CHAPTER II

YOUTHFUL DAYS IN AUGSBURG Birth of Hans Holbein the Younger—Forgeries of dates on early pictures attributed to him—Various portraits bearing on the question of the year of his birth—His early life in Augsburg—The family house on the Vorderer Lech—Early training in his father’s studio—Hans Burgkmair—Augsburg and the decorative arts. NO absolutely conclusive proof has yet been discovered of the exact date of the birth of Hans Holbein the Younger. For years the question was complicated by more than one forgery of dates and signatures on certain pictures in Augsburg, and by spurious amplifications made in the modern copies taken from certain entries in the annals of the convent of St. Catherine. Owing to these forgeries, Dr. Woltmann, in the first edition of his book,[66] advanced the opinion that Holbein was born in 1495; but before the publication of the first volume of the second edition of his work, in 1874, these inscriptions and entries had been proved to be falsifications, and he then altered the date to 1497,[67] and this is now generally accepted as correct. Equal doubt existed at one time as to the place of his birth. Among earlier writers, Carel van Mander (1604) and Patin (1676) stated that he was born in Basel, while Matthis Quad gave his birthplace as Grünstadt in the Palatinate. Sandrart (1675) was the first biographer to name Augsburg, which modern research has shown to be correct. The forgeries, no doubt, were the result of the discovery that Holbein was not a Swiss, as had been usually supposed, and were intended to supply convincing evidence that he was of German origin, and a citizen of Augsburg, and also to furnish proof of the precocity of his youthful genius. [Sidenote: THE YOUNGER HOLBEIN’S BIRTH] The chief forgery was an inscription on a picture in the Augsburg Gallery (Nos. 74-77), dated 1512, which until 1845 had always been rightly regarded as the work of the elder Holbein. This picture is one of the four panels which originally formed the inner and outer sides of the two shutters of an altar-piece or shrine painted for the convent of St. Catherine.[68] The two inner panels represent the Martyrdom of St. Catherine[69] and the Legend of St. Ulrich, the patron saint of Augsburg; the outer ones the Crucifixion of St. Peter, and the Virgin and St. Anne teaching the Infant Christ to walk. On the panel representing St. Catherine the date 1512 occurs on a votive tablet containing a Latin prayer to the saint, while on the old original frame the name of the painter, “Hans Holbain,” the two last letters of the surname now defaced, stands in gold letters.[70] It was upon the panel representing the Virgin and St. Anne with the Infant Christ[71] that the false inscription was placed. In this picture Mary and her Mother are seated, each holding a hand of the youthful Saviour, who stands between them on the bench making his first attempts to walk. Three small angels hold up a curtain behind them, and at the top of the panel is a band of rich Renaissance ornamentation, with two cupids blowing horns.[72] St. Anne holds an open book on her lap with her left hand; and when, in 1854, the panel was separated from its obverse side and cleaned and restored, a Latin inscription upon this book came to light, parts of which were hidden by the hand of the saint. This inscription stated that the picture had been painted “by order of the venerable and most pious mother Veronica Welser—Hans Holbain, of Augsburg, at the age of 17.”[73] Before this Dr. Waagen[74] and several other critics had attributed this altar-piece to the younger Holbein because of supposed differences in style between it and the greater number of the authenticated works by the father. The newly-discovered inscription, which was accepted as genuine by Dr. Woltmann and most German writers, was considered to afford final proof of the truth of Waagen’s contention, though a few, among them Herman Grimm, refused to credit it. It was not until after the death of A. Eigner, the keeper of the Augsburg Gallery, and the originator of the falsification, in November 1870, that it was possible to apply a practical test to it, with the result that it proved to be a modern forgery. Upon the application of turpentine the whole of the inscription disappeared, and traces of a much earlier and badly-defaced one were found beneath it. The discovery of its fictitious nature led to further investigation, and the final abandonment of the date 1495 as the year of the painter’s birth, while the picture is now rightly restored to the older artist who painted it. [Sidenote: THE YOUNGER HOLBEIN’S BIRTH] Far more reliable proof as to the correct date of Holbein’s birth is afforded by the fine silver-point drawing by the elder painter, in the Berlin Museum, of the heads of his two sons (Pl. 6).[75] Between the heads is written “Holbain,” and over that of the younger boy on the right the word “Hanns,” with the age “14” above the name. Over the head of the elder boy on the left the shortened name “Prosy” is still legible. Probably the first syllable, “Am,” has become obliterated in course of time, or it may be that the father merely set down his nickname, “Prosy.”[76] The age of Ambrosius, which must also have been added, is now entirely effaced. At the top of the sheet is placed the date, which to-day is barely legible. Dr. Woltmann read it as “1511,” which would give the birth-year of Hans as 1497, and this reading is now generally accepted. The same writer imagined that he could trace the figure “5” above the head of Ambrosius, which would make his age fifteen, and thus one year older than his brother. In the drawing itself, however, he appears to be at least two or three years the senior. Dr. Willy Hes, in his recently-published book on Ambrosius Holbein, states that this now almost obliterated age-figure is “17,” and this is probably correct.[77] Both heads are full of character. The younger boy, with round face, and straight hair falling on his forehead and covering his ears, though not a child of much personal beauty, has a pleasant, thoughtful expression. The forehead is a fine one, projecting over the eyes, and showing, according to phrenologists, a strongly-developed power of imagination, while the mouth is large and determined. Ambrosius has more mobile features, and a mass of curling hair. This drawing, which at one time was attributed to the younger Hans, is one of the most masterly in the Berlin series, and shows how largely the son’s great gift of lifelike portraiture was inherited from his father. [Sidenote: THE YOUNGER HOLBEIN’S BIRTH] Dr. Hes also publishes a second drawing by the elder Holbein from the Berlin collection,[78] which, as he was the first to point out, undoubtedly represents the two boys at an earlier age. This silver-point drawing, hitherto known merely as “Portraits of two Children,” and bearing the inscription “Thomasins Sohn und Tochter” in a later hand, represents the two boys in profile, facing one another. It is not of such fine quality as the drawing of 1511, but the likeness to Ambrosius and Hans is unmistakable. In this earlier study Dr. Hes considers the age of the boys to be eight and five respectively. The further researches of the same writer have resulted in his discovery of a third likeness of the elder son from his father’s pencil, a beautiful drawing of a curly-haired lad with looks cast downwards. It is among the silver-point drawings of Hans Holbein the Elder in the Basel collection,[79] and seems to be connected with two other works by the Augsburg master, both also at Basel, for which, perhaps, it may have served as a preliminary study. One is an Indian-ink study for a “Death of Mary,” and the other a large oil-painting of the same subject (No. 301). In both the features of the youthful St. John, who bends over the Virgin with palm-branch and long candle in either hand, are evidently those of Ambrosius. This drawing[80] is dated 1508 on a slate hanging at the head of the bed, so that the “St. John” represents the boy at the age of about fourteen. A still more youthful figure, with long hair, stands behind the wooden head of the bed, with clasped hands, gazing down at the Virgin. It may be suggested, though Dr. Hes does not call attention to it, that in this figure we have a third likeness of the younger Hans. The resemblance to the heads in the two drawings is not as close as in the case of Ambrosius, but is sufficiently so to permit the conjecture that the father intended to introduce both his boys into the picture to be painted from this study. The connection between these drawings and the picture at Basel is not, however, very clear. In the oil-painting[81] Mary is enthroned, the arrangement is entirely different, and many more figures are introduced; but the figure and face of the St. John are the same as in the Indian-ink drawing, though seen from the opposite side. According to the Basel catalogue, however, this picture was painted in 1501, and it does not appear very probable that the painter would have used a boy of seven as his model for the Saint. Behind St. John appears the curly head of a young man looking down; and here again, though possibly only in the imagination of the present writer, there is a faint resemblance to Hans the Younger. But this cannot be so if the picture was painted in 1501, when Hans was only four. The same figure of St. John occurs also in the “Death of Mary,”[82] on one of the panels of the Kaisheimer altar-piece at Munich. We have thus, in these drawings, together with the “Basilica of St. Paul” picture of 1504, portraits of Ambrosius Holbein at the ages of eight, ten, fourteen, and seventeen respectively, and of Hans when five, seven, and fourteen,[83] and also, if the likeness in the Indian-ink drawing of 1508 be allowed, at the age of eleven as well. VOL. I., PLATE 6. [Illustration: AMBROSIUS AND HANS HOLBEIN 1511 _Silver-point drawing_ HANS HOLBEIN THE ELDER ROYAL PRINT ROOM, BERLIN ] Further evidence as to his birth-date is afforded by two engravings, by Vorsterman and Hollar respectively, and several miniatures of Holbein by himself, some of the latter being only early copies, all of which are dated 1543, and give the age as forty-five. Vorsterman’s print, which is 4¾ inches in diameter, shows no date on the background, but round the outside is engraved “Ioannes Holbenius Pictor Regis Magnæ Britanniæ Sui Cæculi Celeberrimus Anno 1543 Ætat: 45.” Hollar’s etching is also circular. There is no lettering round the rim, but across the background is inscribed: “HH. Æ. 45—AN^o 1543.” Below is the legend—“Vera Effigies Johannis Holbeinii Basiliensis Pictoris et Deliniatoris rarissimi. Ipse Holbeinius pinxit, Wenceslaus Hollar aqua forti æri insculpsit. Ex Collec: Arundel: 1647.”[84] The original paintings from which these two engravings were taken have not been discovered, but they were, no doubt, two small roundels in oils.[85] In Carel van Mander’s time two such portraits were in existence. He says, when speaking of Holbein’s works then in Amsterdam: “At the house of Jacques Razet, the fine arts amateur, I saw Holbein’s portrait, painted by himself very prettily and neatly, in miniature, with a small margin round it; and in the possession of Bartholomäus Ferreris, I saw a second, about the size of the palm of my hand, excellently and neatly executed in flesh tints.”[86] Sandrart, who was in Amsterdam between 1639 and 1645, gave to the collector Le Blond a small round portrait of Holbein, and this is probably identical with the one which Van Mander saw in the possession of Razet. From Le Blond, who acted as agent for the Earl, it may well have passed into the Arundel Collection before 1647, in which year Hollar etched it. Vorsterman’s engraving is not dated, but it is evidently taken from the same or an almost similar original, and this artist engraved other pictures in the Arundel collection. According to Walpole, the picture in the Earl’s possession was dated. He says, quoting from one of the pocket-books of Richard Symonds:—“In the Arundelian collection was a head of Holbein, in oil, by himself, most sweet, dated 1543.”[87] The various miniatures of the painter, the greater number of which are merely good and almost contemporary copies, described in a later chapter,[88] have all, with one possible exception, the same date, 1543, upon them, and, like the engravings, represent the artist with a beard, wearing a black skull-cap, and, in those which show the hands, in the act of painting. The exception is the fine miniature in the Salting Collection, which is inscribed “ETATIS SVÆ 35,” but is without date. It is almost certain, however, that this miniature does not represent the painter.[89] [Sidenote: HOLBEIN’S BIRTHPLACE] The fact that the inscriptions on these various engravings and miniatures agree as to the date and the age of the painter does not necessarily prove that such date and age were placed by the artist himself upon the original painting on which most of them are based; but the probability is that such was the case, and that Holbein, therefore, was forty-five years old in 1543. Unless, however, more definite evidence is forthcoming in the future, the question must remain undecided, though it is practically certain that his birth took place either in 1497 or 1498. Nothing is known of Holbein’s early life in Augsburg, where he spent the greater part of his first seventeen years. It is not very likely that his father took his family with him upon his painting expeditions to Ulm, Frankfurt, and elsewhere, although he became a burgher of the first-named place for a time. It was the custom at that period for a painter to leave wife and children at home while he visited other centres in search of work or to carry out commissions. The house in which the young Hans is supposed to have been born is still standing in Augsburg, and bears a recording tablet on its front. It is in the Vorderer Lech, No. 496A, one of the quieter streets of the city to-day. It is thus described by Mr. Davies: “The Vorderer Lech obtains its name from the fact that a narrow channel of the Lech runs clear and green down one side of the street, separating the roadway from the houses on the north side. Access is gained to these houses in most instances by a wooden bridge or gangway which leads the visitor under an archway in the house itself. The house of the Holbeins, one of those little whitewashed buildings with the comfortable red-tiled roofs which are so plentiful in the city, has nothing to distinguish it beyond the tablet aforesaid. You pass under the arch, and find on either side the doors (still retaining their ancient hinges) and the open staircase which leads to the separate tenements into which the house is now divided. Ascending the staircase to the right, one finds the little room wherein tradition has it that our Hans Holbein was born, the little kitchen over which his mother presided, and the room which is traditionally regarded as the painting room of Hans Holbein the elder. It looks pleasantly out over enclosed gardens and picturesque roofs up towards the statelier buildings of the Maximilianstrasse. The house is not luxurious, but may well have been a house of no small comfort in the days when the Holbeins held it.”[90] It is impossible to point to any work of this period which can be accepted without question as from the hand of the younger Holbein alone. Both he and his brother Ambrosius received a very thorough training in their father’s workshop, and for the last few years before their departure for Basel they must have taken an active though minor share in the completion of the various commissions which fell to the elder painter. Many attempts have been made to separate the work of the father from that of his sons in such pictures as the “St. Catherine” altar-piece panels of 1512, already described, and the more famous “St. Sebastian” altar-piece in Munich; but the critics have never been able to come to any settled agreement as to the particular parts of these pictures, if any, which were the actual work of the younger Hans. It is only possible to say with some certainty that he must have been employed by his father on the less important portions of his altar-pieces, and that such work would be carried out under the personal direction of the elder painter, who alone was responsible for the general design and composition, and the arrangement of the colour-scheme, if not for the actual painting of the figures and the chief passages of the pictures. It is not possible to allow, as some writers have done, that such figures as the St. Elizabeth and St. Barbara on the shutters of the Munich “St. Sebastian” altar-piece were conceived and carried out by the younger Holbein independently of his father, although he may have shared to some small extent in the actual painting of the panels. They display a more advanced technique, and an art in all ways more matured, than is to be found in the earliest independent work of Holbein’s first Basel period. [Sidenote: THE DECORATIVE ARTS IN AUGSBURG] In his father’s studio Holbein obtained a very complete grounding in all the technical processes of his art, and was encouraged to develop that extraordinary gift for portraiture which he had largely inherited. The family seems to have been so frequently hard-pressed for money that the two boys would be obliged, at as early an age as possible, to begin to work seriously for a living, and in this way would gain much useful practical knowledge and facility in the handling of brush and pencil. In other respects Holbein’s art was apparently more strongly influenced by the example of Hans Burgkmair, who was some twenty-five years his senior, than by that of his own father, and more particularly in his ready assimilation of the newer methods and aspirations springing from the Italian Renaissance, which afterwards became so perfectly blended in his painting with those older forms and conceptions of the Germanic school of the fifteenth century, in which he was first trained in the elder Holbein’s workshop. Burgkmair returned from Italy about 1508, full of enthusiasm for the new movement, and his example must have acted as an inspiration to Holbein’s budding genius. Not only in his pictures and wall-paintings, but in his remarkable designs for woodcuts for the two great works in his own honour projected by the Emperor Maximilian—the “Weisskunig,” and the “Triumphal Procession”—Burgkmair exercised an undoubted influence over his younger contemporary. A year or two later in Basel Holbein’s art appears to have been affected to some extent, though indirectly, by that of Hans Baldung Grien and Matthias Grünewald, through the medium of some painter whose name so far has not been traced.[91] Other causes, too, were at work in moulding him for his future career. The city of Augsburg was exceptionally well fitted for providing incentives to a young artist to develop his powers in many directions. The practice of decorating the more important buildings of the city and the mansions of its merchant-princes with wall-paintings both within and without provided work for numerous artists, and in this way, no doubt, Holbein first began to practise a form of art which a few years later he was to carry to so high a pitch of excellence in Lucerne and Basel. Numerous printers, too, were settled in the city, who provided employment for many wood-engravers and designers of book illustrations and ornamentation—the latter a form of art in which Holbein was very busily engaged during the first ten years of his residence in Switzerland. His skill, too, in making designs for workers in gold and silver, in enamels and painted glass, must have received its first encouragement in Augsburg, which was noted for its craftsmen. Every branch of handicraft, indeed, was practised there. Its armourers, headed by the great Kolman family, were celebrated throughout Europe, while the Augsburg goldsmiths were equally famous for the artistic excellence and fine workmanship of their productions. Among such masters in their various arts the youthful Holbein moved, and it must have been from personal intercourse with them that he gained his first knowledge of design, and how it should be rightfully applied to the service of the several decorative arts, and how best modified to suit the nature of the materials used in each particular handicraft; and that he made the most of his opportunities is proved by the fact that when, a few years later, he started upon an independent career in Basel, the first works he produced show him to have been even at that early age an almost complete master of decorative design. ------------------------------------------------------------------------