Portrait Head

IN THE PORTRAITS of Hans Holbein the Younger, the men and women of early 16thcentury England and Continental Europe come alive again. Resplendent yet understated in their garb of velvet and furs, these worthies of “half a thousand years ago,” as Johan Huizinga put it in The Waning of the, seem astonishingly real. Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Jane Seymour, Desiderius Erasmus, Henry VIII, as well as a museum’s worth of lesser nobles and notables of the Tudor era, appear in realistic detail yet also, one senses, much as they would have wanted to be presented to posterity—self-possessed, poised, and surrounded by the accoutrements of their offices and tokens of their status.