MAGDALENA OFFENBURG AS VENUS
1526
Basel Gallery
MAGDALENA OFFENBURG AS LAIS
1526
Basel Gallery
THE “LAÏS” AND “VENUS” PICTURES
These two small, delicately painted portraits of Magdalena Offenberg as “Laïs” and “Venus,” the former being dated “1526,” were among the last works produced by Holbein before he left Basel for England. They bear a very close resemblance to one another, except in the position of the head, so that one appears to be almost a copy of the other. In the Amerbach catalogue of 1586 they are described as: “Zwei täfelin doruf eine Offenburgin conterfehet ist vf eim geschriben Lais Corinthiaca, die ander hat ein kindlin bÿ sich. H. Holb. beide, mit ölfarben vnd in ghüsern.” In each the figure is about one-third the size of life, and the costume is the same, a rich dress of dark red velvet with slashings showing white silk puffs, each fastened at top and bottom with gold tags. The wide upper sleeves are of a deep gold hue. In each picture she is shown at almost three-quarter length, behind a plain stone parapet, with a dark green curtain as background. In the “Laïs” (No. 322) (Pl. [73] (2))[[514]] she wears a closely-fitting gold-embroidered head-dress or cap on her fair hair, and with her left hand grasps the folds of a blue mantle draped across her knees. On the parapet in front of her—which is inscribed “Lais Corinthiaca. 1526,” in Roman letters, as though incised in the stone—is placed a little heap of scattered gold coins, and she is holding out her right hand, with palm upwards, as though asking for more of them in payment for her favours. The pose is slightly varied in the “Venus” (No. 323) (Pl. [73] (1)),[[515]] which is undated, the head being bent a little to the right, instead of to the left, and there are small changes in the costume. The lower sleeves of red slashed velvet are omitted, and the arms are bare to the elbow, while the head-dress is black, with a little gold ornamentation. The position of the hands is almost the same, though the left one is hidden by the head and shoulders of a small naked, red-haired Cupid, whose right arm rests on the parapet with two long arrows in his hand. The golden coins are missing, but the open palm of the lady’s right hand carries the same suggestion as in the “Laïs.” The old frame still retains the curious and singularly inappropriate inscription, “Verbum Domini manet in æternum,” which was upon it when the Amerbach Collection was purchased by the town of Basel in 1662.
HOLBEIN AND MAGDALENA OFFENBURG
The face is a refined one, with a high forehead, long nose, finely cut lips, and fair complexion, and in the “Laïs” in particular, does not suggest the supposed character of the sitter as tradition has handed it down. It is possible that the painter to some extent idealised her features. The “Venus” is less tender and attractive in expression; so much so, indeed, that Woltmann[[516]] suggests that it was painted at an earlier date, and that the “Laïs” was a renewed and more successful attempt to represent the same idea. What that idea may have been has given rise to considerable speculation. Wornum[[517]] quotes an old legend to the effect that the artist could not obtain payment for the “Venus” picture, and so, in revenge, he painted her as the famous courtesan, Laïs of Corinth, the mistress of the great painter Apelles; but this explanation is an absurd one. Woltmann’s suggestion is that both pictures were painted for some lover of the lady, who wished, in the first instance, to express his love, and then, later on, his contempt. It is more probable that the pictures were the result of relationships between the painter himself and Magdalena, though beyond the fact that she served him more than once as a model, there is no proof of this. This supposed connection between Holbein and the lady has given rise to much imaginative writing in recent monographs. In one of them we are told that “when Holbein inscribed his second portrait of Dorothea with the words Laïs Corinthiaca, the midsummer madness must have been already a matter of scorn and wonder to himself. His whole life and the works of his life are the negation of the groves of Corinth. The paint was not long dry on the Goddess of Love—at any rate, her dress was not worn out—before he had seen her in her true colours: the daughter of the horseleech, crying ‘Give, give.’ And so he painted her in 1526; to scourge himself, surely, since she was too notoriously infamous to be affected by it. As if in stern scorn of every beauty, every allure, he set himself to record them in detail.... Laïs is far more beautiful, and far more beautifully painted, than Venus. No emotion has hurried the painter’s hand or confused his eye this time. In vain she wears such sadness in her eyes, such pensive dignity of attitude, such a wistful smile on her lips. He knows them, now, for false lights on the wrecker’s coast. No faltering; no turning back. He can even fit a new head-dress on the lovely hair, and add the puffed sleeves below the short ones. He is a painter now; not a lover.... The plague was raging in Basel all through that spring and summer, but I doubt if Holbein shuddered at its contact as at the loveliness he painted,”[[518]] and so on. This is all very pretty, but the imagination of the writer has run away with her. What suggestion could be more fantastic than that in painting the Venus, Holbein’s love for the lady was so great that both hand and eye faltered in depicting her charms, and that he could only do full justice to her beauty when his affection was dead and her loveliness made him shudder? A more recent writer[[519]] is of opinion that Holbein succumbed to the charms of Magdalena Offenburg before his marriage, and that she deigned to honour the young Swabian painter with her favours almost directly after his return to Basel from Lucerne. Though forced to confess that he can find no traces of her as Holbein’s model in any of his finished paintings of the period before Elsbeth Schmidt came into his life, in his opinion she served him in that capacity not only for the series of studies of the costumes worn by the Basel ladies, but also for his early glass designs of the Madonna gazing down at the Infant Christ in her arms, the St. Barbara of the same set, and the fine design of a wooden statue of St. Michael, all three of which have been already described.[[520]] No doubt the type of face in all these studies is much the same, but there is a tendency in this search for likenesses to go too far, and to see Magdalena Offenburg or Elsbeth Schmidt as the only models used by Holbein at this time. In some instances the likeness is largely imaginary. His wife, the same writer continues, may not have been beautiful, but she certainly had charm, as the portrait at the Hague proves, and Holbein must have loved her when he painted her. For two years afterwards he remained the devoted husband, using her as the model for the Solothurn Madonna, the Virgin of the Basel organ doors, and for the glass design of the Mary in the niche with the cavalier kneeling before her. Then, after this short period of happiness, her place in the pictures and designs is again taken by Magdalena. The impudent creature appears as the St. Ursula of the Karlsruhe painting, and the “arrows in her hands are those with which in succeeding years she is to pierce the poor heart of the painter’s wife.” In the Meyer Madonna, this writer sees in the Virgin nothing but the elegant, banal visage of the courtesan, and a complete want of all humanity. The “Laïs” and “Venus” of 1526, he adds, affirm finally and cynically the victory of the mistress over the legitimate wife, while the last and worst insult of all was in using his own eldest child as the model for the Cupid, and placing him in the company of the hateful rival, who in the end robbed his wife of all her beauty and all her happiness. There may be some truth in this attempt to reconstruct a few pages of Holbein’s life-story, but there is little proof to support it. Where proof is lacking, however, the writer’s imagination fills the gaps; but it is not fair to condemn the painter upon such evidence as this, or to hold him guilty of infamous conduct upon the strength of a few supposed likenesses in his pictures or designs.
Whatever Holbein’s personal relations to Magdalena Offenburg may have been, she appears to have been a good model, which is in itself quite sufficient to explain the fact that he painted these two portraits of her. That he held her in no particular esteem may be gathered from the name he gives her, just as Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, as noted in a previous chapter, wrote an offensive remark as to her character on the drawing he made of her. Her face, as represented by Holbein, is fair, but devoid of any strong feeling, though Knackfuss holds that “a deep and quiet sorrow lies in the expression of the refined face;” and that “the sense of the two paintings is explained by their juxtaposition: the gold which she desired cannot make the young woman happy; love alone can do so.”[[521]] This last-named writer considers that the pictures were not painted to some one’s order, but for the artist’s own amusement.
A question of much more interest in connection with these two works is their authorship. They differ from all other portraits by Holbein of the Basel period, because in them the Milanese influence upon his art is seen at its strongest, so that more than one writer of repute has refused to admit that they are his work. Rumohr regarded them as from the hand of some Netherlandish painter, and Waagen was of opinion that Holbein painted them under Netherlandish influence. Wornum considered them to be the work of some Milanese. “The style of the painting,” he says, “is more Milanese, in colouring and in treatment, than anything else, exceedingly elaborate, cool in colour, dry in manner, and altogether unlike any other known work by our painter. In this case I have not the slightest faith in the Amerbach inventory.... The two portraits have a decided Milanese character, in the manner of the scholars of Leonardo da Vinci. A visit to Milan could not have had such a wonderful influence on Holbein’s taste as is shown in these portraits, or if such be allowed to be possible, it is just as remarkable that he should have laid this taste down again without leaving a trace behind.”[[522]]
Mr. Davies follows Wornum, but goes still farther in suggesting the name of the North Italian artist who painted them. He says: “I may say at once that I am quite unable to see any Netherlandish influence or probable authorship in the pictures. On the other hand, I see the strongest evidence of Lombard influence, and that in so direct a fashion and to such a degree that I believe them to be the work of some Lombard artist who had come under the influence of the later work of Raphael. The name of Cesare da Sesto at once occurs to one, and if it were not for the date 1526 on the Laïs picture, there would be no great difficulty in accepting it as a work by him which had found its way across from Milan—possibly even in the pack of Holbein himself.”[[523]] He acknowledges the difficulty of the date—Da Sesto was dead in 1526—and also of the red-haired Cupid in the Venus picture, so evidently both German and from Holbein’s own hand, and bearing so close a resemblance to the children in other pictures of his, such as the Meyer Madonna and the Family Group of 1528; but in spite of this, his final opinion is that they are most probably the work of Cesare da Sesto. He further suggests that Holbein, “possessing, or seeing in the possession of Amerbach, these two small examples, very similar in attitude and motive,” sought to give them variety, by inserting the figure of Cupid in the one, and thus giving this Italian lady the character of Venus, and in the other the gold coins and the title of Laïs, “so as to turn a somewhat unmeaning picture of a woman into a quasi-classical personality.” “The Offenburg tradition,” he adds, “I should wholly reject, nor indeed can I persuade myself that these pictures are portraits by Holbein either of that shadowy lady or of any other lady whatever. They appear to me to be pictures, not of some well-marked personality, but merely Lombard school types.”