Painter of the Bible
Hans Holbein the Younger
Hans Holbein the Younger is best known as the great court portraitist of Tudor England, but his religious work — and especially his Reformation-era illustrated Bible — is large and consequential.
Their faith
Why Hans Holbein the Younger painted Christ
Hans Holbein the Younger, born in 1497 in Augsburg, was deeply rooted in the Christian faith, which significantly influenced his artistic journey. Trained in his father's workshop, Holbein settled in Basel, a hub of Reformation thought, where he married and became an active member of the painters' guild. His early collaborations with publishers, particularly his designs for Erasmus's Greek New Testament, reflect his commitment to the dissemination of scripture. Holbein's faith resonated through his work, as he sought to illustrate profound biblical truths and moral lessons, contributing to the spiritual dialogue of his time. His engagement with the Reformation's ideals underscored his devotion to portraying the divine and the human condition through art.
Holbein's religious works, though fewer in number, are remarkable in their depth and craftsmanship. The 'Solothurn Madonna' (1522) and the 'Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb' (1521) exemplify his ability to convey the sacred through meticulous detail and emotional resonance. The latter painting, described by Dostoevsky as capable of shaking one's faith, invites viewers to confront the reality of Christ's sacrifice and mortality. Holbein's illustrated Bible and woodcut series, such as the 'Dance of Death,' engage with themes of life, death, and the eternal, reflecting his understanding of scripture's moral weight. Through his art, Holbein continues to inspire viewers, inviting them to reflect on their own faith journeys and the profound mysteries of Christianity.
Life & work
Hans Holbein the Younger is best known as the great court portraitist of Tudor England, but his religious work — and especially his Reformation-era illustrated Bible — is large and consequential. Born in Augsburg in 1497 to the painter Hans Holbein the Elder, trained in his father's workshop, he settled in Basel by his early twenties, married there in 1519, and joined the city's painters' guild the following year. Switzerland in those years was the printing capital of Northern Europe, and Holbein's most important early projects were collaborations with the Basel publishers — designs for the title pages of Erasmus's Greek New Testament (1516 and later editions), portraits of Erasmus himself, and a sequence of woodcut series cut from his drawings by professional formschneiders.
Two of those series shape the European visual imagination of Scripture and mortality. The Icones Veteris Testamenti, published in Lyon in 1538, contained ninety-four small woodcuts illustrating the Old Testament from the Creation to the prophetic books — distributed across European Bibles in dozens of editions for the rest of the sixteenth century. The Dance of Death, also published in Lyon in 1538, set forty-one woodcut scenes of Death visiting people of every estate, from the pope to the ploughman; it remains the canonical visual treatment of the medieval danse macabre theme.
His painted religious work is small in number but very high in finish: the Solothurn Madonna (1522, Solothurn), the Darmstadt Madonna (also called the Madonna of Burgomaster Meyer, 1526–28, Würth Collection), the Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521, Kunstmuseum Basel) — a horizontal coffin-perspective view of the body of Christ that Dostoevsky, four centuries later, said could "make a man lose his faith."
He moved to England permanently in 1532 and became court painter to Henry VIII by 1535, producing the great series of Tudor portraits — Thomas More, Erasmus, Henry VIII, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Christina of Denmark — for which he is now most remembered. He died in London in 1543, probably of plague.
Notable works in detail
The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb
The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, painted by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1521 in oil and tempera on a long horizontal lime-wood panel and now in the Kunstmuseum Basel, is one of the most original and most disturbing treatments of the dead Christ in the entire history of European Christian painting. The composition shows the body of Christ stretched out at full length inside a stone sarcophagus, the panel itself almost the same width as the figure; the head is fallen back, the eyes and mouth open, the right hand resting on the chest, the wound in the side visible. There is no Virgin, no John, no Magdalene — no mourning at all — only the body. The flesh tones are rendered with extraordinary literal-mindedness as the colors of recent death: greenish-grey on the limbs, faintly purple at the wounds. The novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who saw the painting in Basel in 1867, described it in The Idiot as a painting that could shake a viewer's faith in the Resurrection; the description fairly captures the painting's effect on every viewer who has stood in front of it since.
The Last Judgment, from "The Dance of Death"
The Last Judgment, from the Dance of Death series of woodcuts designed by Hans Holbein the Younger around 1521 and published as a small bound book in Lyon in 1538, is among the most reproduced of the forty-one tiny printed images that make up the cycle. The composition shows the resurrected dead emerging from open graves in the foreground, Christ enthroned in judgment in the upper register with the apostles ranged around him, and Death — personified as a skeleton — moving among the rising figures with his usual indifference. The Dance of Death series, designed in Basel during Holbein's late twenties and engraved on small woodblocks by the Basel printmaker Hans Lützelburger, was one of the most-reprinted moralizing print cycles of the entire sixteenth century; editions in Latin, French, German, English, and Italian circulated through Europe for over a century after Holbein's death.
Bible scenes Hans Holbein the Younger painted
Revelation
1 Corinthians
