In the wake of the wonderful exhibition of Hans Holbein the Younger's portraiture at the Getty Research Institute and the Morgan Library & Museum in 2021, new admirers of the artist and long-term fans alike will be pleased to find an affordable new biography of the artist, most famous to readers of this journal as a court artist to Henry VIII. Jeanne Nuechterlein's contribution to Reaktion Press's wonderful Renaissance Lives series, Hans Holbein: The Artist in a Changing World, is a thorough account of the many facets of Holbein's oeuvre (to be transparent: this reviewer is also participating in the series, writing on Lucas Cranach the Elder). In its breadth of coverage, Nuechterlein's book is one of the most robust offerings in the series.
Each of the five chapters consists largely of chains of close readings of paintings, prints, and drawings along a given theme. Nuechterlein's readings are extraordinarily meticulous in her attention to detail, leaving no cranny unswept. Commendably, this meticulousness extends well beyond Holbein's major works, or even his works in the media mentioned above: Nuechterlein addresses, for example, metalcut illustration cycles, a design for a metalwork cup, and a hitherto relatively obscure small watercolor fragment depicting a ship. To these, she applies an intensity of attention one might expect would be due mostly to altarpieces or high-end portraiture.
Nuechterlein's thoroughness produces unexpected delights. For example, the watercolor of the ship occasions a fascinating excursus into ship construction practices of the time. This excursus includes a rumination, removed from Holbein's known interests, on the ships used in what Nuechterlein calls “voyages of discovery” (175). Here she is presumably referring to certain Europeans’ fifteenth- and sixteenth-century travel to the Americas and elsewhere outside Europe, lands generally well populated and thus not truly discoverable; this phrase, excluding all but the European point of view, unfortunately resembles her previous comment about how much Asia “was then known” (154). Nevertheless, even more planetarily oriented enthusiasts of the early modern period will enjoy, as this reviewer often did, the detailed detours guided by Nuechterlein's confident command of broader history.
Rather than take a chronological approach to a figure who is, as Nuechterlein notes, far less well documented than is the typical major early modern artist, she proceeds according to themes that cross conceptual frameworks; she organizes some chapters around early modern key concepts like Reformation or observation, and others around patronage, for example. Prudently, in the book's first chapter, “Techniques, Materials, Skill,” Nuechterlein lays the foundation for understanding Holbein's flexibility and virtuosity throughout the following chapters. This exhaustive analysis of Holbein's artistic process with a wide range of examples outside painting should prove eminently teachable for students whose entry to art history comes through an interest in making.
In the next chapter, “Education, Knowledge, Styles,” Nuechterlein draws on her expertise in the context of Renaissance humanism, building on frameworks from her previous book on the artist, Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric (2011). The fluidity of authorship as print culture began to negotiate questions of intellectual property and the ease with which, as Nuechterlein observes, print designs could be reused for multiple projects feels very much in line with the kind of changeability and flexibility she identifies as Holbein's principal attribute, though she does not make this connection explicit. Similarly, rather than come to overly strong conclusions about Holbein's navigation of various styles, she usefully documents the many twists and turns of his stylistic choices.
In the third chapter, on “Religion, Reformation, Politics,” Nuechterlein covers Holbein's work in service of the traditional visual culture of the Roman church and cautiously suggests evidence of potential expressions of reformist ideas in later religiously oriented works. (Some accounts of theological positions here may occasionally feel reductive or overstated to scholars of the Reformation, but will no doubt be helpful as general orientation for less specialist readers.) Though Nuechterlein is not one for wild speculation, this reviewer is grateful that she directly raises and answers the question of why Holbein, with all his experience and skill in the art of woodcut illustration, almost never participated in the crudity-flinging tropes of Reformation propaganda: he was probably too committed to the sensibility of a more sophisticated market to do so.
The range of subject matter presented in “Science, Observation, Manipulation,” the fourth chapter, makes it the stand-out section of the book alongside the final chapter. Aside from the opening reference to the Americas, which again seemed superfluous to Holbein's ambit, in this chapter Nuechterlein collects fascinating, often off-art examples that demonstrate her central thesis of Holbein's adaptability and versatility. Her analyses also reinforce her long-held conviction that Holbein's interest in observation of the natural world always came in service of artifice, of the artistic effects that so dazzled his wealthy patrons.
Much of the final chapter, “Patrons, Status, Court,” serves as an excellent visual history of London's elite from the late 1520s onward. Full of insight into the many forms of portraiture commissioned from Holbein, from the highest royalty to the upper middle class of merchants, especially from London's Hanseatic community, this chapter will be a rich resource to scholars working on this period and the nonspecialist readers Nuechterlein seems to target with her straightforward writing style throughout.
Although there are occasionally questionable attributions left largely unquestioned (see, for example, pages 87 and 111), art history is, after all, more interesting when it is inclusive than when not. Nuechterlein's biography overall presents the most solid foundational text on Holbein yet, for readers both new to and familiar with the artist's work. Scholars of British art in particular will find this a helpful account of a changeable artist who left behind image-skeptic Reformed Basel to cultivate a new audience for impressive feats of mimesis as the great artificer of the English king.
