CHAPTER VI

THE HOUSE OF THE DANCE AND THE WALL-PAINTINGS IN THE BASEL TOWN HALL Holbein as a mural decorator—The “Haus zum Tanz”—The “Dance of Peasants” frieze—Original studies and old copies—Decoration of the inner walls of the new Basel Town Council Chamber—“Charondas of Catanea”—“Zaleucus of Locris”—“Curius Dentatus”—“Sapor and Valerian”—The single figures placed between the large compositions—Cessation of the work before its completion. AT this period of his life Holbein’s work was by no means confined to the painting of portraits and church pictures. His activity was ceaseless, and every moment of his time must have been fully occupied. In addition to many book illustrations for the publishers, and designs for glass-painters, armourers, and other craftsmen, he found considerable employment in decorating the street-fronts of houses of certain of the leading citizens with large wall-paintings, and, in some instances, painted similar decorations on the inner walls. It is evident from various contemporary and later references that he covered more than one house in Basel with decorative designs in this fashion, and that the art of wall-painting, practised in that city to some extent before his time, received a great impetus from his example. He carried it to a far greater pitch of excellence than had been achieved until then in any country but Italy, and founded a school of monumental decorative design which existed for a considerable period after his death, and has been revived again in modern times in Lucerne, if not in Basel. Unfortunately, nothing remains of his original work in this field except a few isolated designs for one or two façades, and several tracings and inferior copies of fragmentary remains of the actual wall-paintings; nor has any definite record been handed down in Basel of any particular dwelling so decorated by him, with the exception of the “House of the Dance,” which obtained a wide celebrity in his own day, and was evidently looked upon as his masterpiece. In carrying out the mural ornamentation of this building he allowed his brilliant fancy full play, and exercised the greatest ingenuity in turning to advantage the wide, flat spaces of the commonplace frontage with its irregularly-placed Gothic arched windows and openings, covering the whole of it with painted Renaissance architecture rich in columns and friezes, balconies and elaborate porticoes and other features, amid which characters from ancient history and fable and modern life were placed with admirable effect. [Sidenote: THE HOUSE OF THE DANCE] The “Haus zum Tanz” was so named by his fellow-citizens from the large frieze representing a number of peasants dancing with the wildest merriment and abandon, which at once took the popular fancy, though it only formed a part of the decoration. An original drawing for the narrow front façade still exists, while there is an old tracing of Holbein’s study for the general design, and some sixteenth-century copies of his sketches, from which a good idea of the decorative effect produced after he had finished the work can be obtained. It was a corner house, and stood in the Eisengasse, near the Rhine Bridge, and at that time belonged to the wealthy goldsmith Balthasar Angelrot, from whom Holbein received the commission. The decorations, probably carried out by him in 1520, were still visible, and described by Patin, in 1676, but towards the end of the eighteenth century their faded remains were whitewashed over. The old building itself stood until 1907, when it was pulled down and rebuilt.[261] The plan Holbein pursued shows a marked advance in his conception of decorative design when compared with the earlier paintings of the Hertenstein house in Lucerne. In the latter large pictures filled practically the whole of the wide spaces between the windows, but he now abandoned this practice to a great extent, and subordinated the pictorial effect to one in which architecture played the leading part, the characters introduced appearing as actual figures occupied in various ways amid this elaborate setting. The main front of the house was very irregular in its features. There were no straight lines, for the windows differed greatly in height and breadth, and those of one storey were in most instances not placed exactly over those in the storey below them. To a painter of lesser mastership than Holbein such a nondescript frontage would have greatly increased the difficulties to be overcome in carrying out a successful decorative scheme; in his case the very difficulties appear to have provided an added spur to his imagination and the fanciful play of his humour, and he seized upon them and turned them to the utmost advantage. According to Dr. Ludwig Iselin, in his notes on Holbein written towards the end of the sixteenth century, the painter regarded his work upon Angelrot’s house with some amount of satisfaction, for when he revisited Basel in the autumn of 1538, and saw his wall-paintings both on the house-fronts and in the Council Chamber rapidly fading away, he proposed to repaint them at his own expense, and in criticising his work found that the “Haus zum Tanz” was “rather good” (“Das Haus zum tantz wär ein wenig gutt”). According to Theodor Zwinger (1577),[262] he received only forty florins (gulden) for the whole of this work, very inadequate payment even for those days, considering the amount of labour which he must have given to it. This reference of Zwinger’s is of great interest, as, with the exception of the wall-paintings in the interior of the Basel Town Hall, it is the only record so far discovered of the prices the artist was in the habit of receiving for such undertakings. [Sidenote: THE HOUSE OF THE DANCE] The house, as already stated, was a corner one of three storeys, the left-hand and narrow side being the one which fronted the Eisengasse. The decoration covered both sides, and was painted more or less in perspective, so arranged that the spectator, in order to obtain the full effect of the design, must stand at the corner angle of the house, from which he could see both sides at the same time. On the ground floor he placed on either side of the broad arched windows and the narrower door at the end of the chief façade thick, stumpy columns, with garlands hanging below their Ionic capitals. He made skilful use of the Gothic forms of the openings, as they actually existed, in such a way that the pointed arches appeared to be merely the result of perspective foreshortening, as seen from the spectator’s standpoint. Above these arches, in the flat space beneath the first-floor windows, was painted the broad band containing the “Bauerntanz,” or “Dance of the Peasants,” which gave the house its popular name. This band was broken by a small oblong window over the house-door, which Holbein utilised by turning it into a stone table, with cans and jugs for the refreshment of the dancers, against which two musicians are leaning, one playing the bagpipes and the other a wind instrument of unusual shape. Boisterous mirth reigns among the dancers. Their flitting shadows are cast upon the wall behind them, as they give full vent to their delight in life by means of measures more energetic than graceful, and much rough-and-tumble play. Judging from the fine original study in the Berlin Print Room,[263] which shows a part of this frieze, the wall-painting itself must have produced a vivid effect of rapid, lifelike movement, and even of noise and laughter. Above the Dance, decorated pilasters supporting lofty columns, which ran up to the top of the building, were placed between the windows, together with antique figures of Mars, Venus, Cupid, and other gods. Above these again ran a balcony with an open balustrading, supported on projecting cornices, with numerous figures of Holbein’s fellow-citizens in contemporary costume walking about and looking over into the street below, one of them with a greyhound. Round the windows of the second floor, which were of varying heights, he gave full play to his delight in Renaissance architecture of a very intricate and fantastic kind, including his favourite round medallions containing the heads of Roman Emperors and other classical heroes and heroines, friezes with rich ornamentation, grotesque figures with human bodies and tails of dolphins, and columns and arches seen in strong perspective. On the top floor of all the small windows were given the appearance of little square towers surrounded by broken and ruined arches and masonry, overgrown with bushes, and behind and between them the blue sky. On one of the walls was a peacock, and on another a paint-pot with the brush stuck in it, as though left up there by accident by the painter after the work had been finished and the scaffolding removed, a pictorial joke which no doubt entertained the passers-by. The other frontage of the house faced a side street. On the wall nearest the corner Holbein painted a lofty arched doorway, with steps leading to the interior, above which Marcus Curtius, brandishing a battle-axe, was represented on a great white, rearing horse, on the point of plunging into the street, and close below him a Roman soldier in a crouching position, with right arm uplifted in self-protection, as though fearful that the rider would fall upon and crush him. Beyond this doorway there were no windows on the ground floor, but merely a few small apertures. Holbein covered this surface with arches and pillars with festoons, and a low wall below. Over this wall the spectator was supposed to obtain a view of the stabling below the level of the street, with a groom in charge of a fine horse, the latter attached to a ring at the foot of a lofty column, surmounted by a figure of Hebe. Between the windows on the floor above stood a fat and youthful Bacchus, crowned with vine-leaves, and holding a cup in his hand, and at his feet a cask with a second boy asleep against it, and a cat stealing away with a mouse in her mouth. Above this floor the treatment was mainly architectural, following the lines of that on the Eisengasse frontage. The general effect produced by the whole decoration must have been an exceptionally gay and brilliant one, both from the effective manner in which Holbein made free use of the Renaissance style of architecture, and from the joyous life and movement of the numerous figures depicted. The decoration was intended to amuse as well as to delight, and the tricks of perspective, together with a realism the main purpose of which was to deceive the eye, were conceived as a jest which should provide a source of continual interest and merriment to the passing citizens. Such a method of covering house walls had little in common with the work he had seen in Italy, except in the sumptuousness of its setting. Although it may have sinned against many of the right principles of mural decorative art, it nevertheless appealed strongly to the fancy and taste of the Baselers of that day, and “took the town” so completely that it set a fashion which lasted many years. The humour and realism of it, however, were by no means its foremost features; in many ways it must have produced a decorative effect of great beauty and richness. Though he gave free play to his fantastic imagination, he at the same time kept it within reasonable bounds, so that it never offended against good taste, except in a certain freedom of representation in some of the dancing couples, but was always subordinate to the higher aims of his art. [Sidenote: WALL-PAINTING FOR AMERBACH HOUSE] There is a large tracing of the design in the Basel Gallery, which has evidently been taken from Holbein’s original drawing, and there are other copies, almost contemporary, of his original studies for portions of the work, one showing the lower part of the side wall with the horse and groom. The Berlin Print Room, as already noted, possesses the very beautiful drawing from Holbein’s own hand, which is the original study for the front façade, showing the musicians and three of the dancing couples of the “Bauerntanz,” with which the Basel tracing is in close agreement, while in the Amerbach Collection there is a slighter version, with certain variations, of the upper portion of the Berlin drawing, showing the balcony with figures. It is a chalk and pen drawing, touched with Indian ink.[264] Dr. Woltmann suggested that the man with the flat cap on the extreme left of the balcony in the Berlin drawing, who is looking down into the street, is intended for a portrait of Holbein himself. In addition, the Basel Gallery possesses good copies of the frieze with the dancers (No. 353),[265] and of the portion of the façade with the mounted figure of Marcus Curtius,[266] made by the glass-painter Niklaus Rippel in 1623 and 1590 respectively. Rippel was master of the Basel Painters’ Guild in 1587. The “Curtius” drawing is inscribed “in frontispicio domus,” and is evidently a faithful transcript of the original; so much so that by its means it is possible to obtain a very adequate idea of the grandeur of Holbein’s design, more particularly in the magnificent group of the horse and its armed rider, in which the Mantegnesque influence is unmistakable. Finally, there is in the same Gallery an excellent reconstruction of the whole frontage (No. 352), a water-colour drawing made by H. E. von Berlepsch in 1878, based upon the Berlin study and the sixteenth-century copies of Holbein’s sketches.[267] One or two original studies remain, which were evidently made as designs for exterior wall-paintings of which all record has been lost. There is a slight but masterly washed pen drawing in the Amerbach Collection (Pl. 40 (1)),[268] representing the upper part of a house in which the irregularly-placed windows have been adapted with the greatest skill to suit the purposes of the elaborate scheme of Italian architecture, one part of which is made to recede by a series of flat columns with ornamented capitals seen in sharp perspective, while the other half appears to project, and shows the seated figure of an Emperor, possibly Charlemagne, between two windows, to which Holbein has given rounded arches with a medallion between them containing an antique head. Dr. Ganz is, no doubt, right in his suggestion that this drawing is a study for a scheme of decoration for the façade of the family house of the Amerbachs in the Rheingasse, in Little Basel, and that the figure of the enthroned Emperor is a pictorial representation of the name—“zum Kaiserstuhl”—by which the house was known. Probably Holbein received a commission for its decoration in 1519, at the time he was painting Bonifacius Amerbach’s portrait.[269] In the same collection there is a design for a framework to surround an ordinary square-headed window, either for internal or external wall-painting,[270] over which he has thrown an ornamented arch filled in with scalloping, and crowned with a brazier from which flames are blowing. It is supported by pillars of elaborate and fantastic design, broken up into various bands of rich ornament, among them ox skulls with small hanging garlands. At the base, on each side, is a nude figure of a woman with a basket of fire on her head. The window, only one half of which is shown, is supported below with corbels, the central one with a grotesque head with an iron ring suspended from its mouth. A third sketch, for the ground floor of the Hertenstein house, has been already described.[271] VOL. I., PLATE 40. [Illustration: