PLATE 34.
CHRISTINA OF DENMARK, DUCHESS OF MILAN
Oils. National Gallery
[Lent by the Duke of Norfolk]
Click to [ENLARGE]

The portrait is nearly life-size. Over a plain black satin dress she wears a gown of the same material, lined with yellow sable. Her hair is entirely concealed by a black hood. At her throat and wrists are plain cambric frills. The ranging scale of tawny tones—in the floor, the gloves, the fur, the golden glint in her brown eyes—and the one ruby, on her hand, are the only colours, except those of her fresh young lips and skin and the black and white of her costume. "She is not so white as the late Queen," wrote Hutton, "but she hath a singular good countenance, and when she chanceth to smile there appeareth two pits in her cheeks and one in her chin, the which becometh her excellently well."

It is easy to believe that they did, but her dimples did not chance for Henry VIII. Whether she really sent him, along with her picture, the witty refusal credited to her—that she had but one head; had she two, one should be at His Majesty's service—or whether it was the Emperor's doing entirely that his niece married the Duke of Lorraine instead of the man whose first wife had been Charles V.'s aunt, there is, at all events, a soft lurking devil in the demure little face which seems to whisper that the answer was one which she could have made an' she would.

Van Mander heard from Holbein's circle a story which modern pedantry is inclined to flout. This is, that when an irate nobleman wanted the painter punished for an affront, the King hotly exclaimed:—"Understand, my lord, that I can make seven earls out of as many hinds, any day; but out of seven earls I could not make one such painter as this Holbein." An eminently ben-trovato story, at all events. And certain it is that the painter stood sufficiently high in the royal favour to be despatched on some special private mission for the King in the summer of 1538, of which the secret was so well kept that nothing beyond the record of payment for it has ever transpired.

From this date Holbein's name is regularly down in the Royal Accounts. The amounts drawn total, it has been computed, about £360 in present value, and would make an agreeable annual addition to his other earnings. So that it is little wonder he was not tempted by the small sum offered by the Basel Council in 1532. But in 1538 the Council greatly increased the old offer, and was so anxious to have him among her citizens that the painter seized the opportunity of his secret mission to Upper Burgundy, whatever it was, to pay a flying visit to Basel in the interests of his family.

His old companions of the Guild of St. Johann Vorstadt made this visit—when Holbein was back among them, as was noted, "in silk and velvet"—the occasion of a grand banquet in his honour. But the real motive for his visit was to arrange upon what terms he could meet the Council's wishes. The terms were far from ungenerous, as is shown by the contract which followed him back to London.

In this the Council bound itself, in consideration of the great honour of retaining in their city a painter "famous beyond all other painters on account of the riches of his art," and in further consideration of his promise to make no absence from Basel more prolonged than should be really necessary to carry his foreign commissions to their destination and receive his pay for them—to give him an annuity of fifty guldens, equally whether Holbein should be ill or well, but only during his own life. In addition to this, they granted him permission to make short visits to specified art-centres, of which Milan was one, "once, twice, or thrice, every year." And recognising the impossibility of his freeing himself from his English engagements in less than two years, they also granted him this interval before he need resume his residence at Basel; and engaged to pay forty guldens yearly to his wife, on his behalf, for each of these two years.

There is every probability that Holbein himself took a goodly sum to Basel to invest for his family's permanent benefit in one way and another. For it could only have been as a part of this gleaning for them that he drew—as the Account Books show that he did just at this juncture—a whole year's salary in advance from the Royal Exchequer; seeing that the same books prove that he was liberally paid for all his own expenses on the King's service, in addition to his regular salary.

Part of the sum he collected to take with him was doubtless used to apprentice his son Philip, now sixteen, to the goldsmith's trade. And that the father chose Paris for this purpose, where he left Philip on his return journey, might well be due either to his own estimation of Jerome David, to whom Philip was indentured, or to the fact that Benvenuto Cellini's presence at Paris afforded some advantage; or that his own promised return to Basel would make it preferable to have the lad on the same side of the Channel as all his family. And that Holbein fully intended to make the necessary and obvious sacrifice involved in exchanging London for Basel is also proved by a contemporary account. "His intention was," says his fellow-townsman, "had God lengthened his life, to paint many of his pictures again at his own expense, as well as the hall in the Rathaus. The paintings on the Haus zum Tanz he pronounced 'pretty good.'" But it was not to be.