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Updated: June 10, 2025
Thus the artists who did not embody their idea of death in a skeleton were the first to conceive and execute a real Dance of Death. In both the groups referred to, the motive is manifestly comic; and neither of them has any similarity to the Dances of Death of which Holbein's has become the grand representative.
You will hear a little later that the finest collection of miniatures in England went through the same process of disappearance and recovery. The collection is now in the Queen's library, Windsor, with photographs at Kensington Museum. There are one or two of Holbein's reputed portraits at Hampton Court. I must pass over some painters as not being sufficiently represented for my purpose.
In the first, a resemblance to Henry VIII, is found in Croesus. If the resemblance were intentional on Holbein's part, it showed the same want of tact and feeling which the painter early betrayed in his caricature of Erasmus. But the best of Holbein's drawings are his portrait sketches with chalks, on flesh-tinted paper.
All but a very few of Holbein's best portraits pale before these instances of searching insight; and, north of the Alps at least, there are no others which can be compared to them.
When brought before him, Holbein's fortune seemed to be made for the King asked him to go to court and paint for him, remarking that "now he had the artist he did not care about the pictures." Holbein seems to have been a favourite with Henry and many anecdotes are told of his life at Whitehall, where he went to live.
It is said that after Holbein's return to Basel he, with others, was persecuted for his "religious principles," but if this were true, his persecutors went to considerable pains for nothing, because Holbein was never known to have any sort of principles, religious or otherwise. He was neither a Protestant, nor a Catholic but a painter, a man without convictions and without thought.
They are a great Testament, though they seem unbearably harsh at a superficial glance. But put aside your own ideas and humbly study the ideas of Holbein, sure that they must be well worth the reverence of yours or mine, and little by little you will be made free of that Underworld where Holbein's true self has its home; you will pierce its gloom and find its clue and understand its tongue.
We shall recur to it in examining Holbein's Dance. The Dance was represented, and still exists, in one very singular place. At Lucerne, in Switzerland, it appears upon a covered bridge, in the triangles formed by the beams which support the roof.
Both of them, becoming naturalist and human, add the veracity of Holbein's intense portraiture to the glow and dignity they had themselves inherited from the Masters of Peace: at the same moment another, as strong as they, and in pure felicity of art-faculty, even greater than they, but trained in a lower school, Velasquez, produced the miracles of colour and shadow-painting, which made Reynolds say of him, "What we all do with labour, he does with ease;" and one more, Correggio, uniting the sensual element of the Greek schools with their gloom, and their light with their beauty, and all these with the Lombardic colour, became, as since I think it has been admitted without question, the captain of the painter's art as such.
The 'Meier, or Meyer Madonna, is otherwise called 'the Meier Family adoring the infant Christ in the arms of the Virgin. The subject is understood to prove that it must have been painted in Holbein's youth, before Protestantism was triumphant at Basle.
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