Review of the exhibition “Holbein and the Northern Renaissance” at the Städel Museum

The European hit of this winter was the large exhibition “Holbein and the Northern Renaissance” at the Frankfurt Staedel Museum. It tells about the numerous characters that are revealed in this plot hidden behind the terse title, which is extremely important for the history of European art. Alexey Mokrousov.

In fact, the exhibition is not about Holbein, at least not about one, but about two, father and son – both Hans. But, besides them, there are many heroes here: Albrecht Durer, Hans Burgkmair, underestimated by history, the masters of Augsburg, artists of the Italian, Dutch and Westphalian Renaissance, painters, sculptors and graphic artists from Donatello and Sebastian Loscher to Hugo van der Goes and Israel van Mekenen.

All of them are part of the life that was seething in Germany at the turn of the 15th–16th centuries; its center was not where modern centers are. At that time, trade routes intersected in Augsburg, and then political paths intersected – the Reichstags, all-class meetings of the Holy Roman Empire were held here, the German myth ultimately crystallized here, and the consciousness of the German as a European was formed. The city had 30,000 inhabitants, which seemed like a huge number to contemporaries, but in itself it would not have been worth much if not for two families, the Fuggers and the Welsers. They created financial empires that swept Europe, and then the world, they sponsored projects of emperors and popes, lent money to archbishops and archdukes, traded indulgences, equipped ships for overseas expeditions and carried out social work – the quarter built by the Fuggers for poor citizens is still inhabited , this is one of the attractions of modern Augsburg. In response, privileges poured in, for example, the Welsers got exclusive trade with the territories of what is now Venezuela, which enriched them a lot.

Big money means great art: the Fuggers, these Trans-Alpine Medicis, ordered an altar for their home church from Dürer himself and invited the best authors of the era to Augsburg. Hans Holbein the Younger, who worked for them, eventually became the court painter of Henry VIII in England.

The 180 works for the exhibition were selected from the world’s largest museums, from the Louvre, the Prado and the Metropolitan to the British Museum, Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza and Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, not to mention private collectors who wished to remain anonymous. The best represented, of course, are the German collections, not only large ones, but also small ones, such as the collection of the Waldburg-Wolfegg princes or the episcopal collection of Rothenburg.

Before moving on to religious painting, portraits of the elite, book illustration, and Holbein the Elder’s children, Ambrosius and Hans, the curator talks about two phenomena, the artistic one of Augsburg as a whole, and the social one of Jacob Fugger the Younger, nicknamed the Rich; his double portrait with Sibylle Artz by Hans Burgkmair is adjacent to the fantastically beautiful organ doors in the Fugger Chapel by the little-known Jörg Breu the Elder.

Burgkmair (1473–1531), who studied in Alsace with the local genius Martin Schongauer, is known, in particular, as a court graphic artist for Emperor Maximilian I – the artist met him during the Reichstag of 1500 – and as an experimenter, including with a technique so popular among the Italians sanguines. Burgkmair adopted many techniques directly from Italy – he worked in Rome, Milan and Venice and was less conservative than Holbein the Elder, so Holbein the Younger, in fact, inherited both him and his father.

At the end of the exhibition, two large-format Madonnas by the younger Holbein meet—“Darmstadt” and “Solothurn,” each almost one and a half meters high and more than a meter wide. The geographical nature of the names is conditional: both were written in Basel, the first, in the Italian spirit, in 1526 by order of the burgomaster Jakob Meyer zum Hazen, the second – four years earlier, it still has a strong influence of the Dutch school. The first was kept by the Grand Duke of Hesse in Darmstadt, while the second was discovered in poor condition in the 19th century in one of the churches of the canton of Solothurn in Switzerland; its origin is unknown. After long discussions, it was recognized as Holbein’s original, and not a later 17th-century copy from the collection of the museum in Dresden – although it seemed more beautiful. But during the famous “Dresden controversy” of the 1870s, which resolved the issue of authenticity, the false Holbein was compared with the “Sistine Madonna” and was eventually recognized as the “northern Raphael”, removing Dürer from this conditional position. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Darmstadt Madonna was stored in Städel, but then the heirs of the Hessian princes decided to sell it. The museum collected €40 million, but a German entrepreneur with an Austrian passport offered almost €60 million. And Frankfurt said goodbye to its beloved Holbein: he went to Schwäbisch Hall to the Reinhold Würth Museum (his company sponsors the summer festival in Salzburg) and has now returned to Hesse only during the exhibition.

Two Madonnas in one room is already a unique situation, but the viewer is finished off aesthetically by placing next to him the “Lucca Madonna” by Jan van Eyck from the Städel collection, so the context becomes not just complete, but as complete as possible. Add to this the recently discovered portrait of Marx Fischer, painted by Holbein the Younger at the age of 14 or 15, shortly before he left his native Augsburg for a great career, and it becomes clear that even if beauty cannot save the world, much of it cannot be saved. sometimes the Alps are not a hindrance to her.