Portrait History #4

Leonardo Da Vinci and Hans Holbien

Leonardo Da Vinci and Hans Holbien a short history of these artist

Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is not an unmixed blessing for a work of art. We become so used to seeing it on picture postcards, and even advertisements that we find it difficult to see it with fresh eyes as the painting by a real man portraying a real woman of flesh and blood.

What strikes us first with Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is the amazing degree to which Lisa looks alive. She really seems to look at us and to have a mind of her own. Like a living being, she seems to change before our eyes and to look a little different every time we come back to her. In the northern countries, in Germany, Holland and England, artists were confronted with a much more real crisis than their colleagues in Italy and Spain. For these southerners had only to deal with the problem of how to paint in a new and startling manner. In the north the question soon faced them whether painting could and should continue at all.

We can witness the effect of this crisis in the career of the greatest German painter of this generation, in the life of (Hans Holbein) the younger. (1497-1543). He was born in Augsburg, a rich merchant city with close trading relations with Italy; he soon moved to Basle, a renowned centre of the new learning. In his earlier portraits he had still sought to display his wonderful skill in the rendering of details, to characterize a sitter through his setting, through the things among which he spent his life.