HOLBEIN, HANS THE YOUNGER. - German painter and engraver, b. in Augsburg in the winter of 1497-1498 and d. between 7 Oct. and 29 Nov. 1543 in London. A pupil of his father, he was then in Basel in 1514 where he first worked as an assistant to Hans Herbster and then on his own account. From these early years of activity date the portraits of J. Meyer, burgomaster of Basel, and of his wife (1516) and the frescoes of 1517 in Lucerne, in the interior and on the facade of the house of the mayor of Hertenstein.
In the summer of 1518 he probably went to Italy, and the influence of Italian art, of Lombard art and of Mantegna in particular, is visible in his immediately subsequent work. Again in Basel in Sept. 1519, he received there, a year later, civic rights. Here (where he enjoyed the friendship of famous men, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, of whom he made many portraits that began his fame as a portraitist) he was received into the artists' guild, worked for the city's publishers providing illustrations for books and frescoed the facade of a dance house (Haus zum Tanz) as well as the Council Hall in the Town Hall (1521). Among the other works of this period are remembered the portrait of Boniface Amerbach (1519), who was later to become one of the greatest collectors of his drawings (his collection is in the Kunstsammlung of Basel); the politician of Fribourg; the Madonna of Solothurn (1522).
In 1524 he went to France, where he came into contact with the art of the Clouets, from whom he derived the technique of drawings in colored pencils (his earlier drawings, in fact, are all in silverpoint) and it was after this journey that he gave to the publishers of Lyon, M. and G. Trechsel, his most celebrated wood engravings, the Imagines mortis and the Icones Veteris Testamenti. Of this same period are the portraits of Erasmus and of Paracelsus, the organ shutters of the Cathedral and the Madonna of Burgomaster Meyer (now in the Museum of Darmstadt). In the autumn of 1526 he moved to England, with letters of recommendation from Erasmus, and passed through the Netherlands visiting Quentin Matsys in Antwerp. In England he was especially active as a portraitist, and there are remembered some portraits of friends of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the portrait of the family of Thomas More, that of the archbishop of Canterbury, that of Henry Guildford, etc. He returned to Basel in 1528 and there finished the frescoes of the Town Hall; here he also painted the famous portrait of his wife with her two children (Museum of Basel). But he went to England again in 1532, becoming shortly afterward (1536) servant of the King Henry VIII; his English stay was interrupted by a brief appearance in Basel in 1538. Of this last period of his life are, besides the many portraits, the canvases (today lost, as all his frescoes have been lost) that decorated in the Venetian manner the council hall of the Stahlhof, commercial agency of the Hanseatic League in London.
H. H. the Younger is certainly the artist closest to the spirit of the Italian Renaissance that German art has had. Contact with the works of Mantegna, of Michelangelo, of Leonardo, of Raphael, of the most famous Italian painters in short, allowed him among other things, in comparison with the painters his fellow countrymen who had preceded him, still traditionally Gothic, to define his representations in a more decidedly plastic sense. And he certainly owes much of his fame, which comes to him from his better-known activity as a portraitist, to the influences of the art of Leonardo and of the Clouets. His portraits (wonderful that of the Two Ambassadors of the National Gallery of London) are defined with an analytical power and such a clarity of vision as to impose themselves among the greatest expressions of the art of all times and all countries. - See pl. XCII.
Bibliography13 works
Gilberto Ronci