The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How to perfect your power pose
Half a millennium after Holbein revolutionised the portrait, his masterpieces still bristle with life
How can an image convey power? This question has obsessed monarchs for centuries – and still preoccupies politicians today. It’s easy to see the failures. Remember that photograph of Ed Miliband munching on a bacon sarnie? Awkwardness, not authority, was its message.
And what about those notorious pictures, released in 2009, of a bare-chested Vladimir Putin riding a horse in Siberia? According to one ingenious art historian, they belonged to a tradition of heroic equestrian portraiture stretching back to Titian’s influential canvas of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V atop a spirited Spanish stallion.
Perhaps Putin’s flesh-flashing was a nod to ancient rulers: in the Prima Porta statue of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor is barefoot, a sign of divinity. Yet, to many, Putin’s holiday snaps were risible, his pectoral display suggestive less of virility than of a midlife crisis.
Sometimes modern political imagery provokes sniggers when, on paper, it could succeed. In 2015, at the Conservative Party conference, George Osborne was mocked for a “power pose” that involved standing with his feet planted farther apart than his shoulders, to create a silhouette reminiscent of the Eiffel Tower. Surprisingly, given the ridicule, other Tory politicians have subsequently adopted the same stance, including Theresa May (who tried out another famous power pose, emulating Jacques-Louis David’s 1812 portrait of Napoleon, in a painting recently unveiled in Parliament).
At the time, commentators suggested that Osborne was channelling the latest management-guru fad. But, a little like Putin cosplaying Titian’s Charles V, he may have had the right idea. Because that pose has been beloved of leaders for half a millennium, ever since the artist Hans Holbein the Younger, who thrived at the Tudor court of Henry VIII (and is the subject of a new exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace), concocted a formidable, and unforgettable, life-sized likeness of the English monarch.
Holbein’s mural – which decorated the king’s privy chamber, but was destroyed in 1698, when Whitehall Palace burned down – was so effective that, according to an art historian writing in the early 17th century, visitors felt “annihilated” in its presence. Recently, I visited the National Portrait Gallery, where a substantial fragment of Holbein’s gigantic preparatory drawing for the wall painting is on display, to discover how he immortalised Henry VIII.
Beside the king, there were three figures: his parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, and his third queen, Jane Seymour, arranged around a stone tablet. But judging by a later painted copy, which survives today, any sense of equilibrium was disrupted by the dominance of Henry VIII, who weighed down the composition on the left. This is the section depicted in the fragment at the NPG, which is patched together from separate sheets of paper, and pricked with tiny holes to facilitate the transfer of Holbein’s ink-andwatercolour design.
Even today, being eyeballed by this infamously despotic monarch is a frightening experience. Everything about Holbein’s bearded and beady-eyed Henry – from his codpiece and dagger to his balled fists and that “power pose”, which turns his corpulence to his advantage – bespeaks a puffedup machismo. His meaty head and neck (the latter augmented by a high collar) form a continuous line that only tapers as his cranium meets a bejewelled, plumed bonnet.
The finery of that headwear, like the richness of the rest of his outfit – embroidered with gold and silver thread – was another marker of supremacy; modern accounts that accentuate the thuggish quality of Holbein’s thickset vision of Henry VIII do so at the expense of this peacocking – which anticipates the suave and urbane vision of monarchy that came into vogue in the following century.
According to Charlotte Bolland, a senior curator at the National Portrait Gallery, Holbein’s Whitehall mural was “a huge stepchange” in English portraiture, hitherto characterised by the sort of “small, portable image” represented by the earliest picture in the gallery’s collection: a likeness, less than 17 inches high, of Henry VII holding a rose. By the time of Holbein’s wall painting, Henry VII’s son and successor had “assumed control over the Church. So, he had more power personally embodied in him than any of his predecessors.”
How did Holbein engineer such a “change”? The forthcoming show at the Queen’s Gallery, the largest group of Holbein’s works from the Royal Collection to be shown in public for more than three decades, will illuminate his achievement.
Holbein was born, the son of an artist, in Augsburg, southern Germany, and started out in the Swiss city of Basel – where he painted a memorably expressionistic image of Christ’s decaying corpse: a vision of a very different kind of power (spiritual, rather than temporal).
His half-length portraits of the humanist scholar Erasmus brought him to the attention, in England, of the learned statesman Thomas More, who would serve, prior to his execution, as Henry VIII’s Lord High Chancellor. Holbein arrived in England in the autumn of 1526. The following year, as well as undertaking a now-lost dynastic portrait of More’s family, he painted Henry Guildford, a favourite courtier of Henry VIII.
In Holbein’s likeness, this barrelchested figure, dressed in cloth of gold, appears with elbows akimbo before a green curtain and twisting vine, his bulk padded out by a fur-lined gown. There’s no codpiece or dagger in the portrait, in which, admittedly, Holbein flattered Guildford by slimming down his features as captured in an initial drawing of
him, also in the Royal Collection. But he holds a pale staff, cleverly set against black cloth to enhance its visibility, which has a priapic quality – and for the National Gallery’s deputy director, Susan Foister, a
Holbein expert, the panel amounts to “a dry run for Henry VIII”.
In the extraordinary painting The Ambassadors (1533) – executed shortly before Holbein’s appointment as King’s Painter, and now in the National Gallery – Jean de Dinteville, the King of France’s melancholy emissary, and his friend Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur, are depicted full-length before a green curtain, leaning against a table laden with objects (including astronomical instruments and a hymnbook) that evoke Renaissance refinement, while alluding – in the case of a lute with a broken string – to the disharmony of the times.
Foister calls The Ambassadors a “dress rehearsal” for the Whitehall mural, which it anticipated in several ways. Dinteville, who adopts a “slightly triangular, tripod pose”, comes across as “very powerful”, his silhouette exaggerated by that voluminous black gown, lined with lynx fur, worn over a pink-satin tunic. By the early 1530s, Holbein’s essential formula for Henry VIII had been established.
There is, however, an important difference that gets to the heart of Holbein’s artistic greatness. The slightly masklike expressions of The Ambassadors seem, as Foister puts it, a little “blank” – probably because Holbein wasn’t given enough time to fathom his subjects’ characters. Yet, with his depictions of members of the Tudor court – particularly in the portrait drawings using coloured chalks on pink-primed paper, many of which are now in the Royal Collection – there’s a forthrightness which still retains its force.
Of course, Holbein was brilliant at capturing fabrics and furs, and his portraits brim with naturalistic details: wispy neck hair, tubercular scars, wrinkles at the corners of the king’s eyes. William Reskimer, “a Cornish Gent”, sports a pelt-like red beard, long as a fox.
Holbein was fascinated by the asymmetry of the human face, and the drawings in the Royal Collection are – as the exhibition’s curator, Kate Heard, tells me – an artist’s “tools”, annotated with observations about his sitters, such as Richard Southwell’s “yellowish” eyes.
Yet, as well as supremely accomplished naturalism, Holbein’s best portraits are animated by something far more profound: an interest in summoning a sense of presence, not mere appearance. He achieved this by, for instance, drawing his subjects – such as the courtier John Poyntz, or a blue-eyed young woman who may have been Jane Seymour’s lady-in-waiting Mary Zouch – glancing upwards or sideways, to convey interior life; while the most “intriguing” thing about Holbein’s cartoon for the Whitehall mural, says Bolland, was how its three-quarter view of the king’s face was subsequently modified, in the finished wall painting, to become “a frontal, head-on image” – to intensify the “split-second feeling that you’re meeting the king in the flesh”. Touches such as these explain why, nearly half a millennium after they were painted, Holbein’s portraits still feel so powerfully alive.
Portraits brim with naturalistic details: neck hair, wrinkles, tubercular scars
Holbein at the Tudor Court is at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace (rct.uk), London SW1, from Friday until April 14