Holbein: Renaissance Master, Elizabeth Goldring, Yale University Press, £40

One of art’s most significant sliding-door moments came in 1523 when Albrecht Dürer prevaricated over painting a portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Dürer was the most famous painter north of the Alps, Erasmus a scholar and theologian of international repute. The pair had met in 1520 for at least two sittings – one in Antwerp, one in Brussels – but three years later there was nothing to show from Dürer’s drawings and studies. A frustrated Erasmus, then living in Basel, lost patience and turned instead to the most celebrated artist in the city, Hans Holbein the Younger. At this point Holbein was a painter of local renown. The commission from Erasmus would change his life.

Erasmus wanted not just one but multiple portraits to disburse as gifts to his wide circle of European friends and correspondents, among them Henry VIII of England. In her immaculate and scholarly study of the artist, Elizabeth Goldring describes how Holbein set about creating two versions of an Erasmus portrait for copying; a ‘thinking type’ and a ‘writing type’. The humanist could choose which image of his contemplative self was best suited to each recipient.

Over the course of the sittings the older man developed a quasi-paternal interest in the painter, which was further cemented when Erasmus sent two of his new portraits to the English court and another one to François I in France – advertising both himself and his painter. In 1526, Holbein decided to follow his pictures to England in the hope, as Erasmus wrote to a friend, ‘of scraping together a few angels’ – an angel being both a patron and a 10-shilling piece. He also took with him a letter of introduction to Thomas More in which Erasmus asked his old acquaintance to allow Holbein to lodge with him and help him find sitters. He sweetened the request with the gift of another of those portraits.

So Holbein arrived in London at a propitious moment. As a contemporary Italian visitor noted: ‘I am of the opinion, all things considered, that it is a very rich, populous, and mercantile city, but not beautiful.’ Nor was there any established native school of painting or even a taste for portraiture. There was opportunity here for ‘a wonderful artist’, as More, on the cusp of becoming Lord Chancellor, described the newest member of his household.

As Goldring points out, Holbein had a gift for landing on his feet and here he was, with the support of a powerful patron and the Henrician court waiting for him. Had he stayed in Basel his career would have been measured in burgher portraits and civic commissions, while in Italy he would have had to contend with Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and Titian among a host of others.

During his two stays in England, 1526-28 and 1532-43, Holbein made full use of both his skill and the fall of the dice. Goldring, in her thorough and inventive scouring of the archives, even retrieves a plan of More’s Chelsea home, the Great House, and finds the only two spots where Holbein’s huge and influential group portrait (now destroyed) of the More family could have hung. Indeed, she suggests it was Holbein who instigated the British fashion for displaying portraits in long galleries where previously tapestries had pride of place (Cardinal Wolsey owned hundreds of them). It was Holbein’s preternatural skill, unprecedented in England, that meant that More’s words in Utopia had real meaning: it was through ‘the ymages of notable men’, he suggested, ‘that the glory and renowne of the ancestors may stirre and prouoke their posteritie to virtue’.

If Goldring, with an extraordinary command of the archives, assiduously charts Holbein’s professional career, his personality is harder to re-imagine. There are no letters or treatises from his hand but a smattering of vivid details that give him independent life. He pronounced velvet with a heavy accent as ‘felbet’; in Basel he was in charge of the beer stocks of his guild and in London Henry granted him a lucrative licence to buy and export 600 tuns of beer; he was generous in his support of the wife – Elspeth – and family he left behind when he moved to England and to the new one he started in London, with an unnamed woman who bore him two children; and he was not shy of an altercation, being fined for brawling in Basel and again for a knife fight with a Lucerne goldsmith. In London he even struck an earl who had barged into his workshop demanding to have his portrait painted. When the affronted nobleman complained to the king, Henry replied: ‘I can make seven earls (if it pleased me) from seven peasants – but I could not make one Hans Holbein, or so excellent an artist, out of seven earls.’ A colourful anecdote but a bit too close to one told about Dürer by the 16^th-century biographer Karel van Mander in his book of artists’ lives necessarily to be true.

If More was the most important figure during Holbein’s first English sojourn, Thomas Cromwell took that role during his second. As he had with Erasmus and More, he produced a template for paintings of Cromwell, both large and in miniature, for dissemination. And with Cromwell the most important man in England beside Henry himself, Holbein had access not just to the court but to the person of Henry himself.

The sheer range of his output was daunting: at least 200 designs for metalware and jewellery (alas, none survive); book illustrations and frontispieces; temporary decorations for diplomatic summits and Anne Boleyn’s coronation; wall paintings such as the Whitehouse Mural (1636-37, again, destroyed) that showed Henry VIII in the now celebrated legs akimbo, hand-on-hip, codpiece-thrusting pose with Jane Seymour and his parents; and drawings and portrait miniatures – he painted one for Margaret Roper, More’s daughter, to smuggle to him in prison as he awaited execution, though what he felt as he made this little gift to his old patron can only be imagined.

As Goldring stresses, for all his adroit handling of the dangerous mood swings of the court, Holbein first and foremost ran a business, maintaining a workshop in Aldgate (in a crown property loaned by the king) as well as in Basel, which continued to produce copies of his Erasmus portraits. Almost nothing is known about his assistants, although his son Philipp was a goldsmith in Paris. Nevertheless, despite the demand for his work across various media, Holbein frequently made requests for advances on his annual £30 stipend as King’s Painter.

It was Holbein’s versatility that made him indispensable to a King who came to understand, as his marital, religious and political woes intensified, the potency of image making. Famously, Holbein was used by Henry in his increasingly desperate Europe-wide search for brides. Dispatched to the Continent to provide a visual representation to supplement the verbal descriptions of Henry’s diplomats, Holbein drew both Christina of Denmark (the sketches he made for the full-length portrait now in the National Gallery were taken in three hours) and Anne of Cleves. Indeed, Holbein was himself an effective diplomat, using his German heritage to gain access to Anne and her sister Amalia and overcoming the hostility of their politician-chaperone who bridled at the English delegation’s request to make their portraits: ‘wolde yow see theym nakydde?’

Somehow Holbein survived the debacle of Henry’s seven-month marriage to Anne, the king blaming Cromwell’s machinations rather than Holbein’s likeness. It was death, probably from the plague, and not royal disfavour that cut short his life; he perished in London in 1543 aged around 45. Holbein was buried in an unmarked grave, a bitter irony that the man who had done so much to fix the living likenesses of the king and his circle for succeeding centuries should lose his own identity.