The Reformation

by Will Durant

  V. THE TUDOR STYLE: 1517–58

  The reign of Henry VIII began with a Gothic masterpiece in the chapel of Henry VII, and closed with the Renaissance architecture of royal palaces; the change of style aptly reflected the conquest of the Church by the state. The attack of the government on the bishops, the monasteries, and ecclesiastical revenues put an end to English ecclesiastical architecture for almost a hundred years.

  Henry VII, anticipating death, had allotted £140,000 ($14,000,000?) to build in Westminster Abbey a Lady Chapel to contain his tomb. It is a masterpiece not of construction but of decoration, from the cenotaph itself to the intricate stone skein of the fan vault, which has been called “the most wonderful work of masonry ever put together by the hand of man.” 20 As the chapel is Gothic in plan and Renaissance in adornment, we have here the beginning of the Tudor or Florid Style. Henry VIII, as a young humanist, was readily won to classical architectural forms. He and Wolsey brought several Italian artists into England. One of them, Pietro Torrigiano, was commissioned to design the paternal tomb. Upon the sarcophagus of white marble and black stone the Florentine sculptor laid lavish decoration in carvings or gilt bronze: plump putti, floral wreaths of airy grace, reliefs of the Virgin and divers saints, angels sitting atop the tomb and extending pretty feet into space, and, over the whole, the recumbent figures of Henry VII and his Queen Elizabeth. This was such sculpture as England had never seen before, and in England it has never been surpassed. Here, said Francis Bacon, the parsimonious King, who had pinched pennies to spend pounds, ‘dwelleth more richly dead than he did alive in any of his palaces.”21

  Henry VIII was not the man to allow anyone to be more sumptuously buried than himself. In 1518 he contracted to pay Torrigiano £2,000 for a tomb “more greater by the fourth part” than his father’s.22 This was never finished, for the artist as well as the King had a royal temper; Torrigiano left England in a huff (1519), and when he returned he did no more work on the second tomb. Instead he designed for Henry VII’s chapel a high altar, reredos, and baldachin, which Cromwell’s men destroyed in 1643. In 1521 Torrigiano departed for Spain.

  The mortal comedy was resumed in 1524 when Wolsey commissioned another Florentine, Benedetto da Rovezzano, to build him a tomb in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, “the design whereof,” wrote Lord Herbert of Cherbury, “was so glorious that it exceeded far that of Henry VII.” 23 When the Cardinal fell he begged the King to let him keep at least the effigy for a humbler tomb in York; Henry refused, and confiscated the whole as a receptacle for himself; he bade the artists replace Wolsey’s figure with his own; but religion and marriage distracted him, and the funereal monument was never completed. Charles I wished to be buried in it, but a hostile Parliament sold the decoration piece by piece, until only the black marble sarcophagus remained, to serve at last (1810) as part of Nelson’s shrine in St. Paul’s.

  Aside from these labors, and the glorious wood screen and stalls and stained glass and vault of King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, the memorable architecture of this age was dedicated to glorifying the country houses of the aristocracy into fairy palaces rising amid the fields and woods of England. The architects were English, but a dozen Italians were enlisted for the decoration. An imposingly wide façade in mixed Gothic and Renaissance, a turreted gateway leading into a court, a spacious hall for crowded festivities, a massive staircase, usually in carved wood, rooms adorned with murals or tapestry and lighted with lattice windows or oriels, and, around the buildings, a garden, a deer park, and, beyond, a hunting ground—this was the English nobleman’s skeptical forestalling of paradise.

  The most famous of these Tudor manor houses was Hampton Court, built by Wolsey (1515) for himself, and bequeathed in terror to his King (1525). Not one architect but a coalition of English master builders created it, basically in Perpendicular Gothic and on a medieval plan, with moat and towers and crenellated walls; Giovanni da Maiano added a Renaissance touch in terra-cotta roundels on the façade. The Duke of Württemberg, visiting England in 1592, called Hampton Court the most magnificent palace in the world.24 Only less sumptuous were Sutton Place in Surrey, built (1521–27) for Sir Richard Weston, and Nonesuch Palace, begun for Henry VIII in 1538 on an imperial scale. “He invited thither,” says an old description, “the most excellent artificers, architects, sculptors, and statuaries of different nations, Italians, Frenchmen, Hollanders, and native Englishmen; and these presented a marvelous example of their art in the decoration of the palace and both within and without adorned it with statues which here recall in literal reproduction the ancient works of Rome, and elsewhere surpass them in excellence.” 25 Two hundred and thirty men were constantly employed on this palace, which was intended to outshine the Chambord and Fontainebleau of Francis I. Seldom had English kings been so rich, or the English people so poor. Henry died before Nonesuch could be finished. Elizabeth made it her favorite residence; Charles II gave it to his mistress Lady Castlemaine (1670), who had it pulled down, and sold the parts, as the only way to transform a liability into an asset.

  VI. HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER: 1497-1543

  How futile are words before a work of art! Each art successfully resists translation into any other medium; it has its own inalienable quality, which must speak for itself or not at all. History can only record the masters and the masterpieces; it cannot convey them. To sit silently before Holbein’s picture of his wife and children is better than a biography. However ....

  He was more fortunate in his parentage than in his time. His father was among the leading painters in Augsburg. From him Hans learned the elements of the art, and from Hans Burgkmair something of Italian grace and modeling. In 1512 he painted four altar panels now in the Augsburg Gallery—middling enough, but astonishingly good for a lad of fifteen. Two years later he and his brother Ambrose, also a painter, decamped to Basel. Perhaps the father had insisted too much on his own—still Gothic—style; perhaps there was not enough educated money in Augsburg to support more than a few artists; in any case youth and genius seldom love home. In Basel the lads discovered that freedom is a trial. Hans illustrated various volumes, including Erasmus’ Praise of Folly; he did some rough painter’s work, made a signboard for a schoolmaster, and decorated a table top with lively incidents from the story of St. Nobody—that handy nonentity who was charged with every anonymous mischief, and never said a word in his own defense. The skill shown in this work earned Hans a fruitful commission—to paint portraits of the burgomaster Jakob Meyer and his wife (1517). The fame of these portraits traveled; Jakob Hertenstein called Holbein to Lucerne, and there Hans frescoed the façade and walls of the patron’s home, and painted that portrait of Benedict Hertenstein which is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. From Lucerne he may have passed into Italy; his work henceforth revealed Italian influence in anatomical accuracy, architectural backgrounds, and the management of light. When he returned to Basel, aged twenty-two, he set up his own studio, and married a widow (1519). In that year his brother died and in 1524 their father.

  German realism mingled with Romanesque architecture and classic ornament in the religious pictures that Holbein now produced. Startling is the realism—echoing Mantegna—of Christ in the Tomb: the body all bone and skin, the eyes ghastly open, the hair disheveled, the mouth agape in a last effort to breathe; this seems irrevocable death, and no wonder Dostoievski said the picture could destroy a man’s religious faith.26 About this time Holbein painted murals for the hall of the Grand Council in Basel. The councilors were pleased, and one of them commissioned him to provide an altarpiece for a Carthusian monastery. This Passion of Christ suffered in the iconoclastic riots of 1529, but two shutters were saved, and were presented to the cathedral at Freiburg-im-Breisgau. They borrow much from Baldung Grien, but they have their own power in the remarkable play of the light that emanates from the Child. In 1522 the town clerk of Basel ordered another altarpiece; for this placidly beautiful Madonna, now preserved in the Kunstmuseum of Solothurn, Holbein used hi
s wife and son as models—the wife then a woman of modest comeliness, not yet touched by tragedy. Probably near this time27 he produced his religious masterpiece, The Virgin and Child with the Family of Burgomaster Meyer—splendid in composition, line, and color, and intense in feeling; we understand more sympathetically the Burgomaster’s prayer to the Madonna when we learn that at the time of this painting the two sons pictured at his feet, and one of the two wives kneeling at the right, were dead.

  But the fees for such religious pictures were small in proportion to the care and labor they required. Portraits were more lucrative, and there was a growing family to support. In 1519 Holbein painted the young scholar Bonifacius Amerbach—a noble face, in which idealism survives a penetrating view of the world. About 1522 he painted the great printer Froben—a man dedicated, disturbed, creatively worn out by life. Through Froben, Holbein came to know Erasmus; and in 1523 he painted two of his many portraits of the saddened humanist. In the three-quarters portrait (in the Earl of Radnor’s Collection at Salisbury) the artist, now in the fullness of his powers, caught the soul of a man who had lived too long; illness and Luther had deepened the lines in the face, the melancholy in the eyes. The profile in the Basel Kunstsammlung shows him calmer and more alive; the nose advancing to battle like a gladiator’s sword; perhaps the manuscript under the pen is a draft of the De libero arbitrio (1524) with which he was entering the lists against Luther. Probably in 1524 Holbein painted Erasmus again, in the best portrait of all, which hangs in the Louvre; seeing that profound and chastened face one thinks of Nisard’s perceptive comment—that Erasmus was one of those dont la gloire a été de comprendre beaucoup et d’affirmer peu—“whose glory it has been to understand much and to affirm little.” 28

  About 1523 Holbein painted himself, now twenty-six, and seemingly prosperous; but the cold glance suggests some fighting resentment of life’s bufferings. Tradition discredits him with a moderate addiction to drink and women, and represents him as unhappy with his wife. Apparently he shared some Lutheran views; his woodcuts of The Dance of Death (c . 1525) satirized the clergy—but even the clergy did that in those days. The series showed Death dogging the steps of every man, woman, or class—Adam, Eve, the Emperor, a noble, a physician, a monk, a priest, a pope, a millionaire, an astrologer, a duchess, a jester, a gambler, a thief—all en route to the Last Judgment; it is as powerful a work as any of Dürer’s in this medium. Aside from this masterpiece of drawing, and the Meyer Madonna, Holbein is without visible piety. Perhaps he imbibed some skepticism from Erasmus and the Basel humanists.29 He was more interested in anatomy than in religion.

  The Reformation, though he presumably favored it, ruined his market in Basel. No more religious pictures were asked of him. Payments on the paintings for the council hall were suspended. Rich men, frightened by the Peasants’ War, retreated into privacy and parsimony, and thought the time unpropitious for portraits. “Here the arts are freezing,” wrote Erasmus from Basel in 1526.30 He gave Holbein letters of introduction to friends in Antwerp and London, and Holbein, leaving his family at home, sought fortune in the north. He visited Quentin Massys, and doubtless they exchanged notes about Erasmus. From Antwerp he crossed to England. Erasmus’ letter assured him a cordial welcome from Thomas More, who gave him a place in his Chelsea home; and there he painted (1526) the portrait of More that is now in the Frick Gallery in New York. To the hindsight of the historian the tense and half-somber eyes foreshadow the devotion and tenacity of the martyr; to the insight of an artist the wonder will be in the fur and folds of the sleeve. In 1527 Holbein painted Thomas More and His Family—the oldest known group picture in transalpine secular art.

  Late in 1528 Holbein, having made some pounds and shillings, returned to Basel, gave Erasmus a copy of More and His Family, and rejoined his wife. Now he painted one of his greatest, most honest pictures, showing his own family with a realism unsparing to himself. Each of the three faces is sad: the girl resigned, almost hopeless; the boy gazing up plaintively at his mother; she looking upon them with grief and affection profoundly mirrored in her eyes—the grief of a wife who has lost the love of her husband, the affection of a mother whose children are her only tie to life. Three years after painting this masterly self-indictment, Holbein left his family again.

  During this stay in Basel he painted another portrait of Froben, and made six more of Erasmus, not as searchingly profound as those of 1523–24. The town council renewed his commission to fresco its chambers, but, yielding to the triumphant iconoclasts, it condemned all religious pictures, and ruled that “God has cursed all those who make them.” 31 Commissions fell, and in 1532 Holbein returned to England.

  There he painted portraits so plentifully that most of the figures dominating the English scene in those turbulent years are still alive by the magic of Holbein’s hand. In the Queen’s Library at Windsor are eighty-seven sketches in charcoal or chalk, some for cartoons, most of them for portraits; apparently the artist required only one or two sittings from his subjects, and then painted their likeness from such sketches. The Hanseatic merchants in London solicited his art, but did not inspire his best. For the Guildhall of the Hanse he painted two murals preserved only in copies or drawings: one represented The Triumph of Poverty, the other The Triumph of Riches; both are marvels of individualized character, living movement, and coherent design, and illustrate the motto of the Guild—“Gold is the father of joy and the son of care; he who lacks it is sad, he who has it is uneasy.” 32

  Thomas Cromwell, who was to exemplify this adage, submitted his hard face and soft frame to Holbein’s brush in 1534. Through him the artist found access to the highest figures at the court. He painted The French Ambassadors, and one of them, Charles de Saulier, he portrayed with especial success, revealing the man beneath the vestments and insignia of office. Four others—Sir Henry Guilford (controller of the royal household), Sir Nicholas Carew (royal equerry to the King), Robert Cheseman (royal falconer to the King), and Dr. John Chambers (physician to the King)—suggest the thick skins that alone could safely live near the parboiled King, Holbein became one of them about 1537 as official court painter. He received a workshop of his own in Whitehall Palace, dwelt in comfort, had mistresses and bastards like anybody else, and dressed in color and silk.33 He was called upon to decorate rooms, design ceremonial garments, bookbindings, weapons, tableware, seals, royal buttons and buckles, and the gems that Henry presented to his wives. In 1538 the King sent him to Brussels to paint Princess Christine of Denmark; she proved quite charming, and Henry would gladly have had her, but she took Duke Francis of Lorraine instead; perhaps she preferred to hang in a gallery rather than die on the block. Holbein took the opportunity to visit Basel briefly; he arranged an annuity of forty guilders ($1,000?) for his wife, and hurried back to London. Soon thereafter came the commission to paint Anne of Cleves; Holbein almost foreshadowed the result in the sad eyes of the portrait now in the Louvre.

  For the King himself he painted several large pictures, nearly all lost. One survives in the Barber Surgeons’ Hall in London: Henry VIII Granting a Charter of Incorporation to the Barber Surgeons’ Company; Henry dominates the scene in his robes of state. The artist made appealing portraits of Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, and the fifth wife, Catherine Howard. When Henry himself sat or stood for Holbein the painter rose to the challenge, and produced portraits surpassed in his own work only by the Louvre and Basel pictures of Erasmus. The portrait of 1536 shows the monarch Teutonically pompous and stout. Henry liked it despite himself, and commissioned Holbein to paint the royal family as a fresco in Whitehall Palace; this mural was destroyed by fire in 1698, but a copy made in 1667 for Charles II reveals a masterly design: at the upper left Henry VII, pious and modest; lower, his son, brandishing the symbols of power and spreading his legs like a colossus; at the right his mother and his third wife; and in the center a marble monument retailing in Latin the virtues of the kings. The figure of Henry VIII was elaborated with such realism that a legend
arose about persons entering the room and mistaking the portrait for the living King. In 1540 Holbein painted a still more imposing Henry VIII in Wedding Dress. Finally (1542) he displayed Henry in the deterioration of mind and body. Nemesis here worked leisurely, lengthening the revenge of the gods from clean or sudden death to prolonged and ignominious decay.

  Two lovely pictures redeem the royal gallery: one of Prince Edward at the age of two, all innocence; the other of Edward aged six (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). This second portrait is a delight to behold. We may judge the art of Holbein when we see him, within a year or two, portray unflinchingly the obese pride of the father, and then catch with such mysterious skill the guileless kindliness of the son.

  At forty-five (1542) the artist pictured himself again, and with the same objectivity with which he had depicted the King: a suspicious, pugnacious fellow with carelessly kept graying hair and beard; and once more (1543) in a roundel showing him in a gentler mood. In that year plague came to London, and chose him as one of its victims.

  Technically he was one of the supreme painters. He saw meticulously, and so portrayed; every line, color, or attitude, every incidence or variation of light, that could reveal significance was caught and pinned down upon the paper, linen, wood, or wall. What accuracy in the line, what depth and smoothness and warmth in the color, what skill in ordering details into a unified composition! But in many of the portraits, where the object was not the subject but the fee, we miss the sympathy that could see, and feel with, a man’s secret soul; we find it in the Louvre and Basel Erasmus, and in the picture of his family. We miss, except in the Meyer Madonna, the idealism that ennobled the realism in the Van Eycks’ Adoration of the Lamb. His indifference to religion kept him short of the grandeur of Grünewald, and marked him off from Dürer, who always had one foot in the Middle Ages. Holbein was neither Renaissance like Titian nor Reformation like Cranach; he was German-Dutch-Flemish-English matter-of-fact and practical sense. Perhaps his success prevented the effective entry of Italian pictorial principles and finesse into England. After him Puritanism triumphed over the Elizabethan passion, and English painting languished till Hogarth came. At the same time the glory departed from German painting. A flood of barbarism would have to pass over Central Europe before the sense of beauty would find voice there again.