The New Murrey and Blue blog

could not agree more! but careful what we wish for! Holbein was northern renaissance, NOT Italian renaissance, Holbein belonged to the warts and all aesthetic! I was reading up on George Neville, 5th Baron Bergavenny (d c 1535) and his simple charcoal sketch/portrait by Holbein depicts a most unpleasant looking man! (Like many of the male portraits of older Englishmen of his day Neville exudes a sour, pudding like face, as if its congealing before your eyes – or Holbein captures those with hawk-like, suspicious faces of younger men; all in all I have wondered just what he made of his English sitters)
Holbein did not flatter his sitters, obviously, as a Raphael or even Titian would have done (a man may appear of advanced years yes, but with great dignity and even compassion, as Raphael gave his friend, Baldassare Castiglione (no David Beckham he) – IF one looks at Raphael’s chilling (I think it’s chilly, almost bloodless) frontal portrait of the young Guidobaldo Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino at the Uffizi I see the closest thing to a Holbein-esque acceptance to ‘this is what he was and looked like’ admission from the incomparable suck-up, sorry, from the Divine Raphael (at the time that painters lived if they didn’t suck up they found themselves cleaning stables – or worse – instead). Montefeltro died of gout at 35, but not before his marriage, to a Gonzaga (oh my) was a complete failure, as he was impotent, and chased out of Urbino by Cesar Borgia to boot! Clearly, by 1506 when this was painted he had nothing to look charming about.
Some cite Polydore Vergil as in Montefeltro’s service, at some point, (also in Castiglione’s) before he was brought into the orbit of Henry VII. THAT portrait, of Vergil, by Holbein, I would have loved to see. As for our Baron Bergavenny, ole oudding puss, his father was the 4th baron (c 1440-1492) and that 4th baron was the nephew of Cecily Neville, duchess of York (of course, when your family is as huge as hers was one could expect the Neville connection to be close to Richard. And it was, on many levels: Cecily’s brother, Edward, was the 7th son of her mother Joan Beaufort by Ralph Neville, and married lady Abergenney, his SECOND wife, with whom he had “illicit” relations before wife no.1 passed was none other than a sister of John Lord Howard.
Our 4th baron married as his 2nd wife a most enterprising lady, Elizabeth (Brent???) who took him as her 4th husband, after being widowed in quick succession three citizen merchants in London). Not to be outdone by dad, the 5th baron, George Nevylle, or Nevill, was first married to the daughter of Margaret Woodville and Thomas Fitzalan (17th earl of Arundel) – and finally, his 3rd wife, when he was about 50, he chose the young daughter of Edward Stafford, one time 3rd duke of Buckingham, this was a success: 3 sons and 5 daughters arrived by the time he died when he was about 65 – which is – we think – how old he was when the portrait was done. Holbein was not going to erase or soften anything. Nor does he impose any ideas he might have had about the inner life of his sitter, if the man had noble and lofty sentiments they are not visible among the wrinkles and hanging jowls. If Neville was wracked with distaste for regime that had torn the country apart, to put Anne Boleyn on the throne (briefly) Holbein does not do more than represent an old, haggard, affluent, man of the court, jaw set, eyes betraying nothing.An Italian would never have drawn this!
What would Holbein have made of Neville’s relatives, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, Queen Elizabeth of York, Cecily Neville, or Edward IV, or our Richard? The snapshot look would have been tempting to see I agree, but sketches were only meant to be prep for a painting, to give the painter some idea of proportion, some rough idea of the sitter’s disposition. The painting would – or should – add additional dimensions (aside from color and costume, jewelry and props), it should add the life of the sitter, their eyes alight, something in their flesh that says, I am alive now, you can hear me breathe! The linearity of Holbein (as with almost all Northern Painters until Rembrandt) made that difficult, to say the least, so give me a Holbein sketch AND a Raphael painting, it’s entirely possible that old sourpuss Neville MIGHT have been had a gentle aspect in the hands of say Correggio or del Sarto, and certainly with Raphael.

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