Hans Holbein

In the first full biography of Holbein for 80 years Derek Wilson marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of one of the most original and popular Renaissance artists. He reveals Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) to us as a complex and fascinating man who knew and was influenced by the greatest thinkers of the age. He developed his own distinctive attitudes towards religion, politics and social life as he moved among stalwart burghers, merchant adventurers and the bejewelled denizens of a glittering court. The Elizabethan artist Nicholas Hilliard recognised him as 'the greatest Master in [portraiture] that ever was'. Yet the range of Holbein's talent went far beyond painting likenesses. He was constantly in demand for trompe-l'oeil murals and intricate jewellery designs, and he revolutionized book illustration. He produced Catholic altarpieces and Protestant propaganda engravings, woodcuts and drawings depicting the stories of the Bible. Derek Wilson draws on a wealth of research to challenge old assumptions about Holbein and to extend our knowledge of the Renaissance and the Reformation. He presents the artist as a man inextricably bound up in the stirring events of a creative and turbulent age; a man who knew Erasmus, Thomas More, Henry VIII and many of the sixteenth century's wielders of power and intellect; a man committed above all things to truth, who battled his own way through the cross-currents of religious and political change and, while pilgrimaging from Augsburg via Basel to London, found his ultimate fulfilment as a member of Thomas Cromwell's intelligence and propaganda organization.