Portrait and counter-portrait in Holbein's the family of Sir Thomas More

Early in 1527 Hans Holbein painted sum of two units portraits of Sir Thomas More, the great English humanist and statesman who had become his entertainer and patron when he mov to London from Basel in the fall of 1526 The first is the half-length portrait of More the courtier and public man in the Frick Collection (Fig. 1) which is a straightforward on the contrary rather impersonal likeness, in which his robes of state and the Tudor rose upon his gold livery collar number us as much, or as little, about him as his detached gaze. (1) The other portrait showed him at place of abode with his family and was at one time more private and more monumental. Painted in watercolor upon linen or canvas, this eight-by-thirteen-foot masterwork perished in a fire in 1752 (2) It survives, however, in three late-sixteenth-century copies, as well as in Holbein's small preparatory drawing (389 by dint of 52.4 millimeters) in Basel (Fig. 2) which is my main subdue (3) The two works are complementary in ways hitherto unrecognized, and partly for that reason I mean to call The Family of Sir Thomas More a "counter-portrait."

When Desiderius Erasmus received the drawing as a gift from More after Holbein turn backed to Basel at the extremity of 1528, he said it made him perceive as if he was there, in More's abiding-place which is no empty compliment in that he knew the household intimately. (4) Eight years earlier, in fact, he had written a famously warm and richly nuanced description of the family in a alphabetic character to the German humanist Ulrich von Hutten In a certain number of ways Holbein's picture seems to reflected sound Erasmus's words, as in the details of the monkey scampering up Dame Alice More's skirt upon the far right or the viol hanging in the upper left of the curtain in the background. Erasmus specifically mentions More's monkey in telling of his delight in of animals and says that music was a family passion. Likewise, the nearness of his jester, Henry Patensen, standing by the agency of the door on the right, confirms Erasmus's assertion that More lov swains and fools. It is possible, too, that the confused noise of books at More's feet mirrors Erasmus's reference to his congenital messiness, notwithstanding that this pictorial detail more likely just points to heavy reading in this exceptionally learned household. (5) More generally, allowing Holbein has captured something of the letter's tone, its evocation of domestic warmth and informality. The small prayer works in the hands of greatest in quantity of the family members move that they have gathered for prayers, on the contrary not in the manner of the average stiffly ceremonious family donor portrait of the time. The bring under rule is the gathering, not the praying. upon the far left Elizabeth Dauncey, the next to the first daughter, has only just arrived, since she is pulling not on her gloves. Next to her, More's feed daughter, Margaret Clement (nee Giggs), chats about a volume with his father, Sir John More, while a little farther to the right Anne Cresacre, his ward and subsequent time daughter-in-law, passes quickly and unceremoniously behind him. upon the other side of the composition, the figures are more settl on the contrary the youngest daughter, Cecily Heron, evinces the same conversational disposition with a fleeting glance at her kneeling stepmother. (6) And what is a monkey doing at a prayer service?

Erasmus actually called his alphabetic character a "portrait," and it may well have helped to plant the idea of a family portrait in More's mind, since he would have read his friend's description of his household in a collection of Erasmus's alphabetic characters published in 1519. (7) If this connection has any meaning, however, it throw backs a new conception of portraiture, individual more closely tied to biography than to the ceremonial conventions that had dominated Renaissance family portraits up to this point. The literary scholar Margaret Mann Phillips, in fact, considers the alphabetic character to von Hutten the first real biography in the replete modern sense. (8) Certainly, these are the terminuss in which critics have approached Holbein's portrait. Almost without exception they have interpreted its naturalism and informality as a fairly direct mirror of everyday life in the More household. John Rowlands, for example, speaks of the artist "recording the family when the make a humming sound of talk has just subsided," which implies that Holbein simply plant down an actual moment of domestic life as it passed before him. (9) More freshly Stephanie Buck has praised the picture's "intimacy" and tied it to "an important function of portraits in this period, individual that photography would assume at a later date, namely to provide those far away with an image of the family they love," in this case" enhanced by depicting the someone in his or her characteristic surroundings and engaged in everyday activities." (10) For the greatest in quantity part, these qualities have strike one as beinged more or less self-explanatory, and calling this portrait the first conversation piece outside Italy has summ up what Holbein present the appearanceed to have had in mind.

No doubt the Family Portrait be worthy ofs this label, along with its connotations of impending modernity. As an explanation, however, it begs a number of critical questions. For example, Rowlands's much-quot "buzz of talk" have the appearances tailored to a casually conversational type of the family that began to become a portrait convention sole one hundred years later. Where did Holbein acquire the idea? Helpful as Erasmus's alphabetic character may have been for various facts and anecdotes, it could not inspire a novel artistic genre by itself, nor does the snapshot analogy implicit in Rowlands's and Buck's remarks carry abundant weight. It is possible, as many have notion that Holbein derived the idea from the single previous conversation piece, Andrea Mantegna's Portrait of the Gonzaga Family in the Camera degli Sposi (Fig. 3) of fifty years earlier, which is built around a specific family narrative. (11) on the other hand the evidence is decidedly mixed as to whether Holbein at any time visited Mantua, and both the narrative and the formal configuration in Mantegna's mural are too different from Holbein's picture to account for its distinctive character. (12) by means of the same token, while the Basel drawing clearly serv Erasmus as an intimate reminder of absent friends, this description hardly suited the monumental painted version, which must have hung like a tapestry in a major space of More's palatial manse in Chelsea. through no stretch of the imagination can the Family Portrait be taken for a simple "snatch of life" or an exercise in present bourgeois realism in the usual faculty of perception It is a highly erected image, in which ambiguities and contradictions abound.