Whenever one thinks of Henry VIII, Holbein’s iconic and widely reproduced image of the King springs instantly to mind. It is to Holbein more than anyone else that Henrician England owed the visual imagery of royal authority and of the Reformation itself.

The Augsburg-born Hans Holbein (1497/8–1543) moved in early adulthood to Basel, where he established his career between about 1515 and 1526. He became a citizen of that city and quickly gained a reputation among sundry patrons as an artisan and master of many media. Discouraged by the early outbreaks of Swiss Protestant iconoclasm and armed with an introductory letter from Erasmus, he opted to try his luck in London, where he found a patron in Sir Thomas More. After a brief return to Basel between 1528 and 1531/2 and several diplomatic missions abroad, he spent the rest of his life in England. By 1541, at which point he had been named King’s Painter, he settled in London’s parish of St Andrew Undershaft and remained there until his death in 1543.

Holbein’s portrait subjects consisted of (a) the royal family, its predecessors, and prospective royal wives including Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, Henry VIII himself, the future Edward VI, Anne of Cleves, Jane Seymour, and the royal family as depicted in the group portrait known as The Whitehall Portrait; (b) prominent court officials including Thomas Cromwell, Sir Thomas More, Archbishop William Wareham, and Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk; (c) merchants of the German Hanse based at their Steelyard headquarters in London; and (d) sundry English courtiers and aristocrats. In addition, his two large canvases for the Hanseatic merchants, The Triumph of Riches and The Triumph of Poverty, and his ingenious 1533 painting known as The Ambassadors rank among the most innovative and important works of their time. But Holbein excelled at more than panel portraits. His portrait miniatures helped introduce a new medium on the English scene. His 1535 engraving of the title page of the Coverdale Bible, with the image of the enthroned King distributing copies to his bishops, dramatically articulated the royal supremacy over the church. He designed jewelry, stained glass windows, metalwork, and other objects.

Elizabeth Goldring’s Holbein, Renaissance Master follows a long and distinguished line of Holbein scholarship beginning with Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (1604) through the early twentieth-century efforts of A.B. Chamberlain (Hans Holbein the Younger, 1913), and Susan Foister’s noteworthy studies Holbein and England (2004) and Holbein in England (2006). But none of the earlier studies had full access to the more recent advances in both archival and technological research which inform Goldring’s work. None begin to approach the fine-detailed, patient, and definitive work at hand here.

This is erudite, tightly focused, and meticulously constructed research. More than a study of artist and art, Goldring shows Holbein bobbing like a cork above the swift current of religious and political controversy and managing adroitly to skip from one patron to another as circumstances required. Henry might do away with Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and a host of others, but he continued to rely on Holbein to fashion the appropriate imagery of majesty and to help scout the continental scene for potential spouses.

Goldring offers a leisurely and deeply contextualized sojourn into Holbein’s world. Rarely content merely to record a fact, she stops to browse and to graze along the way, though never to the point of real digression. Noting Holbein’s left-handedness (20), she stops to explore the implications of that anomaly. Describing Holbein’s entrance to Basel, she describes Basel and the city’s guild, which Holbein joined (32–7). She wonders (88) what languages Holbein will have spoken on his journey, as his Latin was rudimentary. His attenuated will has been known since the nineteenth century, but now we have some idea of why it says so little and something about its four executors. Goldring comfortably draws upon sources in several languages. She utilizes the latest scientific technology, including X-radiography, infrared reflectography, dendrochronology, and pigment analysis, to reconstruct Holbein’s technique. She appears to have seen and studied almost every one of Holbein’s surviving paintings and drawings.

Yet there are things we still do not know about Holbein and, like any excellent biography, even this study invites further exploration. Though he produced an astonishing volume of work himself, of which myriad copies and versions poured forth from template models, the details of the workshop which he must have furnished and staffed remain unknown. The well-established suggestion that such contemporaries as, e.g., John Bettes, pulled their oar in such a crew remains to be explored. So do the implications of the surrealistic, anamorphic imagery in Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533): where does Holbein come upon such an approach; what does it tell us of his work and of his mind; where does it fit in the context of contemporary European visual or scientific culture? And why is it that an artist with so many admirers had so little immediate influence and so few imitators among those who followed? Whomever seeks to explore such issues further will have the rock-solid firmament of Goldring’s work upon which to stand.