) which his brother Ambrose had joined two years earlier and from which he seems to have passed to the veritable guild of Heaven at about this latter date.

And hardly is the ink dry upon the record of his membership than Holbein painted one of the most beautiful of his portraits--that of Bonifacius Amerbach (Plate 6). He stands beside a tree on which is hung an inscription. Behind him is Holbein's favourite early background,--the blue of the sky, here broken by the warm brown and green of the branch, and the faint glimpse of far-away mountains. Under his soft cap, with a cross for badge, his intensely gleaming blue eyes look out beneath grave brows. The lips are softly yet firmly set; the mouth framed by the sunny beard which repeats the red-brown of his hair. The black scholar's gown, with its trimming of black fur, discloses his rich damask doublet and white collar.

Illustration: PLATE 6
BONIFACIUS AMERBACH
_Oils. Basel Museum_

Well may the inscription assert--above the signature, the name of the sitter and the date 14th October, 1519--

_"Though but a painted face I am not far removed from Life; but rather,
By truthful lines, the noble image of my Possessor.
As he accomplishes eight times three years, so faithfully in me also
Is Nature's work proclaimed by the work of Art."_

For here in truth is a work of Nature which is no less a work of Art.

This is the Amerbach who began and inspired his son Basilius (so named after Bonifacius's brother) to complete the Holbein Collection, which the Basel Museum bought long afterwards. And such was the love of both that they included, perhaps deliberately, much that has small probability of claim to be Holbein's work. They would reject nothing attributed to him; thinking a bushel of chaff well worth housing if it might yield one genuine grain. And in view of these expressive facts, it is hardly necessary to argue in behalf of the tradition that more than a conventional friendship bound the two young men together,--printer's son and painter's son, musician-scholar and scholar-painter, Churchman and Churchman; the one twenty-four, the other twenty-two.

Bonifacius was the youngest of Johann Amerbach's three gifted sons. As all the world knows, Johann had been also a scholar as well as a printer, and great in both capacities. The most eminent scholars of his day gravitated as naturally to this noble personality as they afterwards did to that of his protégé and successor, Johann Froben. He had educated his sons, too, to worthily continue his life-work and maintain his devout principles. Bonifacius was the darling of more than one heart not given to softness. He had been more the friend than the pupil of Ulrich Zasius at the University of Freiburg, before he went to Avignon to complete his legal studies under Alciat. Five years after this portrait was painted he became Professor of Law in the Basel University. "I am ready to die," writes Erasmus of him, "when I shall have seen any young man purer or kinder or more sincere than this one."

Very possibly it was for Bonifacius himself that Holbein painted his own portrait about this time (Plate 1, frontispiece). It is a worthy mate, at all events. In the Amerbach Catalogue it was simply called "Holbein's counterfeit, in dry colour" (_ein conterfehung Holbein's mit trocken farben_); the frame, too, was catalogued, though the painting was kept in a cabinet separately when the Basel Museum acquired it with the Collection.

The vigour and finish of this portrait on vellum, done in crayons or body-colour, make it a gem of the first water. The drawing was done in black chalk, and the tints have been rubbed in with coloured crayons or given with the point where lines of colour were required. The work has the delicacy of a water-colour and the strength of oils. The broad, soft, red hat, though so fine a bit of colour, is clearly worn as part of a simple everyday habit. There is no suggestion of studying for effect, or even caring at all about it. He wears his hat pulled soberly down over his brown hair exactly as when he wore it thus about the business of the day. The plastic modelling of the puckered brow and the mobile mouth is beautifully indicated. The bluish tone left by the razor is just hinted. In his drab coat with its black velvet bands, with his shirt, on which the high lights have been applied, slightly open at the throat, Holbein himself seems to stand before one as in life.

Among the "early works" of the Amerbach Catalogue there is one which shows strong traces of Leonardo's and even more of Mantegna's influence on him at this time. It is a Last Supper, painted in oils on wood. But it was so mutilated in the iconoclastic fury of 1529, and has been so cobbled, re-broken, re-set, and "restored" generally, that it can no longer be called Holbein's work without many reservations. There is also another Last Supper, one of a coarsely painted set on canvas, which is attributed to him on much more doubtful grounds, to judge by the composition and colouring. Myself I should be inclined to see the inferior hand of Ambrose, Hans the elder, or perhaps even Sigmund Holbein in these, if they are genuine Holbein works at all.

But there are still to be seen the traces of his own hand and mind in the Last Supper in oils on wood. St. John's head must originally have been very beautiful; very manly, too,--dark with sudden anguish and recoil. There is a separate head of St. John, in oils, in the same collection, which shows how fixed was this noble originality of type in Holbein's conception of "the beloved apostle." But it is in Judas that the patient student will find, perhaps, most of Holbein's peculiar cast of thought, when once the initial repulsion is overcome.

By a very natural arrangement he is brought into the immediate foreground and sits there, already isolated, already damned, in such a torment of body and soul as haunts the spectator who has had the courage to reconsider the dictum of authorities who call him "a Jew of frightful vulgarity." Frightful he may be; but it is a strange judgment which can find him vulgar. Unfortunately, the painting is no longer in a condition to justify reproduction; but such as study this yellow-robed, emaciated, shivering, fever-consumed Judas will, I venture to assert, find food for thought in it even under all the injuries the work has undergone.

It is a demon-driven soul if ever there was one. He is in the very act of springing to his feet and rushing away anywhere, anywhere out of this Presence;--no more concerned about his money-bag than about the food he loathes. Thirty pieces of silver! If the priests have lied, if this is in very truth the Messiah his heart still half believes Him, will thirty pieces of silver buy his soul from the Avenger? Is there time still to escape? What if he break the promise given when he was over-persuaded in the market-place the other day? But did not the High Priest himself declare that this is Beelzebub in person,--this fair, false, dear,--oh! still too dear Illusion? Up! Let him be gone out of this!--from the sound of that Voice, from the sight of that Face, get the thing over and done, done--done one way or another! If God's work, as the priests swear, well and good. He will have earned the pity of God Himself. If the devil's, as his heart whispers, well, too! Let him take his price and buy himself a rope long enough to house his soul in any Hell, rather than sit on in this one! It is all painted, or was once; all written on that sunken cheek, that matted hair and clammy brow; in that cavernous socket, that eye of lurid despair; on the whole anatomy of a lost soul. The hand that did it was very young, very immature; but it had the youth and the immaturity of a Master.

There is another and a very different work, an oil painting, in the Royal Collection at Lisbon, signed IOANNES HOLBEIN FECIT 1519, which, if by the younger Hans, would almost put the question as to whether the painter knew the landscapes of Italy, beyond doubt; so southern is the type of its background. The work, however, has been rejected by Woltmann, on the strength of an old photograph not quite perfect. He held the signature to be spurious, and attributed the picture to the school of Gerard David. And he gave to the work the name by which it is now generally styled in English works: "The Fountain of Life" (_Der Brunnen des Lebens_[3]). He did so from the inscription within the rim of the well immediately in the foreground; but a literal translation of this inscription, PVTEVS AQVARVM VIVENCIVM, is, I think, to be preferred: _The Well of Living Waters_.

The majority of those competent to form a judgment in such matters are inclined to attribute the work to Hans Holbein the Elder, who did not die until some years later, and who made use of a very similar form of signature. And for myself I find it hard to see how anyone familiar with Hans the Younger could accept it as his work at any period of his career; least of all at the date given in the signature. So that equally whether Woltmann is right in believing the signature itself spurious, or those are right who hold it to be the genuine signature of Hans the Elder,--a more detailed description of the composition does not fall within the scope of this little volume. But the whole matter is most clearly set forth, and a very beautiful reproduction in colours given of the painting itself, in Herr Seeman's article upon it, which will be found in the appended List of References.

* * * * *

Considerably before 1519, as has been said, Holbein had begun to develop his special genius for Design, and to apply it to glass or window-paintings, as well as to metal and wood-engravings. The beautiful drawings, whether washed, or etched with the point, in chalks or Indian ink, of which examples may be seen in almost every great collection, private as well as public, that year after year were created by that fertile brain and ever more masterly hand, constitute an Art in themselves. And since so many (perhaps the greater number as well as the greater in subject) of his paintings have perished, it is chiefly in his drawings that the progression of his powers can be followed, or the plane and scope of his imagination recognised at all. There is seldom a date on them; but they will be found to date themselves pretty accurately by certain features. In his earliest, for instance, that defect of which mention has been made,--the short thick figures due to the energy of his rebound from Gothic attenuation is a grave fault. There is a Virgin and Child among his washed drawings for glass-paintings in the Basel Museum, for example, which, when you cut it off at the knees, is one of the most charming pictures of Mother and Child to be found in any painter's treatment of this subject. And behind them is a gem of landscape. Yet the whole, as it stands, is utterly marred by the Virgin's dwarfed limbs. But although Holbein never entirely overcame this fault, he did very greatly do so, as the years passed.

His architectural settings, too, tended to greater simplicity in his later years. Yet this is not a safe guide. Some early designs have simple forms; some comparatively late ones, a very ornate architecture. For the truth is that these architectural backgrounds and settings remained, so long as his fancy had any free field for disporting itself, an integral part of his conception. But only as inseparable from the Symbolism, the under-tow, of his imagination. To my thinking, at any rate, they make a gravid mistake who look for "realism" in these things.

His stately pillars and arches, his fluid forms of ornament, are not his idea of the actual surroundings of the characters he portrays, any more than they are your idea, or mine, of those surroundings. Is it to be supposed that he thought the dwellings of our Lord were palaces? Or that he could not paint a stable? Those who maintain that Holbein was a Realist in the modern sense of the word must reconcile as best they can the theory with the facts. But when we see the stage set with every stately circumstance,--the Babe amid the fading splendours of earthly palaces, our Lord mocked by matter as well as man,--I dare to think that we shall do well to cease from insisting on an adobe wall, and to study those "incongruous" circumstances to which the will and not the poverty of Holbein consents. We shall, at least, no longer be dull to "the tears of things" as he saw them.

But it would be no less a mistake to think of Holbein as one without a sense of laughter as well. His drawings of open-mouthed peasants gossiping in a summer's nooning, or dancing in some uncouth frolic,--and still more his romping children, dancing children, and the chase of the fox running off with the goose,--all of these are full of boyish fun. Would that they could be given here without usurping the place of more important works! But that is impossible. And so, too, with the costume-figures of Basel, among which is the charming back view of a citizen's wife, with all the women bent far backward in the odd carriage that was then "the latest fashion" among them.

He was particularly happy, also, in his drawings of the _Landsknechte_, those famous Mercenaries of "Blut und Eisen"; always ready to drink a good glass, and a-many; to love a good lass after the same liberal fashion; to troll a good song or fight a good fight; and all with equal zest. He had not mixed with these masterful gentry for nothing; nor they with him to wholly die. There are a number of drawings where they are engaged in combat, too, which show that Holbein's heart leapt to the music of sword and spear as blithely as does Scott's or Dumas's--as blithely as did the hearts of the _Reisläufer_ themselves. Look at the mad rush, the hand-to-hand grapple, in a drawing of the Basel Collection, for instance (Plate 7). The blood-lust, the heroism, the savagery, the thrust, the oath, the dust-choked prayer, the forgotten breathing clay under the bloodstained foot; the very clash and din of the fray;--all is told with the brush. And yet not one unnecessary detail squandered. It is as if one watched it from some palpitating refuge, just near enough to see the forefront figures distinctly and to make out the interlocked hubbub and fury where the ranks have been broken through. It would be a great day for Art could we but chance upon some lost painting for which such a study had served its completed purpose.

* * * * *

On the 3rd of July, 1520, Holbein fulfilled what was then the requirement of almost every guild, and purchased his citizenship; a citizenship to reflect unfading honour on Basel, and of which she has ever been justly proud. And somewhere about the same time he married Elsbeth Schmidt, a tanner's widow, who had one child, Franz.

Illustration: PLATE 7
FIGHT OF LANDSKNECHTE
_Washed Drawing. Basel Museum_

For the past four or five years Basel had been steadily becoming more and more democratic. And at a period when its _élite_ were scholars and printers and civic officials of every origin,--when the illegitimate son of a Rotterdam doctor was the true prince, and Beatus Rhenanus, the grandson of a butcher, was his worthy second in the reverence of Basel,--the widow and son of a reputable tanner and a rising young artist, who had already the suffrages of the most influential citizens, would find no doors closed to them on the score of social disabilities. The friendship of such men as Erasmus, Froben, Bonifacius Amerbach, and the Mayor,--all conspicuous stars in the Church party,--would have ennobled a man of less genius than Holbein in the eyes of his fellow-citizens; and rightly. But as to the exact locality in which Holbein set up his first married roof-tree--that Bethel of sacred or saddest dreams--no documentary evidence has yet come to light. Circumstantial evidence, however, amounts to a strong probability in favour of the _Rheinhalde_ of Great-Basel.

If there was an emblem peculiarly abhorrent to the Basilisk (the Device of Basel) it was the Crescent-and-star. But nothing could better serve to recall the rough outline of Basel in Holbein's day than this very emblem. As the Rhine suddenly swerves from its first wild rush westward and races away, northerly, to the German Ocean, it shapes the hollow of the crescent in which Little-Basel (_Klein-Basel_) nestled as the star; and, appropriately enough, since it was here that the Catholic's Star of Faith rallied when overcome across the river, where curved the crescent of Great-Basel (_Gross-Basel_). And the relative proportions of the two would be fairly enough represented by the symbols respectively used.

Great-Basel's northern face was protected by the Rhine, while the stout city wall secured its convex curve. Of this wall the eastern horn was St. Alban's Gate; its north-west was St. John's Gate (_St. Johann Thor_); beside which stood the decaying Commandery of the Knights of Malta, which had contributed a large sum toward the expanded wall, in order to be included within it. And just as these spots still mark the horns of the old crescent, the _Spalen Thor_ shows where it had its greatest depth, midway between the other two.

A straight line running due north-east from this Spalen-Thor would cross the big square of the Fish-market (_Fischmarktplatz_) pretty nearly as the uncovered stream of the Birsig, or "Little Birs," did before the quaint little bridge, which then united the two halves of the Fischmarkt, was absorbed in the paving over of stream and square before Holbein's day. This same straight line would of itself draw the "Old Bridge" (_Alte Brücke_) with approximate exactness, the even then ancient bridge which centred the star of Klein-Basel to its crescent. And in the Historical Museum, where the Barefooted Friars worshipped then, we may still see the grotesque piece of clockwork, the wooden "Stammering King" (_Lällenkönig_), that for centuries used hourly to roll great eyes and stick out its tongue a foot long across the river from the Gross-Basel end of the bridge. It is often said that this monster was set up as a public token of the hatred which the triumphant Protestantism of the south bank felt for the stubborn Catholicism of Klein-Basel. But the thing was a famous ancient joke before party feeling turned it into a gibe.

Bonifacius Amerbach's home, the "Emperor's Seat" (_Kaiserstuhl_, now 23, Rheingasse), was in Klein-Basel. Johann Amerbach had bought it, near to his beloved friends, the Carthusians. In 1520 the good old man had slept for six years in the cloisters of the monastery; where to-day the children of the Orphan Asylum play above his grave.

But all the conditions of Holbein's daily life would lead him to prefer Basel proper, and to choose the quarter in which he bought a home eight years later. This was then the western quarter of Gross-Basel, along the river-face of which ran the high southern and western bank of the Rhine, the _Rheinhalde_, now _St. Johann Vorstadt_. About where the present _Blumenrain_ ends stood the arch, or _Schwibbogen_. Further on still stood the "Gate of the Cross" (_Kreuzthor_), by the House of the Brothers of St. Anthony, the ancient _Klösterli_ of Basel. Before the Commandery of St. John got themselves included within the city wall the Kreuzthor was its western gate. The whole district of _ze Crüze_, so called because its boundaries were crosses before towers replaced them, has however become absorbed in the St. Johann Vorstadt, while the Kreuzthor has disappeared altogether. The quarter was a favourite one with members of the Fishers' Guild and with decent folk of small mean s.

As early as 1517 the Fishers' Company had extended itself so greatly as to become a notable institution of the Vorstadt, including many members from Klein-Basel also; while its military record was a proud one. But it was in this year, while Holbein was making his visit to Lucerne and beyond, that this guild took the more truly descriptive name which it bears to this day, that of the "Vorstadt Association" (_Vorstadtgesellschaft_). And to this association, which in after years gave him a famous banquet, Holbein, we know, belonged later on, if not now.

Every day would take him to the Fischmarkt,--the great square humming with activity, crowded with inns, public-houses, shops, booths, dwelling-houses,--the trade mart of every nationality. The Cornmarkt near by, now the _Marktplatz_, with its almost finished Rathaus, was the centre of official civic life. When the great bell clanged on the Rathaus, and its flag was flung out, not only every professional soldier, but every guild and every male above fourteen, knew his appointed place at the wall, and took it. But every day, and all day, the Fischmarkt flung out its peaceful standards, or rallied men to this side or to that with the tocsin of its presses,--the old Amerbach printing-house "of the Settle" (_zum Sessel_), which was Johann Froben's home and printing-house in 1520.

Morning after morning, and year upon year, Holbein turned his back upon St. Johannthor, and walked eastward along the Rheinhalde;--the river racing toward him on his left hand, the University rising in front of him beyond the bridge, and the delicate Cathedral towers beyond the University. For the Basel Minster was still the Cathedral of the great See of Basel. Passing the wall of the Dominican Cemetery, on which was painted the ancient Dance of Death with which his own after-creations were so often to be confused, Holbein must many a time have studied the famous old copy. For though the Dominican painting was then nearly a century old, it was a copy of a still older original in the Klein-Basel nunnery of _Klingenthal_, a community under Dominican direction.

But he would pass another spot--one day to be of far more living importance to him. In 1520 it was a corn warehouse, known by the name of _ze Crüz_, which belonged to Adam Petri, the printer, who had inherited it from his uncle, the famous printer Johann Petri, by whose ingenious improvements the art of printing was so greatly facilitated. Two years later, in 1522, Froben bought this granary, ze Crüz, and converted it into the book-magazine which was known all over Europe as "Froben's Book-house." And in this latter year Adam Petri, greatly to Luther's disgust, pirated Luther's translation of the New Testament, which had appeared three months before.

Holbein drew a superb title-page, ante-dated 1523, for this "enterprise" of Petri--the New Testament "now right faithfully rendered into German,"--with the symbols of the Evangelists at the four corners, the arms of Basel at the top, the device of the printer at the foot, and the noble figures of St. Paul and St. Peter on either side; figures which will bear comparison with Dürer's "Four Temperaments" of a later date. Later still he designed another striking title-page for Thomas Wolff's translation; and his beautiful title-pages and ornaments for Froben, with whom his connection was not a temporary matter such as these others, would need a volume to themselves.

Holbein's only rival, if he could be called such, in work of this sort was the talented goldsmith, Urs Graf, who, as an exceedingly loose fish, lived most appropriately in the Fischmarkt in his own house near the old Birsig Bridge, when he was not in the lock-up for one or another of his constant brawls and scandals. But to compare the best work of both is to recognise a difference in kind as well as degree: the essential difference between even negligent genius and the most elaborate talent. High talent Urs Graf had unquestionably; though stamped,--I think,--with the lawless caprices of his own character. Holbein's every design has not only what Urs Graf lacked--that ordered imagination which is Style--but over and above all, the subtle expression of Power.

Many a time, too, just where he would turn away from the Rhine for the business centre of Gross-Basel, the artist would make some little pause at the old "Flower" Inn (_zur Blume_), which gave its name to the Blumenplatz, and is still commemorated in the greatly extended Blumenrain of to-day. All the world now knows the famous hotel of "The Three Kings"; and where it reaches nearest to the Old Bridge stood the "Blume" of Holbein's time, even then the oldest of the Basel inns. This Blume, not to be confused with later inns of the same name, shared with its no less famous contemporary,--"The Stork," in the Fischmarkt,--the special patronage of the chief printers. Basilius Amerbach, for instance, the brother of Holbein's friend Bonifacius, lived at the Blume; and often the painter must have turned in for a friendly glass with him and a chat about Bonifacius, away at his law studies in Avignon.

As for the Stork, its very rooms were named in remembrance of the envoys and merchant traders who flocked to it on all great occasions. There was a "Cologne Room," for instance, and a "Venetian Room," among many others. The men of Venice, indeed, had a particular affection for it. Here Holbein met with all nationalities, and learned much of the great centres of other countries. Here came all the Basel magnates and printers. And here, a few years later on, came that bizarre personage who was for a very brief time Basel's "town physician," the Paracelsus Theophrastus Bombastus to whom we owe our word _bombastic_. Holbein was on a visit to England during the latter's short tenure of office, when the combined scholarship and poverty of Oporinus made him the hack of Paracelsus and the victim of many a petty tyranny. At that time Oporinus,--the son of that Hans Herbster, painter, whose portrait is now attributed to Ambrose Holbein,--was glad to place his remarkable knowledge of Greek at Froben's service. He was not yet a printer, as later when Holbein drew a clever device for him. And neither he nor the painter could know that one day the daughter of Bonifacius Amerbach should marry him out of sheer pity for his unhappy old age,--somewhat as he himself, when but a lad of twenty, married an aged Xantippe from gratitude.

But in 1520, when Holbein was just married, Oporinus was still a student and Bonifacius unmarried. Erasmus, too, did not permanently take up his home with Froben until the following year, and was now at Louvain. Yet what a true university was that little house _zum Sessel_ (now 3, Todtengässlein, the little lane where the old post-office stood) to an intelligence such as Holbein's! And what a circle was that of Froben's staff! From Froben himself, above whom Erasmus alone could tower in scholarship, down through every member to the youngest, and from such men as Gerard Lystrius on the one hand and the literally "Beatus" Rhenanus on the other, what things were not to be learned!

And what discussions those were that drew each man to give of his best in the common talk! Venice sent news of the "unspeakable" Turk, whom she had such good cause to watch and dread. For fifty years his name had ceased to blanch the cheek of other nations; but now it was said, and said truly, that the dying Selim, "the Grim," had forged a thunderbolt which Suleyman II. would not be slow to hurl. No man could know the worst or dared predict the end, as to that Yellow Terror of Holbein's time. And closer still, to keen eyes, were the threats of the coming Peasant Terror. Wurtemberg had battened down the flames, it is true; but the deck of Europe was hot under foot with the passions that were soon to make the Turks' atrocities seem gentle in comparison.

The death of Maximilian and the election of Charles V. were a year old now. But none knew better than the Basel printers how much the League of Swabia and the Swiss Confederation had weighed in the close contest of claims between those three strangely youthful competitors for the Emperor's crown;--Charles, but nineteen; Francis I., one-and-twenty; and Henry VIII., not twenty-five. Basel also knew that Charles had only bought his triumph by swearing to summon the Diet of Worms. All the more, therefore, was she intensely alive to the possible issues of the Arabian-Nights-Entertainment which had but just concluded on the dreary Calais flats when Holbein became one of Basel's citizens. Erasmus had come back full of it. Marco Polo's best wonders made but a dingy show beside the "Field of the Cloth of Gold," where in this June the two defeated candidates for imperial honours had kissed each other midway between the ruined moat of Guisnes and the rased battlements of Arde.

Then, on top of this, came the rumours of the English King's undertaking to answer Luther's most formidable attack on Rome. It was in 1520, the year after his great disputation with Eck at Leipzig, that Luther published his cataclysmic addresses: "To the Christian Nobles of Germany" and "On the Babylonian Captivity,"--the latter of which itself contains the whole Protestant Reformation in embryo. "Would to God," exclaimed Erasmus of it, "that he had followed my counsel and abstained from odious and seditious proceedings!" Bishop Tunstall, then in Worms, had also written of it:--"I pray God keep that book out of England!" But before the year was out "that book" had reached England, and Henry VIII. had sworn to annihilate its arguments and to triumphantly defend the dogmas of Rome. The eagerly-awaited "Defence" did not get printed, and would remain in Pope Leo's hands for a year yet. But Basel knew, through More and Erasmus,--whose canny smile probably discounted its critical quality,--pretty much its line of defence. Nor was Froben's circle one whit more surprised than its royal author when its immediate reward was that formal style and title--_Defender of the Faith_,--to which a few years more were to lend so different a significance.

By this latter date Ulrich von Hutten had fled to Basel, only to find that his violent "heresies" had completely estranged Erasmus, and closed Froben's door, as well as all other Roman Catholic doors, against him for ever. He lodged, therefore, at the Blume until the Basel Council requested him to leave the town, a little before his death, in 1523. But in 1520 Hutten was still at Sickingen's fortress, digging with fierce ardour the impassable gulf between him and the band of friends and Churchmen among whom Holbein ever ranged himself.

* * * * *

Among the five lost works which Patin says Holbein painted, there was a "Nativity" and an "Adoration of the Kings." It is impossible now to say what resemblances, if any, existed between these and the same subjects, executed not much later, which are now in the University Chapel, Freiburg Minster. These latter are the only known works of Holbein that still hang in a sacred edifice. They were evidently designed to fold in upon a central altar-piece with an arched top, thus making, when open, the usual triptych; but the central painting has vanished. This large work was a gift to the Carthusian monastery in Klein-Basel; and the arms of the donor, Hans Oberriedt, are displayed below the Nativity, as well as the portraits of himself and his six sons. Below the corresponding right wing, the Adoration, are the arms of his wife and her portrait, with her four daughters.

In both wings what I can only describe as the atmosphere of Infancy,--and a touching atmosphere it is too--is strengthened by keeping all the figures small and heightening this suggestion by contrast with a grandiose architecture. In both, too, the sacred scenes reveal themselves like visions unseen by the Oberriedt family, who face outward toward the altar and are supposed to be lighted by the actual lights of the church. The whole work must once have been a glorious creation, with its rich colours, its beautiful architectural forms, and its mingling of purest imagination with realism. What would one not give to see the lost work these wings covered?

Illustration: PLATE 8
THE NATIVITY
_Oils. University Chapel, Freiburg Cathedral_

In the left wing, the Nativity (Plate 8), Holbein has remarkably anticipated the lighting of Correggio's famous masterpiece, not finished until years after this must have been painted, by the conditions of Oberriedt's history and Basel's as well. The Light that is to light the world lights up the scene with an exquisite enchanting softness,--yet so brilliantly that the very lights of heaven seem dimmed in comparison. The moon, in Holbein's deliberate audacity, seems but a disc as she bows her face, too, in worship. Shining by some compulsion of purest Nature, the divine radiance glows on the ecstatic Mother; and away above and beyond her--"How far that little candle shines," and shines, and shines again amid the shadows! It illumines the beautiful face of the Virgin, touches the reverent awe of St. Joseph, plays over marble arch and pillar, discovers the wondering shepherd peering from behind the pillar on the left, and irradiates the angel in the distance, hastening to carry the "glad tidings." The happy cherubs behind the Child rejoice in it; and as they spring forward one notices how Holbein has boldly discarded the conventional, and attached their pinions as if these were a natural development of the arm instead of a separate member.

The same union of unfettered fancy symbolism and realism displays itself throughout the right wing,--where the Virgin is enthroned in front of crumbling palaces. The sun's rays form a great star, of such dazzling light that one of the attendants shades his eyes to look upward, and an old man with a noble head, wearing an ermine cape, presents his offering as the chief of the three kings; while a Moorish sovereign, dressed in white, makes a splendid figure as he waits to kneel with his gift, and his greyhound stands beside him. The colouring of both paintings must have had an extraordinary beauty when the painter laid down his brush.

To carp at such conceptions because their architecture is as imaginative and as deeply symbolical as the action, is to demand that Holbein shall be someone else. These pictures, beyond the portraits below them, are the farthest possible from aiming at what we demand of Realism, though their own realism is astonishing. Holbein all too seldom sounds them, but when he does choose to stir only a joyous elation in the heart he rings a peal of silver bells. Here all is glad thanksgiving. The Divine has come into a sick and sorry world; and, behold, all is changed! Nothing sordid, nothing shabby, consists with the _meaning_ of this miracle. Therefore it is not here. All is transformed; all is a New Jerusalem--splendour, peace, ineffable and mysterious Beauty.

With the dominance of the anti-Catholic party, which unseated Meyer zum Hasen in 1521, his friend Oberriedt also fell into trouble. And soon after Erasmus and Bonifacius Amerbach,--disgusted with the iconoclast fanaticism of 1528 and 1529,--took refuge in Catholic Freiburg-in-the-Breisgau, Oberriedt also left Basel for that city. He took these wings with him to save them from the destruction which probably overtook the central work. The latter was, perhaps, too large to conceal or get away. During the Thirty Years' War they were again removed, and safeguarded at Schaffhausen. And so great was their fame that they were twice expressly commanded to be brought before a sovereign; once to Munich, to be seen by Maximilian of Bavaria; and again to Ratisbon for the Emperor Ferdinand III. In 1798 they were looted by the French, and were only restored to Freiburg in 1808.

Illustration: PLATE 9
THE PASSION
_Eight-panelled Altar-piece Oils. Basel Museum_
I _Gethsemane_
II _The Kiss of Judas_
III _Before Pontius Pilate_
IV _The Scourging_
V _The Mocking_
VI _The Way to Calvary_
VII _"It is finished"_
VIII _The Entombment_

Another great religious picture, once no less renowned than Oberriedt's altar-paintings, has suffered a worse fate. This is the eight-panelled altar-piece of the Passion, now in the Basel Museum (Plate 9). So far back as is known it was preserved, probably after being hidden from the fury that attacked all church pictures, in the Rathaus. Maximilian I., of Bavaria, the zealous collector of Dürer's works, offered almost any price for this altar-piece by Dürer's great contemporary. But Basel, unlike Nüremberg, was not to be bribed; and the world-famous painting remained to draw art-lovers from every country in Europe. Nor did the most competent judges fail to envy Basel her jewel, and to eulogise its perfections. Painters such as Sandrart, looking at it after it had survived a hundred and fifty years of vicissitude, could exclaim: "It is a work in which the utmost that our art is capable of may be found; yielding the palm to none, whether of Germany or Italy, and justly wearing the laurel-wreath among the works of former times."

Alas! this laurel, too, has been filched from Holbein's fame. In 1771 the altar-piece was consigned to the collection where it now is; and it was then decided to gild the gold and paint the lily. The work was subjected to one of those crude "restorations" which respect nothing save the frame. And no monarch will ever again compete for its possession. Red is over red and blue over blue, doubtless; but in place of Holbein's rich harmony a jangle of gaudy conflicting colours now sets one's teeth on edge. So that only in a photograph can one even enjoy the composition--all that is left of the Master.

But here it can be seen with what art the painter has so combined eight separate and distinct pictures, each a gem, into one, by such a distribution and balance that the whole is as integral as a pearl. The scene on the Mount of Olives, which a great critic once pronounced worthy to compare with Correggio's work, is only to be surpassed by the Entombment. And in every scene--what freedom, action, verve! From the first to the last all passes with the swift step of Calamity, yet all with noble dignity.

The Basel Museum possesses also a set of ten washed drawings in Indian ink,--scenes of the Passion designed for glass-painting,--which must be conned and conned again before one can "know" Holbein at all in his deepest moods. They are a great Testament, though they seem unbearably harsh at a superficial glance. But put aside your own ideas and humbly study the ideas of Holbein,--sure that they must be well worth the reverence of yours or mine,--and little by little you will be made free of that Underworld where Holbein's true self has its home; you will pierce its gloom and find its clue and understand its tongue. It is a small matter whether you and I find ourselves in sympathy with that world, or can never be acclimatised. The great matter, the only matter, is to understand it; to see in its skeletons something more than lively bones, in its graves something besides Horror.

Without mastering the logical sequence of these ten drawings,--where scene by scene the Divine recedes before our eyes, and the Son of Man assumes more and more the whole burden of Sin and Death,--it is inevitable that the life-size painting of Christ in the Grave, also in the Basel Museum (Plate 10), should seem just a ghastly and "unpardonable" piece of realism. Realism of the most ghastly truthfulness, as to a corpse in the grave, it certainly is. But although it may be questioned whether such a picture should ever be painted, no one who looks through the form to the thought that shapes it would pronounce even this awful utterance "unpardonable."

There have been those who could see in this dead Christ,--lying rigid in a green sarcophagus that throws over the waxen flesh the ghastly threat of that decay which would follow if no miracle intervened,--there have been those, I say, who could see in it only superb technique. And others see only the negation of all idealism, if not of all faith.

Illustration: PLATE 10
CHRIST IN THE GRAVE
_Oils. Basel Museum_

Yet put this painting,--the acme of technical beauty as well as of ruthless realism,--at the close of the ten Passion drawings, and I venture to believe that the one coherent conception that runs through them all will legitimately find its conclusion here.

Here He lies that surrendered Himself to the punishment of Sin and the penalty of Death--for all men and all time. His pale lips are set with the superhuman agony of the cry with which He paid the uttermost farthing of that bond. Man has died for man, martyrs for faith; here God has died unto Himself, for us. There has been no playing at death. All the pitiless terrors of the grave are here, with Him who for love of us has chosen to know Mortality "like at all points" with mortal men. What He bore for us, shall we shrink from so much as realising? The great eyes are fixed in a look whose penetrating, almost liquid sweetness not even the rigor of the final anguish could obliterate. Divine devotion,--devotion more than mortal,--still lingers in those sockets. The heart may well dilate before this sight; the soul fall on its knees. By each of those bloodstained steps, by the sting of this death, we have been paid for. Here, here only,--as Holbein saw it,--is the leverage the heathen philosopher vainly sighed for to move the world; God's leverage, Infinite Love.

This is anything but a theological tangent. A great artist has bequeathed us his beliefs,--drawn and painted in many works, with every patient, virile, expressive power at his command. There has been enough and to spare of shrieks or scoffs. A little humility and a little study is in place, too. For the rest, let us not forget that this large painting was made for some altar; and that many a weeping penitent, many a devout heart, has been pierced with its message. On the edge of the stone coffin, which is tinted a warm green within, and lit by some opening at the foot, is the inscription in gold letters: "JESUS NAZARENUS REX JUDÆORUM." The stigmata are painted with unsparing truth. The work is dated 1521.

There is in the Hampton Court Gallery a little painting which has only comparatively recently been recognised as Holbein's, but which forms the beautiful and fitting close of this set of religious pictures. As is the case with so many of his works, the critics are not unanimous upon it. But the authorities who have no doubts as to its being a genuine Holbein of this period are so weighty that I need not argue the point in support of my own convictions.

In the Hampton Court Catalogue it is styled "Mary Magdalen at our Lord's Sepulchre," but I prefer to call it the Risen Christ (Plate 11). It must once have been supremely beautiful; for even now its ideal loveliness shines through all the evil fortunes which have once again defaced the handiwork of Holbein. The type of Christ, and indeed the work throughout, bears a marked resemblance to the eight-panelled Basel altar-piece.

The painter has chosen the moment recorded in the twentieth chapter of St. John. In that early dawn, "when it was yet dark," Mary has brought spikenard in a marble cup, if not to anoint the sacred Dead at least to pour it on the threshold of the sealed tomb, with tears and prayers. She has fled to tell St. John and St. Peter of the sacrilege of the open tomb,--has followed them back, still mechanically clasping her useless spikenard,--has seen them go in where her trembling knees refused to follow, and then go homeward, as we can see them in the distance, arguing the almost incredible fact.

Poor Mary has had no heart for discussion. She has stayed weeping by the empty grave until two pitying angels have appeared to recall her from despair, and she has "turned herself back,"--too frightened to stay for comfort. And then she has seen near her a Face, a Form, she was too dazed to recognise until the unforgettable Voice has thrilled through her, and she has flung herself forward with the old, instinctive cry, "Master!" to touch, to clasp that Hand, so dear, so familiar, so all-protecting, and find it a reality.

It is this tremendous moment that Holbein has seized. And with what exquisite feeling for every detail of the scene, every great emotion! Had the painting been preserved, as it deserved to be, surely it too could claim a part of that laurel wreath which Sandrart averred could not be torn from the Basel altar-piece by any rival, whether Italian or German.

Illustration: Plate 11
THE RISEN CHRIST
_Oils. Hampton Court Gallery_

The misty landscape, with the crosses of Golgotha and the eastern hills catching the first brightness of the new Day dawning over mortality; the broken clouds of night, scattered like the conquered horrors of the grave, and the illuminated tomb where Hope and Faith henceforth ask us why we weep; the hurrying agitation of St. Peter and the trusting serenity of St. John, expressed in every gesture; the dusky trees; Mary's quivering doubt and rapture, touched with some new awe; and the simple majesty with which our Lord stays that unconscious innocent presumption, _Touch me not_.

What forbidding tenderness in that Face lighted by the grave He has passed through! What a subtle yet eloquent suggestion of the eternal difference, henceforth, between Love and love is in these mortal lineaments that have evermore resumed their divinity! No face, no type, no art, can ever realise Christ; yet when this little painting was first added to the great roll of Holbein _Basiliensis_, it must have gone as near to realising its subject as the colours of earth can go.

But every man, happily for himself, has a material as well as an immaterial world with which he must be concerned. To transpose Bagehot's profound little saying,--Each man dines in a room apart, but we all go down to dinner together. And though Holbein knew the pinch of narrow means, he had no lack of good cheer as well as austere food in his art.

On March 12th, 1521, the Great Council held its first meeting in the new Rathaus; and Meyer zum Hasen, who presided over it as Burgomaster, entrusted to his protégé the enviable task of decorating the Council Chamber. Fifty-six years after Holbein's work was completed these wall-paintings were described as "representations of the noblest subjects--done by the German Apelles." By this title the painter was everywhere recognised throughout the greater part of his lifetime.

In all, there would seem to have been six large pictures or set pieces; but two were not done until years later. One wall being too broken up by windows to be suitable, there remained three,--of which "the back wall" adjoining Meyer's house was not touched at this time. Ostensibly the reason was want of funds; but as a matter of fact the Protestant party (to anticipate this name), which grew strong enough to unseat Meyer before the year was out, was at this time indifferent to art when not positively inimical to it.

Whether treating a façade or an interior it was Holbein's custom to make a flat wall-space assume the most solid-looking forms of Renaissance architecture. Iselin once said of a façade of Holbein's, that there was a dog painted on it so naturally that the dogs in the street would run up and bark at it. And so astounding was the realism with which he threw out balconies, and added windows, cornices, and statues, and the richest carvings, pillars, arches, and vistas of every sort, that no eye could credit them with illusion. Horses neighed in the courtyards, flowers bloomed in the gardens, dogs leaped beside master or mistress, and children played in the spacious balconies, or moved to and fro between the splendid marble pillars and the distant wall. To study the copies that remain of such works is to be astounded by their feats of perspective.

Inside would be kindred illusions. Large pictures would seem to be actually taking place without, and beheld through beautifully carved archways or windows; while the apparent walls would have niches filled with superb marble statues and the ceiling be supported by pillars, behind which people walked and talked or leaned out to watch the chief scenes.

And so it was with the Council Chamber. But nothing now remains of these works except fragments and a few drawings for the principal features. So far as can be judged, each wall had two large scenes; the four pictures of this period being chosen from the heroic legends of the _Gesta Romanorum_; the two painted later, from the Old Testament.

But while these large works were going forward Holbein was busy with many others; private commissions for Froben, occasionally for other printers, and for altar-pieces or portraits. All through his life his industry and accomplishment left him small time for leisure or the dissipations of leisure. Nor is there any year of his life when his work does not attest a clear eye and a firm hand. These things are their own certificate of conduct; at any rate, of "worldly" conduct.

* * * * *

In 1522 occurred two important events in his life. His first child, the son he called Philip, was born; and he painted an altar-piece which is in some respects the most beautiful of his extant works. The latter--now in the Solothurn Museum, and therefore called the "Solothurn Madonna" (Plate 12)--has had one of the most extraordinary histories to be found in the records of art.

Illustration: PLATE 12
THE SOLOTHURN, OR ZETTER'SCHE, MADONNA
_Oils. Solothurn Museum_

The background of this picture,--a massive arch of grey sandstone supported by iron stanchions,--was evidently designed to suit the surrounding architecture of some grey-walled ancient structure. On a daïs covered with a green carpet, patterned in white and red and emblazoned with the arms of the donor and his wife, sits the lovely Madonna with the Child held freely yet firmly in two of the most exquisite hands which even Holbein ever painted. Her dress is a rich rose-red; her symbolical mantle of universal Motherhood, or "Grace," is a most beautiful ultramarine, loaded in the shadows and like a sapphire in its lights. The flowing gold of her hair shimmers under its filmy veil, and the jewels in her gold crown flash below the great white pearls that tip its points. Where the sky-background approaches Mother and Child, its azure tone is lost in a pure effulgence of light; as if the very ether were suffused with the sense of the Divine.

The Child is drawn and painted superbly. The carnations are exquisite; the gravity of infancy is not exaggerated, yet fittingly enforces the gesture of benediction. The left hand is turned outward in a movement so peculiar to happy, vigorous babyhood that it is a marvel of observation and nature. The little foot is admirably foreshortened, and the wrinkled sole a bit of inimitable painting. But perhaps most wonderful of all is the art with which, amid so many splendid details, the Child is the centre of interest as well as of the picture. How it is so, is Holbein's own secret.