THE “SALE OF INDULGENCES”
The “Sale of Indulgences” is divided into two parts. On the right is shown the interior of a church, with the Pope enthroned, and surrounded by his cardinals. In the decorations of the building the arms of the Medici occur many times. Leo X is handing a letter of indulgence to a kneeling Dominican. In the choir-stalls on either side are seated a number of Church dignitaries. On the right, one of them rests his hand on the head of a kneeling youth and with a stick points to a large iron-bound chest for the money-offerings, into which a woman is putting her contribution. At a table on the left various Dominicans are preparing and selling indulgences. One of them repulses a beggar, who has nothing to give in exchange for the remission of his sins, while another is carefully checking the money which a suppliant is counting out on the table, and holding back the letter until the full amount has been received. The small figures are very lifelike, and the whole composition is a bitter satire upon the traffic of the Church. The left-hand half of the picture shows a landscape in which three true penitents are beseeching forgiveness from God the Father, who appears with outstretched arms in the clouds above them. Over the head of each figure is a label inscribed, “K. David,” “Manasses,” and “Offen-Synder,” respectively. The first-named kneels, with his harp by his side on the ground; the others stand with clasped hands and bowed heads.
The second sheet, called in the Amerbach inventory “Christus vera lux, philosophi et papa in foveam cadentes,” is divided into two halves by a magnificent candlestick which rises in the centre, the flame surmounted by a large halo of light. The stem contains sculptured figures of the four Evangelists, and the base is supported by their four symbols. On the left, Christ, a finely-conceived figure, points to the light with uplifted hand, and addresses a group of citizens, peasants, beggars, and other simple folk, who listen eagerly to his words. On the right, a procession of the clergy and learned men turn their backs upon the true light, and wander forth into the wilderness, led by Plato and Aristotle, the first of whom has stumbled into a deep pit, while the second is about to fall after him. They are followed by the Pope, a bishop, canons, and other churchmen, and monks of various orders, and a figure which appears to represent Erasmus. Behind them rise lofty snow mountains, while a distant city is seen across the plain in the centre, and trees on the left. This woodcut bears witness to the rapidly growing change in the point of view of the Reformers, who were already parting company with their former allies, the humanists and scholars. Holbein in this design gives expression to the popular feeling of his day in Basel, which was beginning to regard classical learning with suspicion as a supporter of the theology to which it was opposed. This woodcut was used in 1527 to illustrate a large broadsheet, the “Evangelistical Calendar” of Dr. Johannes Copp.
Holbein’s fertility of invention in this field was not confined to subjects chosen from the Bible or from classical literature. Numerous woodcuts occur in which he has made excellent use of incidents taken from the ordinary life of his day. There is a well-known border representing a group of peasants chasing a fox which has stolen a goose from the farmyard, an engraving on metal, which, in spite of the inferiority of the cutting, is full of humour and rapid movement.[[457]] The small figures, carrying flails, spades, and other hastily snatched-up weapons—among them a girl with a hayrake on her shoulder and a soldier with his spear—are running at full speed, while behind them an old man, leaning on a stick, stands among the remaining geese and shouts directions for the fox’s capture. Another border shows a peasants’ dance,[[458]] very similar in treatment to the same subject in the wall-painting of the House of the Dance. These two borders, with two side ones, representing children climbing trees, were frequently used by Cratander of Basel in books published between 1526 and 1534, and a second “Peasants’ Dance”[[459]] is often found in Adam Petri’s publications. Similar borders with dancing or playing children frequently occur. Most of them appear to have been cut in metal by Faber.
ALPHABETS WITH PEASANTS & CHILDREN
Both peasants and children were favourite themes with him in his designs for initial letters, which formed an important part of the decoration of the books issued from the Basel presses. He produced a number of complete alphabets, from A to Z, in which the little pictures which surrounded the letters formed a connected series of designs. Almost invariably the letter itself was shown in plain Roman type, placed within a small square, the background being filled in with small figures which have no actual connection with the letter, but are so combined with it as to produce a very decorative effect. One of the most beautiful of these alphabets, of which complete proof-sheets are to be found at Basel and Dresden, represents the merry-makings of a rustic fair,[[460]] and was used by both Froben and Cratander. The series opens with two musicians playing bagpipes, and the ten next letters represent dancing couples. In succeeding letters the peasants are represented making love, fighting, playing games and practical jokes, drinking, and other scenes in which the humour is too gross for modern tastes, and concluding with the return from the fair, the peasant riding home with his wife behind him, and the visit of the doctor on the following morning, made necessary by over-indulgence in merry-making. The cutting of the set is so beautiful that it must be from the hand of Lützelburger; no other engraver then working in Basel was capable of such minutely fine work, or could do such full justice to Holbein’s genius for filling such small spaces with designs which appear so spacious and so large in style.
Another alphabet, which was evidently also cut by Lützelburger and used by Cratander, of which there is a proof-sheet at Basel, is devoted to the games of children.[[461]] They are represented dancing, playing music, tilting on hobby-horses, riding on one another’s backs, hair-pulling, wrestling, and so on, while in one instance a small boy is chasing a cat with a bird in its mouth. Holbein was always very happy in his treatment of children, and in this instance, as in the Peasants’ Alphabet, the delicacy of the execution is wonderful. There are three other alphabets dealing with children, and portions of others,[[462]] in one of which they are engaged in various trades and employments, and appear as carpenters, millers, masons, fishermen, bakers, painters, doctors, and so on. Another alphabet gives scenes from the Old Testament,[[463]] and a second consists of Greek initials.[[464]] Other letters, far too numerous to enumerate here, represent ornaments, flowers, animals, still life, love scenes, and soldiers. The most famous series of all, however, is the one known as the “Alphabet of Death,” which is described in the next chapter.
WOODCUTS PRODUCED IN ENGLAND
Holbein also designed a number of marks or devices for the various printers who employed him, which were used on the first and last pages of their publications. For Johann Bebelius he drew a palm-tree with a heavy weight pressing down the branches among which it is placed; in a second design for the same publisher a naked man is shown beneath this weight, who attempts with hands and feet to resist the pressure.[[465]] Cratander’s trade-mark was Fortune or Opportunity, a naked goddess, with long flowing hair and winged feet, poised on a revolving ball, a broad-bladed knife in her hand. Valentine Curio’s device was the Table of Parrhasius, a hand drawing[[466]] on a panel one straight line between two others, enclosed, like the mark of Cratander, within an ornamented shield. For Thomas Wolff[[467]] Holbein drew the figure of a scholar or publisher issuing from a doorway, his finger on his lips enjoining silence, with the inscription: “Digito compesce labellum.” The devices of Matthias Bienenvater or Apiarius of Berne and Christopher Froschover of Zürich, contain punning allusions to their name. The former[[468]] represents a bear climbing a tree after honey, with the bees swarming round him; for the latter[[469]] Holbein made three different designs, each one containing frogs. In one the frogs are climbing a tree, with a beautiful landscape background of hills and peasants’ houses, the whole within a Renaissance framework, and evidently cut by Lützelburger; in the two others a boy is represented riding on a large frog, one of them with a background representing the Lake of Zürich, with villages at the foot of the mountains, and the other with a hilly landscape with a castle on a height. Lastly, a very beautiful device made for Reinhold Wolfe[[470]] appears to have been produced during Holbein’s last residence in England, though the cutting of the block was most probably done in Basel. It represents three boys flinging sticks into an appletree laden with fruit, and bears his motto “Charitas.”[[471]] Wolfe, who was settled in London, was possibly some relation of Thomas Wolff, the Basel publisher, and so may have sent his book illustrations to Switzerland to be engraved. This particular device, in any case, is too finely cut to have been done in England at that period. Wolfe was the publisher of John Leland’s Naeniæ, which contained a woodcut portrait of Sir Thomas Wyat after Holbein,[[472]] and also of the same writer’s poem on the birth of the Prince of Wales, which was not issued until 1543. On the back of the title-page of the last publication is the device of the Prince, “Ich Dien” under a crown of ostrich feathers, within a halo, which appears to be after a design by Holbein.[[473]] A few other woodcuts which date from the artist’s last residence in England are referred to in a later chapter.[[474]]