Hans Holbein’s Double Life

Picasso held that there were no bad Picassos; some were merely more or less good than others. I feel the same about Hans Holbein and, after reading The King’s Painter, Franny Moyle’s “life and times” of the artist, suspect he did, too.

His life necessarily gets shorter shrift than the times. Moyle concedes, “Anyone taking on Holbein as a subject has to deal with the fact that primary written material relating to the artist is sparse, to say the least.... His earliest biographer, Carel van Mander, scooped up as much anecdote as he could. But if Holbein ever put pen to paper other than to draw—and surely he did—his correspondence has long been lost.”