Hans Holbein and Portraiture -"Clear Eye, Flawless Touch"
Portrait of Sir John Godsalve. Black and coloured chalks, watercolour and bodycolour, brush, pen and ink on pink-primed paper, 14.5"× 11.6", Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, 1532-33. ...Nobody, one may morosely predict, will ever draw the human face as well as this again. The tradition is cut, the bow unstrung. But the drawings remain—abraded, retouched, sometimes (as in a study of the bony, intense face of Bishop John Fisher) vandalized by later hands, yet through it all, radiating an almost incredible freshness of scrutiny. What strikes one first about them is their self-evident truth. Nobody else got the knobbly, mild face of English patrician power so aptly, or saw so clearly the reserves of cunning and toughness veiled by the pink mask. The idea that Holbein was criticizing his subjects is, of course, absurd; and yet his rapport with them was so acute that he could render their unease at the unfamiliar sensation of being limned. Young Sir John Godsalve, one of whose off...