Holbein. Beatrice Fortescue
even this feat of deduction is surpassed by that which argues that because Erasmus and Holbein lashed bad prelates and vicious monks with satire, therefore they detested the whole hierarchy of Rome and loathed all monks, good or bad. "Erasmus laid the egg which Luther hatched" is the oft-repeated cry; forgetting or ignoring the plain fact that Erasmus eyed the Lutheran egg with no little mistrust in its shell and with unequivocal disgust in its full-feathered development. "What connection have I with Luther," he writes some three years after Holbein illustrated Stultitia's worshippers, "or what recompense have I to expect from him that I should join with him to oppose the Church of Rome, which I take to be the true part of the Church Catholic, or to oppose the Roman Pontiff who is the head of the Catholic Church? I am not so impious as to dissent from the Church nor so ungrateful as to dissent from Leo, from whom I have received uncommon favour and indulgence."
As to Holbein's "Protestant sympathies"—using the name for the whole Lutheran movement in which Protestantism had its rise—the assertions are even less grounded in fact, if that be possible. If he had it not already in his heart, through Erasmus and Amerbach and Froben and More and every other great influence to which he yielded himself at all, he early acquired a deep and devout sense of the need of reform within the Church. Like all these lifelong friends, he wanted to see the Church of Rome return to her purer days and cast off the corruptions of a profligate idleness. Like them he couched his lance against the unworthy priest, the gluttonous or licentious monk, the wolves in sheep's clothing that were destroying the fold from within. Like them, as they re-echoed Colet—the saintly Dean of St. Paul's—he passionately favoured the translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular and placing them in the hands, or at any rate bringing them to the familiar knowledge, of peasant as well as prelate. But surely one must know very little of the teachings of the stoutest Churchmen of Holbein's day and acquaintance not to know also that they encouraged if they did not plant these opinions in his mind.
"Dürer's woodcuts and engravings, especially his various scenes from the Passion," writes even Woltmann, the biographer to whom every student of Holbein owes so grateful a debt, "had prepared the soil among the people for Luther's translation of the Bible. Holbein's pictures from the Old Testament followed in their wake, and helped forward the work." Yet it seems difficult to suppose that Woltmann could have been ignorant of the facts of the case. So far were Holbein's, or any other artist's, Bible illustrations or Bible pictures from arguing a "Lutheran" monopoly in the vernacular Bible, that in Germany alone there were fifteen translated and illustrated editions of the Bible before Luther's appeared; and of these fifteen some half-dozen were published before Luther was born. Quentell, at Cologne, for instance, published a famous translation with exceedingly good woodcuts in 1480—three years before Luther's birth. While some nine years before Quentell's German translation, the Abbot Niccolo Malermi published his Biblia Vulgare in the Italian vernacular, which went through twenty editions in less than a century: one of which—brought out at Venice in 1490 by the Giunta Brothers—was illustrated by woodcuts of the greatest beauty. So widespread was the demand for this "Malermi Bible" that another edition, with new illustrations of almost equal merit, was produced at Venice in 1493, by the printer known as Anima Mia. All of these were vernacular Bibles; all illustrated; all widely known throughout Italy and Germany before Holbein was born or Luther was in his tenth year. And certainly it has not yet been suggested by the most rabid Protestantism that either these or any of the many other illustrated vernacular Bibles printed long before Luther's great translation—a translation with a special claim to immortality because it may be said to have set the standard for modern German—were anything but Roman Catholic Bibles. They were translated and illustrated in behalf of no doctrine which Protestantism does not hold in common with the Church of Rome.
To lose hold of these things, to lose sight of the true attitude of Holbein in his Bible woodcuts and his "Images of Death," or of either Erasmus or Holbein in their satires on the flagrant abuses within their Church, and their unwavering devotion to that Church—is to deliberately throw away the clue to the most vital qualities in the work of either, and to the whole course and character of Holbein himself, no less than to that of his lifelong friend and benefactor.
In 1515 the young painter who had come to Basel to better his fortunes painted a table for Hans Bär's wedding. The bridegroom marched away, carrying the Basel colours, to the bloody field of Marignano (or Melegnano) in this same year, and never came back to sit with his smiling bride around Holbein's most amusing conceits—where "Saint Nobody" was depicted among all the catastrophes of which he is the scapegoat, and a few ordinary trifles—a letter, a pair of spectacles, etc.—were marvellously represented, as if dropped by chance above the painted decorations, so that people were always attempting to pick them up. But Hans Bär's sister had been the first wife of a certain brave comrade—Meyer "of the Hare," who did come back and played an important part in young Holbein's career. Long lost among forgotten rubbish, Hans Bär's table has been unearthed, and is now preserved in the town library at Zurich.
But although Holbein had got his foot on the ladder of fame in this year's beginning of his connection with Froben, he was as yet very thankful to accept any commission, however humble. And as a human document there is a touch of peculiar, almost pathetic interest about the Schoolmaster's Signboard preserved by Bonifacius Amerbach, and now with his collection in the Basel Museum (Plate 3). It is a simple thing, with no pretension to a place among "works of art"—this bit of flotsam from 1516, when it was painted. Originally the two views, the Infant Class and the Adult Class, were on opposite sides of the sign; but they have been carefully split apart so as to be seen side by side. In the one is the quaint but usual Dame's School of the period; in the other the public is informed how the adults of Basel may retrieve the lack of such early opportunities. The inscription above each sets forth how whosoever wishes to do so can be taught to read and write correctly, and be furnished with all the essentials of a decent education at a very moderate cost; "children on the usual terms." And there is a delightful clause to say that "if anyone is too dull-witted to learn at all, no payment will be accepted, be it Burger or Apprentice, Wife or Maid."
Somehow, looking at the young fellow at the right of the table, in the Adult Class, sitting facing the anxious schoolmaster, with his own brow all furrowed by the effort to follow him and his mouth doggedly set to succeed—while the late, low sun of a summer afternoon streams in through the leaded window—one muses on the chance that so may the young painter from Augsburg, now but nineteen, himself have sat upon this very bench and leaned across this very table, in a like determination to widen out his small store of book-learning. He could have had little opportunity to do so in the ever-shifting, bailiff-haunted home of his boyhood. And somewhere he certainly learned to write quite as well as even the average gentleman of his day; witness the notes on his drawings.
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