The Royal Artists: Holbein, Eye of the Tudors (Art History Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] so this must go there must be and this would be last [Music] who do you think that is I'll give you a clue it's a famous English king so who is it come on no googling who is this Stern and bony monarch now you smart people out there the ones who come here to the National Portrait Gallery you've got it straight away I know the giveaway of course is the nose the way its flattened there's something walrus see about it but some of you didn't get it right and the reason you didn't recognize immediately that this is Henry the eighth is because this isn't the Henry we've all got up here in our imaginations the Henry who had six wives who took on the Pope who destroyed the monasteries that Henry didn't look like this he looked like this now that's what you call Henry the eighth look at the way he stands like a Tudor gunslinger and he okay corral the mighty torso the sheer width of the man this is a king who could change history that's the Henry who lives up here in our thoughts Henry the Terrible the widest King in Christendom and he is the creation of a particularly important artist an artist who I would argue didn't just record British history he actually changed it he was a funny little man a German from Bavaria the genius who looked like a farmer called Johannes or Hance halt boy this is hole binds great gift to the world the iconic image of Henry the eighth which everyone recognizes and Holbein didn't stop there how do we know what Sir Thomas Moore that conscience phille man for all seasons who stood up to Henry looked like because of Holbein how do we know what Henry's unfortunate queens are looked like because of Holbein and how do we know what Thomas Cromwell Henry's go-to man for destroying the monasteries really looked like because of Holbein Holbein didn't just describe Tudor England he gave it an extraordinarily active presence made it feel real and by making Tudor England immortal he changed history because a slab of history we can envisage so clearly will always trump all those other slabs of history we can't envisage at all why are we so obsessed with Henry the eighth and his damned wives because of Holbein Holbein was from here outs Berg in Bavaria where he was born in 1497 his father was a painter and a really good one hands Holbein the elder he painted religious pictures this is one of his he designed stained glass as well so his son trained by his father would have imbibed all these profound Catholic moods from birth here at the Museum in Augsburg they've got one of Holbein the elders finest pictures this is the Basilica of st. Paul as it's called an altarpiece which tells them Paul's story over here he's having his head cut off on the orders of the Emperor Nero apparently the head bounced three times when it hit the ground causing three miraculous fountains to spurt from the earth but what I really want to show you is this scene on the left because that old man with a straggly beard that's actually Hall behind the elder and below him are his two sons Ambrosius the older one with the curly hair next to him little hands Holbein future painter of Henry the eighth [Music] so the dad trains the son to be a painter when the son is 17 he comes here to Basel in modern Switzerland Basel was famous for its printing the European Capital of books and that must have been what brought the young Holbein here he was looking for work as a book illustrator Basil's greatest printer was a man called your hand for Oban throbbin was both a publisher and a scholar so he was adventurous and informed and Holbein was soon working for him Froman produced lots of important books but he's particularly well known for publishing the work of that celebrated Dutch naysayer Erasmus of Rotterdam and yes Holbein painted Erasmus too tucked up for winter in his study busily writing Erasmus actually came to Basel specifically to work with Froman and it was frou bin' who published the best edition of Erasmus's most celebrated work a hilarious send-up of the modern world called in praise of folly just about everyone gets a kicking in in praise of folly young people women gamblers but Erasmus comes down particularly hard on the clergy the priests the bishops and the Friars [Music] Holbein was just 17 when he got hold of a copy of him praise of fawni and in the margins he drew all these funny little drawings it's like something a naughty schoolboy might do draw all over a famous book this chap here is walking along the road when he sees a beautiful woman and he's so busy staring at her he steps into a basket of eggs ah and this is a monk who's taken the vow of poverty so he can only touch money with this weird money touching implement however with his other hand he can touch whatever he wants as you can see it's impressively rude how can a 17 year old boy know this much already about sex greed human stupidity the Holbein who emerges here is an instinctive subversive a Mickey taker who sides with Erasmus to poke fun at the world around him so a good question is where did it all go did Holbein suppress all this precocious knowledge of the dark workings of men or did it sometimes poke out and reveal itself when you're as talented as this and you've got this much speed and inventiveness in your fingers people quickly notice so Holbein was soon busy [Music] the thing he was really good at was religious painting this is the dead Christ that the young Holbein painted for the base of a basel altarpiece it's a coruscating piece of religious realism but he could do catholic fluffiness as well like this gorgeous madonna and child standing in a niche in Darmstadt look at the brilliant foreshortening of jesus' hand Leonardo himself would have been proud of that so it was all going spiffing li his religious art was in demand the book trade was keeping him busy when along came Martin Luther and his Protestant Reformation suddenly everything changed in a Lutheran world there was no longer much demand for Catholic Madonna's standing ornately in golden niches the printing industry too began to flounder who should it publish the Protestants or the Catholics with the publishing world caught in this dangerous crossfire and the religious Commission's drying up Holbein needed to find work somewhere else and that's where Erasmus made himself useful [Music] Erasmus had actually written in praise of folly in England he'd spent several years there teaching at Oxford and Cambridge and in 1526 Holbein armed with a letter of introduction from Erasmus set off looking for work to England when he gets here to England he's in his late 20s so he's still a young artist but already very experienced the unexpected thing though about hoe binds arrival in Henry the eighth's England is that the one thing he didn't have much experience of was painting portraits in Basel Holbein had been known chiefly as a religious artist it painted one or two portraits yes and they were really good but they were exceptions in his output England though had never had much of an appetite for Madonna's and Christ's that kind of thing was best left to the Italians in England the art form that was most esteemed and which seemed most in tune with the national psyche was portraiture the staircases of England were lined with ancestors showing off their bloodlines to succeed in England Holbein needed to change tack Erasmus had given him an introduction to one of the most influential men at the court writer Statesman theologian and as it later transpired Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More Holbein seems to have spent most of his first year in England living in Moore's house in Chelsea he was working on this a few jury ambitious group portrait of Moore and his very large family [Music] unfortunately this is a copy and not a very good one the original was destroyed by a fire in the 18th century all that's left of the real Holbein is a stack of these astonishingly vivid drawings oh [Music] and there is something else of course this whole Bynes great portrait of Moore which they have here at the Frick Collection in New York more was the man who famously stood up to Henry who refused to accept the King as the new head of the church so Henry had him beheaded now I was brought up believing that Sir Thomas Moore was a man of great principle that's why the Catholic Church made him a saint in 1935 but more recently a different Thomas More has been proposed to us in today's histories he's often presented as a demented religious bigot a cruel Slayer of the heretics that's what modern novelists and playwrights have been making of Moore but it's not what Holbein makes of him and Holbein was there [Music] I know it's a cliche and it's been said a thousand times but you really do feel he's standing there before you one of the most resolute presences in British art just look at the details the way the velvet has been painted or his perfectly observed skin tones without uttering Vinson five o'clock shadow this sense of actuality is new not just in British art but anywhere these first English portraits of whole Bynes make Doctor Who's of us all TARDIS sing us back in time to meet a tudor cast that feels astonishingly present just there right in front of us [Music] all Bynes first visit to England lasted just two years before the fates conspired to bring him home to Basel he was busy enough that wasn't the issue but as a citizen of Basel he could only leave the city for a short time or he'd lose his citizenship so in 1528 he had to come back it was probably now that he painted his wife and children it had to leave them behind when he left for England and as you can see he's made them into a holy family hasn't he a suffering Madonna and her infants dreading what lies ahead [Music] basel in 1528 was not a nice place to be if you are a painter or a Catholic Holbein had seen the Protestant revolution arriving in Basel it was one of the reasons he'd left for England but in the time he was gone it had all gotten so much worse [Music] Basel officially became a Protestant city in 1529 to celebrate gangs of rabid iconoclasts rampage through the churches looking for Madonna's to trample and Christ's to smash on the 9th of February 15:29 a gang of some 200 angry Lutheran's broke into here Basel Cathedral and began attacking the art statues crucifixes whole wine paintings and they didn't stop until all this superstitious idolatry as they saw it was destroyed there's no official record of Holbein zone religious views not surprisingly he kept them to himself but he was born a Catholic in very Catholic Bavaria and my hunch based on the odd visual clue here and there is that he never crossed over fully to the Lutheran side what definite is that work was now hard to come by the Econo clasts had seen to that in a world without images there was no longer much need for a painter Holbein didn't leave immediately there was his wife and children to worry about but in 1532 having put his affairs in order he left basel again and set off once more for England and this time he'd be working not just in royal circles but for the king himself and water king he was Holbein came to England because he was following the money as artists do getting away from Basel getting away from the iconoclasts he came here looking for prosperity and peace instead he found Henry the eighth [Music] and for him to be here while Henry beheaded his wives took on the Pope brutally and forced his new religion is so damn fortunate it almost feels preordained [Music] Holbein didn't begin working for the king as soon as he returned to London his first patrons actually came from here it's changed a bit of course but in Tudor times this was a very important location for Holbein because where I'm standing now was the centre of a huge urban complex called the German steel yard the steel yard wasn't a steel yard it was a city within a city a kind of German Hong Kong created by German merchants for the purposes of international trade it had been here since 1320 going bigger and bigger and the German merchants in here they didn't pay any tolls or customs they were privileged foreigners and inside this walled community of theirs they had warehouses shops offices taverns so this was a home from home for Holbein and when he returned to England in 1532 the rich German merchants of the Steel Yard were his first customers this handsome young chap who now hangs in Windsor Castle is Derek born from Cologne who supplied the court of Henry the eighth with military equipment for the army in Hull binds time just like today if you wanted precision quality and Voss sprung door Technic you bought German the paintings that Holbein made of the merchants of the German steel yard seemed to speak a different language from his other English pictures it's as if some of that different mindset that had poked out in empresa folly pokes out here as well this exceptionally fine fellow is Joerg geese emergent from Danzig he's sitting in his office in the German steel yard surrounded by the accoutrements of his trade his pens his documents the box in which he keeps his money and all these details which have been described so perfectly by Holbein have other meanings secret little messages that have been smuggled into the picture in particular notice the beautiful Venetian VARs with its fragile pink carnations how skillfully Holbein has painted the shifting reflections in the glass and how precariously the VARs is balanced on the edge of the table whenever you see something on the edge of a table in art it always means the same thing isn't life precarious it's the same with the money box how easily George Keisha's stash of cash could topple and for the precarious VARs the lovely reflections are all brilliant whole pinion reminders of the shortness of life just like the reflections in the glass all this can disappear in an instant it's a message that's always relevant but it was particularly relevant in the shifting fracturing England of Henry the eighth's Holbein obviously didn't know what he was letting himself in for in Henry the eighth's England had he known he would surely have turned tail and returned home you know between the age of 5 and 11 I used to walk down this road pretty much every day of my life we lived up there in Caversham in Redding and this was my way to school every day for six years and not once in that time did I ever consider the significance of this road [Music] my school was down here down the alley they still love walking down here the school was a Catholic Primary School run by nuns called st. Anne's a nice friendly ordinary school next door to a church the church was also called Saint Anne's and back then I didn't know what had actually happened here in whole Bynes time but I do now st. Anne's Caversham had a famous statue in it she was called Our Lady of Caversham and she was said to have miraculous powers the Shrine of Our Lady of Caversham was one of the most visited locations in Tudor England pilgrims would travel hundreds of miles to pray to her for help one of them was the rightful Queen of England Catherine of Aragon who came here to Caversham on the 17th of July 15:32 to pray for her husband Henry the eighth it was the Queen's final plea to her God begging him to intervene and stop Henry from divorcing her and marrying and Berlin of course it didn't work Henry went ahead with his divorce he married an Berlin and made himself the supreme head of a new English church and a few years later he took his revenge on our Lady of Kavitha on the 14th of September 15:38 a gang of government agents arrived at st. Anne's and closed down the famous shrine Our Lady of Caversham was bundled into a cart and taken to London the gold and the silver in which the statue was covered was stripped off and sent to the king and the actual wooden statue well that was burned the man who organized all this destruction and who jotted off a quick note to his agents to congratulate them on a job well done was of course Cromwell Thomas Cromwell I bet you were wondering when we'd get to him now when I was at school Cromwell was recognized by everyone as a terrible man Henry the eighth's enforcer the destroyer of the monasteries in recent years though there's been this big reassessment and the modern image of him the one you find today in plays and books is of a decent and brilliant man who's trapped in a difficult situation Cromwell we're now told was an early civil servant who channeled power away from the monarchy and who invented the modern bureaucratic state these days were encouraged to see Thomas Cromwell as a good guy but in this film I'm not going to do that for two important reasons this is one of them what Cromwell did to our lady of Caversham the ruination he visited upon England's artistic past is unforgivable and the second reason for not whitewashing Thomas Cromwell is this whole Bynes portrait of him just look at him what a hard and charmless presence as Piggy eyes that blank expression Cromwell is surely the least attractive sitter in the whole of Hull Bynes art this was painted at the outset of Cromwell's campaign against the monasteries in 1533 it shows him in his office with his quails and his documents inventing the modern bureaucratic state according to various conspiratorial whispers doing the rounds Cromwell actually used Holbein to spy on the German community in the steel yard that's how pol bine ended up working for the English Court it's certainly true that Cromwell had spies everywhere but his Holbein really thanking him for his assistance in this grim portrayal was he really the good guy and was promised more over here really the bad guy fortunately because of Holbein who was actually there who knew them both who happened to be the greatest portraitist of his times here at the Frick Collection in New York we're in a perfect position to decide so who is the goodie here and who's the baddie we're Holbein stands on the matter is surely pretty obvious Holbein officially entered the service of the king in 1535 he was paid 30 pounds per year which even in those days wasn't very much and since this was the court of Henry the eighth there were immediately problems hull binds first supporter in England Sir Thomas More had risen to the rank of Lord Chancellor but he refused to accept the Kings new position as head of the church so Henry had embedded poor Holbein had no choice really but to disassociate himself from his first supporter he needed a new patron and at some point probably with the connivance of Cromwell he managed to get on the good side of Anne Boleyn how did he do that with his art of course there's a drawing in the basel museum of a magnificent gold table fountain he designed for the King's new wife it would have been covered in pearls and rubies and the water would have flowed from the breasts of the women below so he wasn't just the court portraitist to earn his 30 pounds a year Holbein and lots of duties of the court he designed the royal jewelry and the Royal pendants the Royal cutlery and the Royal daggers he even designed the royal fireplace but it's chief duty the one we all know him for today was to invent a look for Henry the eighth that was instantly recognizable Henry needed portraits of himself to hand out to passing dignitaries people he was trying to impress so this wasn't portraiture as a record of how he actually looked this was portraiture as a weapon of propaganda Holbein painted Henry on various occasions Henry the eighth's the extra-wide monarch ruler of all he surveys their splendid of course jewel-like and perfect but they're not exactly revealing are they [Music] this is the most celebrated of them Henry in the classic Henry pose and this is actually a cartoon or preparatory drawing for a life-size mural that Holbein painted in Whitehall palace [Music] there's a copy of it in Hampton Court Henry and his parents welcoming visitors to his privy chamber imagine walking into a room and being confronted by this lot life-sized the actual painting the Holbein mural was destroyed by a fire in the 17th century there's just this drawing left but one thing you do get from this is a sense of scale look how big the king is Holbein was no longer in the business of telling the truth instead he's invented a Henry the eighth so imposing and wide that no one dared argue with him it was a task accomplished in the Mount Seton manner with constant repetition and huge exaggerations of scale by the time the Whitehall mural was painted in 1537 and Berlin had had the Henry treatment accused on trumped-up charges of incest adultery and witchcraft she was beheaded on the 19th of May 1536 while Cromwell watched from the wings the next day Henry was betrothed to one of her maids in waiting the pale and Placid Jane Seymour Jane Seymour would actually be standing about here in the Whitehall mural in the bit that's missing don't worry we know exactly what she looked like because Holbein has also left us a portrait of her it's a lovely thing and hangs now in Vienna in the country storage a museum but here too there's a distance a lack of touchable humanity a beautiful queen in beautiful clothes she's like one of those precious pendants that Holbein designed for the court a human jewel [Music] Jane Seymour didn't last long just one year having given birth to the male heir that Henry craved so desperately she died tragically from complications brought on by the royal birth the son she bore the future Edward the sixth was also painted by Holbein in this fiercely frontal image he's got Henry's cheeks that's for sure but his real face is hiding in the middle with the death of Jane Seymour that was three wives down and free to go for Henry but having run out of maids in waiting at court he widened the search for wife number four by assembling a new list of the best European princesses poor Holbein found himself involved intimately in this hunt when he was sent across the channel to paint portraits of Henry's prospective brides so the king could choose the prettiest welcome to the hands Holbein dating agency the first princess Christina of Denmark was just 16 when Henry approached her Christina was famously beautiful just how beautiful you can see immediately from Hall Bynes superb full-length portrait of her although she was so young christina was already a widow having been married briefly to the Duke of Mantua that's why she's wearing black in Hall binds towering likeness apparently Holbein had just one sitting with Christina in Brussels which lasted three hours the drawing he produced in those three hours with as lightning-fast fingers on his was all he needed to paint this it's his finest and most ambitious female portrait not surprisingly Henry wanted immediately to marry Christina of Denmark who wouldn't but Christina was lucky she turned him down [Music] so Holbein was sent back across the channel to search further for prospective brides and this time it was a German princess anne of cleves who needed to be examined interestingly Anne of Cleves was painted on paper presumably so the picture could be rolled up more easily and taken back to England and it was painted with egg tempera which dries much more quickly than oil paints so this was done in a hurry it's a peculiar picture look how she stares straight out at us you can't look natural staring like that whole Bynes art was beginning to stiffen the king didn't mind he liked whole Bynes portrait of Anne so much he married her but the marriage was a famous disaster when Henry saw what she really looked like in the flesh rather than in whole Bynes portrait of her he found her and this is his word not mine repulsive so the marriage was never consummated and quickly annulled but at least Anne of Cleves got out of it alive not everyone was as fortunate cromwell who'd sent Holbein to europe to paint Anne was blamed for the mistake and a few weeks after the wedding he was accused of treason and beheaded [Music] Holbein had fetched up in a historical nightmare this is Catherine Howard wife number five she lasted just over a year before Henry got crazily jealous again and she too was beheaded as for wife number six Catherine Parr there is no Holbein portrait of her so we have no idea what she looked like one generation goeth and another generation cometh and the earth abideth forever Ecclesiastes all binds most famous painting in the National Gallery in London is usually called the ambassador's but that's just its modern name it's only been called that since the end of the 19th century a more revealing and more accurate name would be something like don't worry it'll soon be over [Music] The Ambassadors chose to of hole binds most suave sitters he is Jean d-don't oval French ambassador to the court of Henry the eighth and this is his French friend George de selve bishop of love war so these two commissioned the picture and now they're standing there leaning casually on this shelf here packed with all these symbols interestingly very relevantly we know exactly how old they are because whole minds put it in the picture over here on to Dan travels dagger it says ETSU a-29 he is 29 in Latin and up here on this book on which the cell was leaning at a t su a 25 he is 25 so an ambassador who's 29 and a bishop who's 25 now that's young isn't it [Music] lots of complex meanings have been proposed for the ambassador's trying to understand the picture has become a mini industry most of the mystery is centred on this thing here the famous Holbein skull which is distorted so heavily you can only see it from the side from over here and from pretty high up why the skull is distorted is pretty obvious as I'll be showing you in a moment why it's in the picture what it's doing here is more than obvious it's completely unmissable yeah I'll show you oh and you also need to notice that crucifix hidden behind the curtain at the top because that was the most important symbol in the picture [Music] this is by Hartman's stain vague painted much later but as you can see it's got another skull in it and this messy heap of objects just like the ambassador's [Music] it's what's called a van it has picture vana tosses appeared in Northern Renaissance art in the fifteenth century this word Vanitas comes from here from the Bible and the book of Ecclesiastes there's a wonderful dumi passage right at the beginning which goes in Latin Vanitas vaneeta tome omnia Vanitas vanity of vanities all is vanity this though isn't about vanity in the modern sense all those TV presenters looking at themselves in the mirror this is biblical vanity where nothing lasts forever so what this pictures doing is reminding us all of the ultimate uselessness of life and all this stuff in here the flute the books that beautiful Japanese sword all that is here today gone tomorrow because what awaits us all where we're all heading is here you can see the same meaning in another famous picture at the National Gallery by France house in the France house the young man is looking at a skull because that's his future however young you are this is where it will end so back on the Holbein all this stuff here the things on the shelves are like the objects piled up in the stained leg earthly goodies wonderful while you're here useless when you're not the top shelf is packed with scientific instruments for working out the time sundials clocks celestial globes the Sun Rise earth says Ecclesiastes do Mele and the Sun goeth down and haste earth to the place where he arises so all these beautiful instruments for working out on the time all this knowledge is basically useless just a heap of stuff the bottom shelf meanwhile is full of earthly pleasures things we enjoy a lute for playing music this bag of floats over here look a book of hymns by Martin Luther [Music] and this is where the picture gets sneaky very sneaky look again at that loot look really carefully see one of the strings is broken and traditionally a broken string is a symbol of discord some things gone wrong what's gone wrong is Luther it's no accident that the Lutheran hymnbook is directly below the lute with a broken string that is a deliberate piece of vanity as symbolism remember when this picture was painted in 1533 no one was sure yet that the Protestant revolution was going to succeed how could they have known that it hadn't happened yet so what a lot of people would have assumed particularly a Catholic bishop and the French Catholic ambassador is that Luther's revolt was just a flash in the pan that is where the skull comes in the skull right at the front of the picture is so big it trumps everything else compared with this big skull this little bit of discord here is nothing so why is this skull so distorted ah that's where it gets clever this is boy bitten by a lizard by Caravaggio so it's another young man and the lizard is biting him because the lizard in art is traditionally a symbol of old age and to amplify that meaning that life is short very short Caravaggio's also included this beautiful reflection in the VARs [Music] the reflection like youth itself will only last a moment it's another vanity as symbol so in the Holbein the skull is like the reflection it can only be seen for a moment but only if you're over here I reckon this must have been hanging in a room that you entered from the side from over here and when you looked over you saw the skull and that was a shock but then we saw the picture from the front the skull wasn't there anymore it was gone because the skull death itself is just another vanity like the lutheran hymnbook like the broken string like the lifetimes of the bishop and the ambassador death means nothing in the end it's just another illusion all that really matters and I told you the crucifix was important is the eternal truth hidden behind the curtain in this great and sneaky masterpiece Holbein is reminding us that the world of Henry the eighth all that discord all that death it's just like everything else here today gone tomorrow [Music] Holbein himself didn't last long he died in 1543 from what they called the sweating sickness the plague he was 45 he left behind some of the greatest portraiture of the Renaissance the Tudor cast so vivid you can feel their breath on your cheek if Holbein hadn't fetched up in england when he did i'm absolutely certain that we wouldn't be as obsessed with the Tudors as we are by making the age of Henry the eighth so damn tangible Holbein forced it into our thoughts forever you know when I flick through this that marvelous fully booked he drew when he was a boy I can't help wondering how much more there could have been when you remember the coruscating realism of his religious art or the pathos and sadness he found in the face of his own wife when you consider the devious complexity of the ambassador's that's a lot of might of beans it wasn't just an Berlin ran of Cleves also Thomas Moore whose misfortune it was to encounter Henry the terrible that was Hall binds misfortune to

Channel: Perspective

Views: 287,137

Rating: 4.8255992 out of 5

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, henry viii, history documentary, anne boleyn, king henry viii, documentary history, documentary movies - topic, the tudors, medieval documentary, medieval history documentary, art history, waldemar januszczak, waldemar januszczak documentary

Id: cWGvPjNPo1U

Length: 59min 50sec (3590 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020