Portrait of an Unknown Woman (12 page)
He was the worst, but I couldn’t be doing with any of them, to be honest,” she added more seriously. “Prate prate prate about reforming one thing and fiddling with another, changing this and improving that. They took themselves far too seriously for my liking. Nothing was ever quite good enough for them. My motto is, Take life as you find it. Go to mass. Give alms to the poor. Do your business. Advance yourself as God wills. And enjoy what He brings. Have your babies, love your family, look after your old folk. Have your play-acting evenings if you will; play the lute if you must. But don’t get so carried away with your foolish ideas that you put others off living their lives.”
I moved a step forward, raising my hand, hoping I could get her to pay proper attention to a franker version of my question, now that her familiar flow of words had reached its natural end. “That’s just what I mean. Don’t you think Father’s more carried away by ideas now than he ever was when Erasmus lived with us?” I said quickly. “With all this business of hunting down heretics? He’s always away, and even when he is here with us he always seems to be cooped up in the New Building writing some angry denunciation or other. And I don’t remember him being angry before. I never thought of anger as being his nature. The ideas he used to have with Erasmus always made him laugh. Doesn’t that worry you?”
She didn’t quite meet my eyes this time. Dame Alice would never actually lie, but it now occurred to me that this one small bodily sin of omission might indeed signal worry. Yet if she was anxious, she wasn’t about to share her fears with me, or perhaps even admit them to herself. I should have known that from the start. She was too pragmatic to start wailing and beating her breast about anything she couldn’t do something about.
She liked looking on the bright side of life too much. Perhaps she’d even brought out her old rant about Erasmus to choke off my first question.
So I wasn’t altogether surprised when, instead of answering, she picked up the nearest capon and the small cleaver that the second boy had laid by her hand before slipping away, theatrically measured the distance between bird and implement, and began rhythmically chopping off small legs and wings. “Much better to be the king’s man and the friend of bishops is what I say, and doing a sensible job of work,” she pronounced firmly. Chop went the blade in her hand. “Archbishop Warham: a sensible, God-fearing man.” The cleaver rose again. “John Fisher, Cuthbert Tunstall”—chop, an approving look at the neat cut—“good men too.” She placed the pieces carefully in the pot. “Even Cardinal Wolsey,” she added, looking for an easy laugh to shift us back to the jocular kind of conversation she felt happier with. “He might be greedy and devious, Wolsey, and too worldly for a good churchman, but at least he appreciates good cooking,” she finished triumphantly. “He had three helpings of my capon in orange sauce at Candlemas. And he’s praised it to the heavens every time I’ve seen him since.”
With a determined smile, Dame Alice brought her cooking anecdote to its cheery close and swept off to the fireplace to harass the waiting kitchen boys to hook up the pot and start boiling the capons. She might like to be seen as straightforward, but Dame Alice could be as much a mistress of diplomatic half-truths and evasions as any courtier. She clearly didn’t want to discuss any worries I might have about Father. I wasn’t going to get a chance now to raise the matter of the prisoner in the gatehouse, either, because our talk was firmly over. She was off hustling a boy out to fetch more kindling and water. She still wasn’t looking me in the eye. And, somewhere in her rush of words, the comfort I’d briefly taken from John Clement, that Father could only be keeping a prisoner here for the man’s own protection, had been quietly swept away.
Hans Holbein looked at the glowing, fierce face of this tall, skinny, unworldly English girl, with her piercing eyes and angular movements, trying her best to stay still although some sort of worry kept furrowing her brow and making her very nearly fidget, and for reasons he didn’t understand, found himself remembering Magdalena. The softness of her: the ripeness of shoulders and breasts, the honey of her eyes, the vague scents of violets and roses. And the deceit. The soft mouth-shaped bruises on her neck. The confused look in her eyes when he asked where they came from; her silly explanation, murmured so gently that he was almost ready to believe they really could be gnat bites. The sheets on her bed, already rumpled and warm and sweaty on that last evening, when he’d tumbled her into it after a hard day at the print shop with Bonifacius and Myconius and Frobenius.
More “gnat bites” on her: on breasts and belly and buttocks. And the hot red imprint of his palm on her white cheek, and her hands both fluttering up to hold the place he’d hit her as he slammed the door and clattered off back down the stairs, practically howling with his own pain. His last memory of her: wounded eyes staring uncomprehendingly back at him.
Well, Magdalena was who she was. He shouldn’t have asked more of her. She had her own way to make in the world, after all, and times were hard. There weren’t many pickings for an artist’s model anymore. And so, when a few months later Master Mayer turned out to have taken her under his wing (“a young widow . . . angelically beautiful,” the old fool kept burbling), Hans made no bones about painting her face into Master Mayer’s family chapel as the Virgin of Mercy protecting the old man and his various wives and children, dead and alive, from ill fortune. Master Mayer could believe whatever nonsense he wanted in the privacy of his own home. Hans Holbein wasn’t going to argue with such a good patron. But he knew he’d never look without skepticism at another religious picture after that. He probably wouldn’t paint any more religious pictures, either.
He’d had enough of dressing women of dubious virtue up in blue robes and pretending they were Madonnas. All that was just playacting, children’s stories. What he wanted now was to portray the real-life faces and personalities of the people God had put on this earth to enchant and torment one another, without costumes, without artifice. To get at the truth.
But he was a bear at home. Snarling at his poor wife, Elsbeth, till her face turned as sour and rough as those hands sticking out from under her pushed-up sleeves, permanently reddened from tanning hides. Hating the stink of leather up his nostrils all the time, till even his food tasted of animal skins and poverty. Hating little Philip’s endless whining; yelling at Elsbeth’s scared-looking boy to take better care of the child. Even hating the long-winded abstract talk of his humanist friends, whom he usually admired. Part of him was now blaming them for his gloom—for starting the whole upheaval of these evil times with their clever, clever talk about the corruption of the clergy and their desire to purify the church. Look where those ideas had landed everyone now. And look how panicked the humanists and even the most determined of the reformers were, at the violent enthusiasm of the mob for their elegantly formulated ideas—even Brother Luther, thundering “strike, stab, slay” from his Wittenberg pulpit in a vain attempt to stop the thugs destroying civilization.
Suddenly Hans Holbein hated the humanists’ silly, clever faces; suddenly even the Latin names they chose to call themselves seemed pretentious. His brother, Prosy, under their influence, had renamed himself Ambrosius; Hans wasn’t so grand, and in his current black mood, resented the Latinized name they insisted on calling him: Olpeius. If they had to be foolish enough to call him something classical, the only name he’d have liked was the one they were always giving Albrecht Dürer—the only real compliment a painter could desire—Apelles, the name of the greatest painter of antiquity, the court artist to Philip of Macedon and a famous portraitist. So he sat knocking back tankard after tankard at the tavern with them, in thunderous silence, hating whey-faced Myconius’s thin mockery: “Poor love-struck Olpeius—drowning his sorrows in beer.”
And there was no work, or hardly any. With the hate-filled, frightening turn public life was taking—now that the peasants’ revolts in the countryside had given way to mobs of image breakers roaming the city streets and smashing windows and burning devotional pictures and hacking statues to bits—the rich weren’t keen on displaying their wealth by having frescoes painted on their houses. And of course there was no new work to be had in churches that were being stripped down and white-washed. Painters’ studios were closing down on all sides. Wood-carvers and carpenters were fighting over the same menial tradesmen’s work. And there was a limit to how hard you could fight for the few book-engraving jobs or tavern sign commissions that still came on the market.
It had been so exciting before. Before the year of doom three years ago, when all the planets coalesced in the constellation of the fish and brought chaos and destruction. In the days when Magdalena had always been there in his studio, ready to drape her naked form in whatever scrap of velvet or silk he could find to pose for him. When there had still been enough work to justify keeping a model. When he personally had more work than he could cope with, doing the pictures for both Adam Petri’s and Thomas Wolff’s versions of Luther’s New Testament in German— and getting an extra payment from Tommi Wolff, as well as an extra dose of grinning thanks from the impish little blond man, Basel’s biggest charmer, with his fangy teeth, sparkling eyes, and that dark mole on his right cheek, for making his most successful publication even more of a success—a payment big enough to buy Magdalena a dress and give Elsbeth extra housekeeping money. Well, they were good pictures, after all.
His Latin had never been good, but with Luther’s New Testament he had read it properly for the first time. And he was painting at his peak. He was finally able to show the divine truth as he knew it really was in the Book, without recourse to a priest or a preacher to tell him how they read it. He had felt enlightened. Purified. Transfigured by the truth.
Hans Holbein was all right for longer than most people, after things went wrong, because he had the Rathaus fresco commission. But then the burghers got scared of his daring design for the last wall—respectable if hypocritical Jews shrinking away from the presence of Jesus, in the parable of the woman taken in adultery; Christ warning the Jews, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” So the respectable if hypocritical burghers cut off his contract. They preferred looking at a blank wall to being reminded that their integrity might also be questioned. And the money stopped.
The last straw was his
Dance of Death
engravings. Forty-one of them, using every ounce of imagination and passion he possessed. He started them after his father died. They were the only way he had to show the truth about today as he saw it, through a theme he chose for himself without any interference from a patron. Two years’ work: his and Hans Lützelberger’s block making skill combined in merciless mockery of every one of the failings and offenses of the age’s corrupt priests, the powerful and pious and their bedazzled followers. All exposed as vanity-filled frauds at the moment they met Death. The pope crowning an emperor, waving a papal bull, full of hubris—and surrounded by devils. Death coming to the Judge, accepting a bribe from a wealthy litigant while a poor plaintiff looked disconsolately on. Death coming to the Monk, who, even though his calling meant he should have been prepared, was trying frantically to escape, clutching his money box. No one would publish the pictures. The council was scared. Erasmus had told them not to publish inflammatory pamphlets, and—too late—they’d begun to heed his advice. Then, last summer, Hans Lützelberger died. Bankrupt. The creditors settled on his goods like scavengers. The
Dance of Death
blocks ended up being snapped up by a printer in Lyon and shut up in a storeroom. And Hans Holbein hadn’t got a penny out of any of it.
“Go traveling,” Erasmus said phlegmatically. “Go to quiet places where all this trouble isn’t happening. Learn something new; find new patrons; get your heartache out of your system.” Erasmus never stopped traveling. He was a famous man; there were homes for him everywhere, and people begging him to endorse their religion or their political beliefs just by living among them.
So Hans Holbein cut the old Dutchman off in midflow, just as he was pronouncing his favorite maxim: “Live every day as though it were your last; study as though you will live forever,” and asked, abruptly, “How could I travel? And where to?”
Hans Holbein wasn’t scared of moving. He and his brother, Prosy, had managed to set themselves up in Basel when they were young men, after their father went bankrupt in Augsberg and even Uncle Sigmund started suing him for thirty-four miserable florins, the old skinflint. Hans had talked his way boldly into job after job—fresco painting and chapel decorating jobs he’d never actually done before, and certainly had no expertise in. But he’d coped. People trusted him. And he felt at ease with talking up his talents. No client of his would be disappointed in the results he produced. His kit packed up small and he was ready for anything. He’d been to Italy and France to look at the paintings of the south, and got back safely. He just needed practical advice.
