A History of Wood-Engraving

by George Edward Woodberry

VI.
HANS HOLBEIN.

Holbein was born at Augsburg, in 1495 or 1496, into a family of artists. In that city, then the centre of German culture, he grew up amid the stir of curiosity and thought which attended the discovery of the Western World and the first movements of the Reformation. He handled the pencil and the brush from boyhood, and produced works as wonderful for their precocious excellence as the early efforts of Mantegna; he was deeply impressed by the secular and picturesque genius of Burgkmaier, the great artist of Augsburg, who may have first opened to him the value of beauty of detail, and inculcated in him that carefulness in respect to it which afterward distinguished him; he seems, too, even at this early period, to have been touched by some Italian influence which may have reached Augsburg in consequence of the close commercial relations between that city and Venice. Holbein, however, did not arrive at any mature development until after he left Augsburg and removed to Bâsle, whither he went in 1515, in order to earn his bread by making designs for books—a trade which was then flourishing and lucrative in that city. Bâsle offered conditions of life more favorable, in some respects, to the development of energetic individuality than did Augsburg; it was already the seat of humanistic literature, at the head of which was Erasmus, and it soon became the safest refuge of the persecuted Reformers. In such a city there was necessarily a vigorous intellectual life and a free and liberal spirit, which must have exerted great influence upon the young artist, who by his profession was brought into intimate relations with the most learned and advanced thinkers about him. Holbein was at once profoundly affected by the literary and reform movements which he was called upon to aid by his designs, and he threw himself into their service with energy and sympathy. His art, too, under the influence of Italy, and under the rational direction of his own thought, grew steadily more refined in ideal and more finished in execution. He soon learned the value of formal beauty, and gave evidence that the work of the last great German painter was not to be marred by German tastelessness. Hitherto the masters of German art, led by a realistic spirit which did not discriminate regularly and with certainty between the different values of the lovely and the unlovely, had expressed their thought and feeling in familiar forms, and, consequently, often in forms which shared in the grotesqueness, bordering on caricature, and in the homeliness, bordering on ugliness, that characterized much of actual German life. Holbein, whose realism was governed by cultivated taste, expressed his thought and feeling in beautiful forms. His predecessors had used a dialect of art, as it were, which could never seem perfectly natural or be immediately intelligible to any but their own countrymen; Holbein acquired the true language of art, and was as directly and completely intelligible to the refined Englishman or Italian as to the citizen of Augsburg or Bâsle. Holbein came, also, to an understanding of the true law of art; as he freed himself from the Gothic dulness of sight in respect to beauty, he freed himself from the Gothic license of reverie, fancy, and thought. He limited himself to the clear and forcible expression of the idea he had in mind; he admitted no details which interfered with his main purpose, and which asserted a claim to be there for their own sake; he made every accessary enforce or illustrate his principal design, and subordinated each minor portion of his picture to the leading conception; he had one purpose in view, and he preserved its unity. How different this was from the practice of Dürer, who introduced into his work whatever came into his mind, however remotely it might be associated with his subject, who repeated almost wearisomely the same idea in varying symbolism, and dissipated the intensity of the thought by distracting suggestion crowded into any available space, need not be pointed out; in just the proportion in which Dürer lost by his practice directness, simplicity, and force, Holbein gained these by his own method, which was, indeed, the method of great art, of the art which obeys reason, in distinction from the art which yields to the wandering sentiment. Holbein differed from Dürer in another respect: he thoroughly understood what he meant to express; he would have nothing to do with vague dreaming or mystical contemplation; he thought that whatever could not be definitely conceived in the brain, and clearly expressed by line and color, lay outside the domain of his art; he gave up the phantoms of the enthusiast and the puzzle of the theologian to those who cared for them, and fixed his attention on human life as he saw it and understood it. He often treated religious subjects, but in no different spirit from that in which he treated secular subjects; in all it is the human interest which attracts him—the life of man as it exists within the bounds of mortality. Thus he arrived not only at the true language and the true law of art, but also at its true object. This development of his genius did not take place suddenly and at once; it was a gradual growth, and reached full maturity only in his closing years; but, while he still worked at Bâsle, the essential lines of his development were clearly marked, and he had advanced so far along them as to be even then the most perfect artist whom the North had produced.

Holbein began to practise wood-engraving as soon as he settled in Bâsle, and designed many titlepages, initial letters, and cuts for the publishers of that city. The titlepages, which are numerous, were usually in the form of an architectural frame, in which groups of figures were introduced; they show how early his taste for the forms of Italian architecture became pronounced, and how bold and free was his power of drawing, and how highly developed was his sense of style, even in his first efforts. He illustrated the books of the humanists, especially the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, then a new and popular work; and he designed the cuts for the biblical translations of Luther, and for other publications of the Reformers. He served the Reformation, too, in a humorous as well as in a serious way, for he was as much a master of satire as of beauty. Two cuts in ridicule of the papal party are particularly noticeable, one in which he satirizes the sale of indulgences, contrasting it with true repentance; and one in which he represents Christ as the Light of the World, with a group of sinners approaching upon one side, and a group of papal dignitaries led by Aristotle turning away on the other side. The illustrations in which he depicts ordinary humble life, particularly the life of peasants and children, make another great department of his lesser work in wood-engraving; these scenes are sometimes separate cuts, and sometimes introduced as backgrounds of initial letters, twenty alphabets of which are ascribed to him; they represent the pastimes and sports of the country, just as Holbein may have seen them at any time upon the way-side, and are full of heartiness, humor, and reality. The sketches from the life of boys and children are especially graceful and charming, and reveal an ease and power in delineation which has seldom been rivalled. This species of genre art, which had first made its appearance in wood-engraving, because it was considered beneath the dignity of the higher arts, was very popular; by his work of this sort Holbein contributed to the pleasure of the people, just as by his co-operation with the Humanists and the Reformers he served them in more important ways. Finally he produced at Bâsle his two great works in wood-engraving, the Dance of Death and the Figures of the Bible, which are the highest achievements of the art at any time.

The Dance of Death was an old subject. It had possessed for centuries a powerful and sometimes morbid attraction for the artistic imagination and for popular reflection. It was peculiarly the product of mediæval Christian life, and survives as a representative of the great mediæval ideas. That age first surrounded death with terrors, fastened the attention of man continually upon his doom, and affrighted his spirit with the dread of that unknown hour of his dissolution which should put him in danger of the second death of immortal agony. In Greece death had been the breaking of the chrysalis by the winged butterfly, or, at least, only the extinction of the torch; here it was the gaunt and grinning skeleton always jostling the flesh of the living, however beautiful or joyous they might be. In the churches of the thirteenth century there swung a banner emblazoned upon one side with the figures of a youth and maiden before a mirror of their loveliness, and, upon the reverse, with Death holding his spade beside the worm-pierced corpse; it was the type of mediæval Christian teaching. The fear of death was the recurring burden of the pulpit; it made the heart of every bowed worshipper tremble, and was taught with fearful distinctness by the pestilence that again and again suddenly struck the populations of Europe. The chord of feeling was overstrained; the elastic force of life asserted itself, and, by a strange transformation, men made a jest of their terror, and played with death as they have never since done; they acted the ravages of death in pantomime, made the tragedy comic, put the figure of Death into their carnivals, and changed the object of their alarm into the theme of their sport. In the spirit of that democracy which, in spite of the aristocratic structure of mediæval society, was imbedded in the heart of the Christian system, where every soul was of equal value before God, the people turned the universal moral lesson of death into a satire against the great; Death was not only the common executioner, he arrested the prelates and the nobles, stripped them of their robes and their possessions, and tried them whether they were of God or Mammon. In these many-varied forms of terror, sport, and irony Death filled the imagination and reflection of the age; the shrouded figure or the naked skeleton was seen on the stage of the theatre, amid the games of the people, on the walls of the churches and the monasteries, throughout the whole range of art and literature. Holbein had looked on many representations of this idea: where, as in Dürer’s work, Death attends knight and beggar; or where, as in the Nuremberg Chronicle, the skeletons dance by the open grave; or where, as in the famous series at Bâsle, Death humbles every rank of life in turn. But Holbein did not look on these scenes as his predecessors had done; he was free from their spirit. He took the mediæval idea and re-moulded it, as Shakspeare re-moulded the tradition of Denmark and Italy, into a work for all times and generations. He represented Death, but with an artistic power, an imaginative fervor, a perception of the constant element in its interest for mankind, which lifted his work out of mediævalism into universal truth; and in doing this he not only showed the high power of his art, but he unlocked the secrets of his character.