Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ... HOLBEIN THE name of Holbein calls up Immediately in the mind a series of portraits somewhat stiff in attitude, rather primitive in their lack of light and shade, but incomparable in their masterly draughtsmanship and their expression of character. To the true connoisseur it calls up first of all, perhaps, that wonderful series of drawings preserved at Windsor Castle, studies for portraits of persons connected with the English court, which are even more remarkable than the paintings executed from some of them for the masterful use of what seem inadequate means--drawings which express the full power of the sixteenth century in the technique of a hundred years ear her. Considered in itself there is something enigmatic in this contrast of matter and manner, but the puzzle becomes more baffling when one considers these drawings and paintings in connection with the early work of the man who produced them. We are too apt to forget this early work. When we begin to study it we find that Holbein's development was in the reverse direction of that of almost all other artists, that his methods grow more primitive as he grows older, and that his earlier productions, if we except the mere prentice work of his extreme youth, are much freer in movement, richer in composition, fuller in light and shade, every way more modern than the works of his full maturity. Born at Augsburg, almost at the very end of the fifteenth century, twenty-six years later than Diirer and twenty years after the date usually given as that of the birth of Titian, Holbein was a child of the high Renaissance and, slowly as the Renaissance crept northward, fell early under Italian influence. At Basel, where he began his independent career at about the age of seventeen or eighteen, ..