I am in the Haus of Holbein, to quote the techno number from the hit musical Six. Or anyway, I am in the house of Windsor, which still owns many of Renaissance artist Hans Holbein’s portraits of the Tudor court. They will go on show at the Queen’s Gallery next month but I’m getting a sneak preview in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.
The man in front of me could do with a shave. I can see the dark stubble on his face as he seems about to break into a gentle smile. That five o’clock shadow is part of the informality of Holbein’s drawing of Thomas More, the author of Utopia who was executed in 1535. It makes me feel that I am actually meeting this Renaissance thinker.
This and the other drawings by Holbein are some of the most startling portraits in existence. Holbein painted Tudor people against deep blue backgrounds, meticulously depicting their jewels, furs and pets. He based these paintings on drawings from life, many of which are here, in the Royal Library. They are so drop-dead accurate and apparently impassive that they resemble photographs. “I am a camera with its shutter open, quiet, recording, not thinking.” That declaration, by the narrator of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, seems to describe Holbein at the Tudor court.
Born in Augsburg, Germany, into a family of artists, Holbein initially carved a career in Basel, a centre of Renaissance publishing and ideas on the Rhine, before moving to England where he specialised in portraits. His intimate preparatory drawings of his English subjects are on music-style stands for me to study up close: next to More is his daughter-in-law Anne Cresacre, her grey-blue eyes dreamy as she looks into the distance; in another drawing, Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third queen and the only one to bear him his longed-for son, looks slightly oppressed by having to keep still for the “camera” that was Holbein.
These portraits really do seem to have the objectivity of photographs. David Hockney, in his book Secret Knowledge, argued that Renaissance artists used early forms of camera to capture such lifelike images. The problem with his thesis is that Renaissance artists were not “secretive” about their innovative techniques. Albrecht Dürer published illustrations of how to use a perspective machine to get spatial construction right and Leonardo da Vinci described a camera obscura, without suggesting any artistic use for it.
Yet if there are any Renaissance portraits that look truly photographic, they are Holbein’s. Here, in the Royal Library where I can even hold up the drawings to see their reverse sides and the little pinpricks through which Holbein pushed chalk to transfer their outlines to canvas, it’s clear what’s going on in these hypnotic drawings.
They are meant to impress the client. Holbein would work them up into paintings later, but to get the lucrative commissions to do so, he first had to astound sitters with his pictorial science. That is why most of his portrait drawings have colour subtly added. They’re finished, in their own way - enough to awe. First you posed, keeping still. Then he put some warming tints on the sketch. When he let you see yourself, it must have seemed miraculous.
In the Royal Library’s conservation workshop, I have the chance to look at Holbein’s miniatures through a powerful microscope. These pocket-sized portraits, usually circular, could be carried around as a token of love or loyalty. The microscope reveals the incredible detail these tiny portraits possess, from jewellery to a single strand of hair. How did he include such intricate observations on such a tiny scale, too small to be noticed by the naked eye? Surely he used an optical device, maybe along the lines of a jeweller’s eyeglass.
However he did it, the intention was surely to amaze. Holbein came to Britain because it was getting harder to work in Basel, where the Reformation frowned on religious art. Up to this point he’d painted altarpieces, allegories, even housefronts. But Tudor Britain was the perfect context for a genre that was simple, universal and irresistible: the portrait. A portrait crossed language barriers. There are notes by Holbein on his drawings: early on he scribbles only in German. Later, you see him add English words as he makes headway with the language.
Yet, as he found out more about this strange country where he’d washed up, he became increasingly reserved in his art. The more he knew about the Tudor court, the more he concealed himself. This is what the drawings in the Royal Library confirm. I am struck by the intimacy of the first portraits Holbein did in London, his studies of Thomas More and his family. Bearing a letter of recommendation from the renowned theologian Erasmus, he was commissioned to paint a group portrait in More’s Chelsea riverside home. The painting is lost. But the drawings take you back five centuries to spend time with this family, all of them relatable.
John More, Thomas’s son has his face in a book, probably from his father’s library. His fuzz of brown hair escapes from his flat cap as he reads intently. These were bookish people. And as he reads, Holbein clearly sketched fast and loose – John’s clothes are captured as rapid stripy notations. This is a living, breathing moment.
It’s not that Holbein’s later drawings are any less alive. Although it can’t have been easy drawing Jane Seymour: weighted with the pressure of a formal royal portrait, her eyes are energised, her dimple humanising. Yet the shift, though subtle, is unmistakable.
Holbein portrayed More and his family like a friend among friends. His later depictions of courtiers are just as brilliant but not as affectionate. He poses people more formally and looks at them more carefully. The poet Thomas Wyatt has a fleshy wide face behind his dark beard: his eyes look off to the side, as if checking the door. Artist and sitter are both on their guard. Wyatt looks watchful as Holbein watches him. Holbein catches at him square on, as if he were a material object, a specimen. But why the spooked looks? Wyatt explains in a poem: beware of courts, he warns, for “circa Regna tonat” – “around thrones thunder rolls”.
The thunder started when Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The Pope’s refusal to help led to the English Reformation, and decades of death and paranoia. More was beheaded. Wyatt survived narrowly after being arrested on suspicion of adultery with Anne Boleyn - and may have seen her execution from his prison window in the Tower of London.
Holbein had come to London to escape the anti-art attitudes of the Reformation but it was out of the frying pan into the fire. Compared with the friendliness of his drawings of the More family, his later portraits are scrupulously objective. He captures faces with a precision that takes your breath away, while guarding against getting too close to the wrong people. Never again.
In the Windsor Castle conservation department, Holbein’s miniatures have been taken out of their cases to show how they were painted on vellum, backed by playing cards. You can identify the cards from which the circles have been cut: red hearts, black clubs, royal personages. It’s extraordinary to think these cards were dealt and handled 500 years ago, perhaps in candlelit inns that Holbein frequented. I suspect he was an excellent player, cards close to his chest.
• Holbein at the Tudor Court opens on 10 November at the Queen’s Gallery, London
