Clear Eye, Flawless Touch

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York, the unsurpassed portrait drawings of Holbein

That Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) was one of the supreme portrait painters has never been in doubt. Anyone who has been to the National Gallery in London and seen his painting of The Ambassadors -- two wary young traders amid their pellucid clutter of emblematic objects, with an anamorphic blur of a skull floating strangely across the inlaid floor --knows that at once. Together with his older contemporary, Albrecht Duerer, Hol bein represents the point at which German painting shook clear of its Gothic past and its folk ties, entering and interpreting the great Renaissance streams of power and trade, be coming a primary instrument of self-recognition for a new Europe.

At a time when most people lived and died within ten miles of their birthplace, when travel was dauntingly arduous and news of other countries was the most expensive commodity in Europe, Holbein was a completely international man: he worked in Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy and, especially, England. His work, despite its powerful integrity of style, was open to all kinds of influence: portrait proto types ranging from Leonardo to Titian, the work of the Fontainebleau mannerists, Quinten Massys, English court miniaturists, Darer and Mathi as Gruenewald. It seems to range backward and forward in time, a web of discreet allusions that seldom rise to open quotation. Thus in drawing Cecily Heron, the youngest daughter of Sir Thomas More, Holbein selected the pose of another woman with the same first name, Cecilia Gallerani, the model for Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine. If one could not deduce from his work that Holbein's was one of the best minds of the northern Renaissance, the names of his friends would suggest it: he was on terms of familiar equality with such heroes of intellectual life as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More.

The seamless surfaces of Holbein's paintings hide the machinery, as they were meant to do. For the first impulses, the slow probings and swift appraisals of a face, one must consult the drawings: something easier said than done in America until now. Although there are paintings by Holbein in U.S. collections, the body of his graphic work is in England and on the Continent. The most important part of it belongs to the British royal family and is housed at Windsor; it comprises the many sketches Holbein made of the nobility and gentry at the court of Henry VIII during his two sojourns in London, a short spell from 1526 to 1528 and a long one of eleven years that finished with his death, of the plague, in 1543. Much of this oeuvre is on view until July 30 at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, where it is amplified by material from the library's own collection -- rare editions and manuscripts by and about Holbein's circle of patrons and friends, prints derived from his images, and so forth.

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 offices was resonantly called the Common

Meter of Precious Tissue, is watching Holbein as Holbein watches him: calm and yet withdrawn to the fine edge of nervousness. It is the look people used to direct at cameras a hundred years ago, before everyone got used to the lens.

One knows these faces; better shaven, they populate the West End in London today. Even the women, as in Holbein's elegant full-face study of Mary Zouch, square-jawed and pale, are reborn among the Sloane Rangers outside Harrods. "Here is Derich himself; add voice and you might doubt if the painter or his father created him," runs an inscription on one of Holbein's portraits of a Hanseatic merchant in London, and for once the cliches about "speaking likeness" do indeed seem fresh. In drawing after drawing, the nervous mobility of the pencil or black chalk, linking blank spaces of paper together in casual but strict tensions between mark and void, creates a pictorial equivalent of the sitter's thought as well as the artist's. Hence the authority of Holbein's drawings of his friend Sir Thomas More, which maintain the etiquette of distance and yet hint at the complexities of emotion such a face could display.

Holbein's formal resources were inexhaustible. His touch went all the way from emphatic black strokes to the subtlest frizzing and toning of gray in a beard, and his sense of how to "tune" hard linear passages against evanescent transitions of tone never seemed to fail him. Sometimes he used technical aids: it is thought that some of the drawings were traced from the sitter's image on a transparent glass pane, an early use of the principle of the camera obscura advocated by Duerer, and a fore runner of photo-derived painting.

But the liveliness of touch is some thing no camera can give. Every hair in the scalp lives and has its place.

The curve of a mouth or the arch of an eyelid is precisely weighted against the amount of blank space it must enliven.

The intensity of detail shifts with marvelous fluency.

It is not certain how far Holbein wanted these drawings to be taken as finished works of art, but the fact that he did not discard them even when they had been developed into paintings suggests that he placed more than instrumental value on them. But whatever the cause of their preservation, one can only be grate ful for it. No other group of Renaissance drawings offers so vivid a picture of a class. They are documents as fraught with human interest as any court memoir by Hervey or Saint-Simon. In celebrating Holbein's eye with such curatorial precision, the Morgan Library has put on an unforgettable show.

-- By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.