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قراءة كتاب Holbein
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curiously practical and business-like age, with rather less imagination than we associate with Elizabethan times. In dealing with one and all of his varied sitters, the painter seems to have preserved the essential characteristics, and, if we must admit the Holbein touch, there is at least no Holbein type. He started his work under the influence of the Renaissance, and with an almost childish delight in decorative effects. As he progressed he threw aside one by one the details that he had ceased to regard as essential, until in the end he could express everything he [26] saw in the simplest possible manner, without any suggestion of superfluity or redundancy, without concession to the merely superficial side of picture-making that stood lesser men in good stead. The extraordinary success of his portraiture is best understood when we learn that for most of his work he did not trouble sitters after the modern fashion. They sat to him for a sketch, and then he took the sketch away with him and produced in due course the finished portrait. When we look at the portraits in the great European galleries, at Windsor or Basle, the Louvre or Munich, we may be astonished that such results should be achieved from mere sketches. But the study of these sketches themselves avails to explain much; and as there are more than eighty of them at Windsor, and these have [27] been reproduced very finely in several volumes, the lover of Holbein has no occasion to leave this country in order to understand the technique of this branch of the master's work. Naturally an artist is judged very readily by his efforts in portraiture, for they are the things that appeal most readily to the eye; but in the case of Holbein, who would have been a great master if he had never painted a portrait, it is well to look in other directions for evidences of his many gifts. What manner of man he was, how and when he lived and died, is, as we have hinted already, a matter of conjecture; and in setting down the facts of his life that are generally accepted, it is necessary to admit reservations at short intervals. Of course, we would give much to know the full story of his progress, to learn the conditions [28] under which some of his most notable achievements were accomplished, to catch some really reliable glimpses of his domestic life, but in all these matters we have nothing but stray facts and countless conjectures. Even the portrait in Basle that is said to stand for him is a doubtful authority, because it is not clear from the original inscription whether it is of Holbein or by Holbein. We know that he painted it, but we do not know whether he was painting himself. Happily, perhaps, the satisfaction of this curiosity, though it be human and reasonable enough, is not of the first importance. It may suffice us amply that the great artist left many and varied monuments of his achievements, and that the most, or very many, of these are open to our inspection to this day, that they have preserved their [29] quality and their power to teach as well as to charm succeeding generations.
II
THE ARTIST'S LIFE
If we may accept the balance of evidence, Hans Holbein was born in the last years of the fifteenth century in Augsburg, then a city of great importance. The visitor to Bavaria to-day will find few traces of its vanished prosperity, but in the years when Hans Holbein was a little boy Augsburg held merchant princes by the dozen, and men of distinction by the score, and enjoyed the favour of the Emperor Maximilian, himself no mean patron of the arts. In such a city at the beginning of the sixteenth century there would have been a certain community [30] of interest between the leaders of state, commerce, and religion, who, keenly conscious of the honour that had come to Italy through the Revival of Learning and the practice of the arts, would do all that in them lay to devote a part of their wealth and leisure to placing their city in an honourable position. Civic pride was rampant throughout the great cities of Europe in the Middle Ages, and Augsburg was no exception to the rule. Holbein's father, whose work may be studied to great advantage in Berlin, was an artist of repute. He belonged to the Guild of Painters that had been successfully established in the city, and enjoyed the patronage of the leisured classes to an extent that brought a measure of prosperity to all its members. The practice of the arts was comparatively new to [31] Augsburg, and doubtless the story of Italian prosperity had lost nothing on its journey across the Tyrol. The Bavarian city would expect its prosperous Guild to achieve distinction, and was ready and able to respond to progress, so that the conditions were very favourable to endeavour and to success. Every great city sought to achieve renown by raising in its midst, or attracting to its circle, scholars and artists of world-wide repute. Hans Holbein had a double advantage. Not only was the time ripe for his achievements, but the family surroundings were of the kind calculated to develop his powers early. His father, nephew, and brothers were painters, and from his earliest years he would have been brought into intimate touch with the life and work of artists. He would have had access to the hall of the [32] Painters' Guild, where as much as could be secured of the world's fine work was to be seen. The Guild was the centre of a great city's enthusiasms; the work was criticised and studied. Great financiers of Augsburg brought artists and craftsmen from other towns, and it is safe to assume that the best of them would have been found in the hall of the Guild from time to time exhibiting their own work, and telling an interested gathering of the wonders of other cities in days when the journey across the frontiers of one's own country was not to be safely or lightly undertaken. The elder Holbein would have introduced his son into the best artistic circles of his time and place; for although he does not seem to have been the leading artist of his city, he received important commissions from the religious houses, and the collection of sketches in the Berlin National Gallery shows how much the son owed to the father, and what a clever fellow the father was.
PLATE IV.—JANE SEYMOUR
(In the Imperial Gallery, Vienna)
This portrait is one of the masterpieces of the Vienna Gallery. The queen is painted almost life size, and wears a dark red dress over a petticoat of silver brocade. The marvellous complexion for which she was noted and the fine jewels she wore are rendered with rare skill by the painter.
Unfortunately history has nothing to tell us of the boyhood of young Hans, though we may gather that his father was in straitened circumstances and not on the best of terms with members of his family who were better off than he. Perhaps we may assume that the res angusta domi turned young Han's steps from his father's house while he was yet little more than a boy, for when he could have been no more than seventeen, and was perhaps younger, he and his brother Ambrosius would seem to have left Augsburg for Basle, where so much of his work is to be found to-day. Here in his first youth he painted a rather poor Madonna and