Hans Holbein the Younger's Darmstadt

Home , Donor portrait, Hans Holbein the Younger, Madonna della Vittoria

Jennifer Wu

2016

1 For my mother and father.

REINVENTING DONOR FAMILY PORTRAITURE:

HANS HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER’S

DARMSTADT MADONNA

Jennifer Wu

ABSTRACT

This thesis examines how Hans Holbein the Younger negotiated the genre of donor family portraiture in the Darmstadt Madonna (1526/1528) by creating a contemporary representation of the patron Jakob Meyer’s family. In early sixteenth- century Basel, reforms within the Catholic Church and the advent of Protestantism contested late medieval concepts of gender, kinship, and piety. I argue that the

Darmstadt Madonna addressed this tumultuous context by partially reorienting the focus of traditional devotionally-themed paintings from the holy figures to the donor family. In this transitional work, Holbein offered an innovative and complex representation of the

Meyer family members, their interconnections, and their relations with the depicted holy figures. The painting inventively satisfied Jakob Meyer’s ostensible objectives in representing his family’s exemplary devotional practices, his own paternal authority, and the Meyers’ procreative continuity through their daughter, Anna.

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to a number of people who have supported me in writing this thesis. It has been a true privilege to work with Dr. Andrea Pearson, who guided my academic journey at American University from the very beginning, shared her time and wisdom generously, and inspired me to do my best work. I thank Dr. Kim Butler

Wingfield for encouraging me to “go big,” trust my instincts, and pursue my ideas. I am greatly appreciative of the wonderful art history faculty and staff, including Dr. Helen

Langa, Dr. Juliet Bellow, Dr. Joanne Allen, Dr. Ying-chen Peng, Sarah Osborne Bender, and Jaylynn Saure. Many thanks to Josh Foley, Steve Clark, and Natalie Ennis for their friendship and support. I am very thankful for the camaraderie of my classmates and cohort, which will sustain me for years to come. Most importantly, I thank my husband

Adam and our little boy Landon for being a constant source of joy and affection.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...... v

INTRODUCTION...... 1

CHAPTER 1 TRADITIONS AND TRANSITIONS: DONOR FAMILY PORTRAITURE IN EARLY GERMAN AND NETHERLANDISH PAINTINGS...... 11

CHAPTER 2 THE DEVOTIONAL MATRIX: EMERGING MODES OF INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE PIETY...... 27

CHAPTER 3 FATHER OF THE BRIDE: PATERNAL AUTHORITY AND PROCREATIONAL ANXIETIES...... 37

CONCLUSION...... 56

ILLUSTRATIONS...... 59

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 61

iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Hans Holbein the Younger, Darmstadt Madonna, 1526/28, oil on panel, Schwäbische Hall, Germany: Johanniterkirche...... 59

Figure 2: Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Jakob Meyer, 1516, oil on panel, Basel, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum Basel...... 59

Figure 3: Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Dorothea Kannengiesser, 1516, oil on panel, Basel, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum Basel...... 59

Figure 4: Gerard David, Baptism of Christ (interior), 1502 -1508, oil on panel, Bruges, Belgium: Groeninge Museum...... 59

Figure 5: Gerard David, Baptism of Christ (exterior panel), 1502 -1508, oil on panel, Bruges, Belgium: Groeninge Museum...... 59

Figure 6: Hans Holbein the Elder, The Votive Painting of Ulrich Schwarz, 1508, Augsburg, Germany: Staatsgalerie Altdeutsche Meister...... 59

Figure 7: Hugo van der Goes, Portinari Altarpiece, c.1475, oil on panel, Florence, Italy: Galleria degli Uffizi...... 59

Figure 8: Hans Memling, Moreel Triptych, 1484, oil on panel, Bruges, Belgium: Groeninge Museum...... 59

Figure 9: Unknown, Epitaph of Klara Löffelhoz, née Münzmeister, 1437, Nuremberg, Germany: St. Sebaldus Church...... 59

Figure 10: Lucas Cranach the Elder, Torgau Holy Kinship Altarpiece, 1509, oil on panel, Frankfurt, Germany: Städel Museum...... 59

Figure 11: Bernhard Strigel, Conrad Rehlinger and His Children, 1517, oil on panel, Munich, Germany: Alte Pinakothek...... 59

Figure 12: Hans Holbein the Younger, Oberried Altarpiece, c. 1520, unspecified paint on pinewood panel, Freiburg, Germany: Freiburg Cathedral...... 59

Figure 13: Hans Baldung Grien, St. James the Greater from Christ and the Apostles, 1519, woodcut, New York, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art..... 59

Figure 14: Gregor Erhart, schutzmantelmadonna sculpture for the Kaishem Altarpiece, 1502-1505, (now lost)...... 59

Figure 15: Hans Holbein the Elder, Single-sheet schutzmantelmadonna woodcut from Kaishem, 1502-1505, Munich, Germany, Alte Pinakothek...... 59

Figure 16: Rogier van der Weyden, Crucifixion, c. 1445, Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum...... 59

Figure 17: Hans Holbein the Younger, Darmstadt Madonna, detail of Magdalene kneeling, oil on panel, 1526/28, Schwäbische Hall, Germany: Johanniterkirche...... 60

Figure 18: A. Werthmann, detailed drawing of the Darmstadt Madonna, 1871...... 60

Figure 19: Rogier van der Weyden, Deposition, oil on panel, c. 1435, Madrid, Spain: Museum del Prado...... 60

Figure 20: Hans Holbein the Younger, Darmstadt Madonna, infrared reflectogram detail of the Meyer women...... 60

Figure 21: Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Anna Meyer, chalk on paper, 1526, Basel, Germany: Kunstmuseum...... 60

Figure 22: Rogier van der Weyden Miraflores Altarpiece, oil on panel, 1445, Berlin, Germany: Berlin Gemäldegalerie...... 60

Figure 23: Tilman Riemenschneider, sculpture of Anna Selbdritt, wood, c. 1500, Würzburg, Germany: Mainfränkisches Museum...... 60

Figure 24: Attributed to Matthäus Gutrecht the Younger, Holy Kinship, oil on panel, c. 1500-1510, Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art...... 60

Figure 25: Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Dorothea Meyer née Kannengiesser, chalk on paper, 1526, Basel, Germany: Basel Kunstmuseum...... 60

Figure 26: Bernhard Strigel, Portrait of Maximilian I and His Family, oil on panel, 1516, Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum...... 60

Figure 27: Hans Burgkmair, Portrait of Hans Schellenberger, oil on panel, 1505, Cologne, Germany: Wallraf-Richartz Museum...... 60

Figure 28: Hans Burgkmair, Portrait of Barbara Schellenberger, oil on panel, 1507, Cologne, Germany: Wallraf-Richartz Museum...... 60

Figure 29: Hans Holbein the Younger, Study of Sir Thomas More Family Portrait, pen and brush on chalk, 1527, Basel, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum Basel...... 60

vi Figure 30: Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife and their Two Elder Children, mixed techniques on paper, mounted on wood, 1528- 1529, Basel, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum Basel...... 60

vii INTRODUCTION

In the nineteenth century, Hans Holbein the Younger’s Darmstadt Madonna

(1526/28), also known as the Meyer Madonna, (fig. 1) achieved cultural prominence with the public audience through a major controversy on connoisseurship that shaped art historical theory and influenced German Romanticism.1 This dispute was centered on the authorship of two versions of the Meyer Madonna, one known as the “Dresden”

Madonna and the other as the “Darmstadt.” Throughout the early part of the century, the

Dresden version stimulated a plethora of popular literature as an ideal painting of the

German Renaissance. These writings widely compared the Dresden Meyer Madonna with

Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, which was in the same collection in Dresden, and extolled

Holbein as the “Raphael of the North.”2

However, the authenticity of the painting was challenged when another version of the Meyer Madonna came on the art market in 1822.3 This more obscure work was bought by Prince Wilhelm of Prussia and was eventually transferred by his descendants to Darmstadt.4 The debate on the authorship of these two versions intensified for decades,

1 Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener collaborated on this research but wrote separate papers. See Oskar Bätschmann, “Der Holbein-Streit: eine Krise der Kunstgeschichte,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 38 (1996): 87–100 and Pascal Griener, “Alfred Woltmann and the Holbein Dispute, 1863-1871,” Studies in the History of Art 60 (January 1, 2001): 210–25; Ralph Nicholson Wornum, Hans Holbein and the Meier Madonna (Arundel Society, 1871). Wornum’s paper settled the dispute and determined that the Darmstadt version was Holbein’s original; Till-Holger Borchert, “Hans Holbein and the Literary Art Criticism of the German Romantics,” Studies in the History of Art 60 (January 1, 2001): 186–209.

2 Bätschmann, “Der Holbein-Streit,” 87; Griener, “Alfred Woltmann and the Holbein Dispute, 1863-1871,” 213.

3 Bätschmann, “Der Holbein-Streit,” 89–90.

4 Griener, “Alfred Woltmann and the Holbein Dispute, 1863-1871,” 213.

1 culminating in a side-by-side exhibit at the Dresden Gemäldegalerie in 1871.5 This event ushered in the application of a cutting-edge, comparative method in art historical analysis and generated a critical discourse among a committee of art historians. The dispute over the authenticity of the two paintings was put to rest by Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who applied Gottfried Semper’s theory of style and firmly attributed only the Darmstadt

Madonna to Holbein.6

Since then, Holbein’s original, the Darmstadt Madonna, has continued to attract scholarly attention, in which diverse theoretical approaches have been applied to the painting. Little has been written, however, on the family depicted in the painting beyond general biographies. This thesis implements a hybrid of formal and socio-historical approaches to examine the problem of spirituality, marriage, and procreation within the family in the Darmstadt Madonna.

In this painting, the Virgin Mary is the immediate focus. Dominant in size and position, she holds the Christ Child tenderly in her arm. Jakob Meyer, the patriarch of the family, kneels on the Virgin’s privileged right side. Before him, an adolescent boy presents a chubby, smiling infant to the viewer. On the left side of the Virgin, three

Meyer women kneel in prayer. Jakob’s first wife, Magdalena Bauer, who had been deceased for at least fourteen years at the time the painting was designed, kneels next to the Virgin; she is the Meyer female farthest from the picture plane. His second wife,

5 Griener, “Alfred Woltmann and the Holbein Dispute, 1863-1871,” 212–13.

6 Griener, “Alfred Woltmann and the Holbein Dispute, 1863-1871,” 211, 219–21; Emil Major, “Der mutmassliche Verfertiger des Dresdener Madonnenbildes,” Anzeiger für Schweizerische Altertumskunde 12 (1910): 318–24. Major later determined that the Dresden Madonna was copied after the original by the German painter Bartholomäus Sarburgh around 1637.

2 Dorothea Kannengiesser, is presented closer to the beholder in a modified three-quarter profile and is slightly smaller in scale than Magdalena. Jakob and Dorothea’s daughter,

Anna, who later married Nikolaus Irmy, kneels in front of the composition. She gazes down and across the foreground of the composition at the standing nude infant. These kneeling supplicants, arranged by gender and flanking the Madonna and Child, conform to the pictorial representation of late medieval family groups.

The dynamic between an established genre, namely, the donor family portrait, and a pivotal set of historical circumstances is at the crux of my analysis. The Darmstadt

Madonna was created in a new historical moment in early sixteenth-century Basel when medieval notions of family and spirituality were facing challenges on several key fronts.

Toward the end of the medieval era, German territories were experiencing economic and demographic shifts from feudal practices to a bourgeois culture in urban areas.7 The emerging middle class was educated and economically bolstered by mercantilism and new industries. Nouveau-riche patrons were commissioning and experimenting with inventive modes of art, including portraiture. At the same time, the growth of the art market compounded the infusion of print media and whetted artists’ interest in innovation and differentiation. By the sixteenth century, the northern version of humanism, which combined the optimistic perfectibility of man with anxiety and suffering, also played a role in challenging the Christian past.8

7 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 55–59. Koerner states that these broad historical factors may have influenced Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait of 1500. I believe that these trends also explain the growth of donor portraiture and the eventual divergence into secular portraiture.

8 Koerner, Self-Portraiture, 78.

3 The life of Jakob Meyer, the presumed patron of the Darmstadt Madonna, had a strong intersection with these events. As the first mayor of Basel elected from the guilds,

Jakob’s personal success was enabled by the elimination of the old feudal system and the creation of the new merchant class. At the same time, Jakob was steadfast in his

Catholicism during a period in which Protestant ideas were quickly altering the society and devotional practices.9 A letter between the Swiss humanist Johannes Xylotectus to the Protestant leader Huldrych Zwingli describes Jakob’s apprehension about the rapid dispersion of Protestant ideology and “Lutheran heresy.”10 Jakob was aware of the encroachment of reform ideology and familiar with the opposing leaders’ strategies and agendas. He continued to champion the interests of the Catholic minority, years after his removal from office in the late 1520s.11 In the context of Protestant and Catholic tensions,

9 Nikolaus Meier, “Tactics and Strategy: Holbein’s Patrons in Basel: Bankers, Scholars and Nobles,” in Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years 1515-1532, ed. Christian Müller and Stephan Kemperdick (New York: Prestel, 2006), 58–59. In 1516, Jakob became the first commoner to rise from the guilds to become the mayor of Basel. He initiated several successful reforms but was later removed from his position in 1521 and imprisoned briefly for accepting French pension payments in violation of the city law. It is possible that the guilds wished to curb Jakob’s stunning political success and therefore skewed the outcome of his trial. See also Christian Müller and Stephan Kemperdick, eds., Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years 1515-1532 (New York, NY: Prestel, 2006), 338. By1522 Lutheranism and political unrest had reached a critical mass and the Catholic community of Basel was quickly eroded.

10 Xylotectus to Huldrych Zwingli, December 11, 1522, in Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, (Leipzig: Heinsius, 1911), 636. Domino Huldricho Zuinglio Ioannes Xylotectus SD / Tam oportunum nactus tabellarium non patiar te latere ea, quae / apud nos nova referuntur. Vidimus litteras patricio cuidam nostrati / a Basilęęnsi quodam non infimae sortis homine Missa, quibus continebatur, / Huttenum modo Basileam adplicuisse cum eo, qui / Francisco Sickingensi a confessionibus fuit, quod item brevi / venturus sit illuc et Melanchton und als bald der Luther selbs; / preterea timendum esse totam urbem propediem ad Lutheranam / heresim declinaturam, quum eo cum senatu populus pręcipitanter / feratur. Caussam quoque adperuit, quur Basilęam sint petituri, ut / scilicet profugi ac Nusquam tuti ad eam, veluti asylum quoddam, se / recipiant. Habes nova, quae te scire volui. Ea, si voles, credas; / nos non credimus. Auctorem volo scias, ut et inde rem aestimes: / Iacobus Meyer, alias zum hasen, olim consul Basilęensis, haec / nostrati cuidam scripsit. Tu vicissim, si quid novi habeas, ad nos / scribito. Fac item, ut olim aliquid de libris meis audiam. Tabellarius / iste longius ibit. Interim scribere potes, ut rediens accipiat.

11 Jeanne Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 92.

4 the commissioning of the Darmstadt Madonna can be considered a testament to Jakob’s devout Catholicism.

The Darmstadt Madonna exemplifies forms of sacred art that were commissioned by a new type of upwardly-mobile clients and social conditions. The exact circumstances of how Jakob Meyer and Holbein made contact are unknown. But by 1516, Holbein had produced a pair of pendant portraits of Jakob Meyer and his wife, Dorothea

Kannengiesser (figs. 2, 3). This set of paintings was likely not made as marital portraits per se, but as a commemoration of Jakob’s election to mayor. In his portrait, Jakob holds a coin as a reference to his guild affiliations. It remains unclear whether Jakob or

Dorothea (or both) commissioned the Darmstadt Madonna in 1526. However, the privileging of Jakob under the Virgin’s cloak suggests that he was probably the donor of the painting.

The Darmstadt Madonna probably served a fairly conventional purpose, perhaps as an altarpiece intended for a semi-private setting, such as a family chapel in a residence or church. Although there are no primary sources on the painting’s original location, the altarpiece survived the iconoclasm of 1529, which persuasively implies a destination in the Meyers’ home rather than a church. The scale of the work is generous, measuring

146.5 cm by 102 cm (approximately 58 inches by 40 inches), which was better suited for an altar than a devotional painting or epitaph. The formal characteristics also provide some insights into the utility of the painting. The compressed verticality of the composition and the Virgin’s foreshortened torso and legs indicate a lower perspectival angle and a possible viewing context over an altar. Furthermore, the standing infant looks

5 at and gestures toward an unexpected and enigmatic visual detail in the central foreground of the painting – the fold in the rug – which highlights the site of the altar.

Perhaps most striking is the overall impression of a seamlessly blended, spiritually exemplary family, conveyed by the physical proximity of the donors and holy figures, the naturalistic representation of each Meyer family member, and a minimized hierarchical scale. Despite compliance with the pictorial language of donor family portraiture that will be described more deeply in Chapter 1 of this study, this painting is also unsettling. The image is marked by ambiguity, in part because Holbein selectively borrows from and merges a broad range of iconographic and visual traditions. The fusion of the schutzmantelmadonna, or the Madonna of Mercy, with a donor family is unprecedented. The painting also stages the Meyer family and holy figures in front of a decorative shell niche, unified by the intricately woven rug. This unarticulated arena resembles neither a church nor a domestic interior, but suggests an intermediary space where the earthly meets the divine. With these pictorial inventions, the painting balances the tension between the conveyance of the Meyers’ Catholic faith and the issue of spiritual decorum.

These compelling formal features in the arrangement of the donors, the indeterminate setting, and the composite of iconographic traditions, have been largely overlooked in the scholarship on the painting. Instead, most of the inquiry relies on technical analyses to outline the production process and to reconstruct the gaps in the

Meyer biographies.12 X-ray images informed Hans Reinhardt’s argument that the two

12 Stephan Kemperdick, “Ein Meisterwerk, ein Rätsel. Mutmassungen über Hans Holbeins Madonnentafel des Jakob Meyer zum Hasen,” in Holbein in Berlin: Die Madonna der Sammlung Würth mit Meisterwerken der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, ed. Stephan Kemperdick, Michael Roth, and Christine Seidel (Berlin: Berlin State Museums, 2016), 32. Kemperdick offers a similar opinion, that the

6 boys whom Holbein included in the lower left are deceased Meyer children, whose deaths prompted the revisions of 1528. This reworking included the addition of the first wife,

Magdalena, and thus integrated the living and dead family members.13 The x-rays were later supplemented with infrared reflectograms. Interpretations of this new technological evidence by Stephanie Buck refute Reinhardt’s point of view, claiming that the portrait of

Magdalena was included from the early stages of the painting.14 A recent essay by

Stephan Kemperdick discusses additional details from the technical studies and questions the two-stage production of the painting and the chronology of events in the lives of the

Meyer family.15 Other recent contributions include an analysis of the painting as a conglomerate of iconographic and pictorial traditions by Max Imdahl and a study of the role and images of stepmothers in early modern families by Lyndan Warner, who claims that Dorothea was carving out her own identity through the revisions in 1528.16

Darmstadt Madonna often informs the gaps in Meyer biographies: “Zwar vermittelt die Literatur bisweilen den Eindruck, die Ereignisse im Hause Meyer lieferten ein tragfähiges Gerüst für die Entstehungsgeschichte des Gemäldes, doch verhält es sich in Wahrheit eher umgekehrt: Dem Gemälde sind Anhaltspunkte für die Geschichte der Familie entnommen worden.” (Although the literature sometimes gives the impression that the events in the Meyer household provided a viable framework for the genesis of the painting, in reality, it behaves in reverse. The evidence for the history of the family has been gathered from the painting.)

13 Hans Reinhardt, “Die Madonna des Bürgermeisters Meyer von Hans Holbein d.J.: Nachforschungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte und Aufstellung des Gemäldes,” Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 15, n. 4 (1954-1955): 253–54.

14 Stephanie Buck and Jochen Sander, Hans Holbein the Younger, 1497/98 - 1543: Portraitist of the Renaissance (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 40–41.

15 Kemperdick, “Ein Meisterwerk, ein Rätsel,” 26–41.

16 Max Imdahl, “Hans Holbeins ‘Darmstädter Madonna’ - Andachtsbild und Ereignisbild,” in Wie eindeutig ist ein Kunstwerk?, ed. Max Imdahl and Werner Busch (Cologne: DuMont Dokumente, 1986), 9– 39; Lyndan Warner, “Remembering the Mother, Presenting the Stepmother: Portraits of the Early Modern Family in Northern Europe,” Early Modern Women 6 (October 1, 2011): 93–125.

7 In addition to the studies that primarily interrogate the Darmstadt Madonna, particular scholarship on late-medieval religious and devotional art has informed my inquiry into this painting. Lynn Jacobs offers a detailed examination of gendered devotion and divine thresholds in her scholarship on Netherlandish triptychs in the fifteenth century.17 Bret Rothstein argues that the devotional gaze could be gendered and that contrasting spiritual practices implied in paired portraits of women and men were understood as complementary if hierarchical forms of piety.18 Laura Gelfand and Walter

Gibson provide insight into the influence of illuminated manuscripts on donor portraiture and explain that the placement of patrons near the Virgin without the intercessory presence of other saints was routine in books of hours.19 Corine Schleif writes prolifically on donor portraiture and the role of patrons in self-fashioning, issues that are at the core of my investigation of the Meyer family portrait.20

The present study builds on this earlier work to explore for the first time the implications of the Meyer imagery within a familial context. Although donor portraits appear in various media, I concentrate on comparisons with contemporary religious

17 Lynn F. Jacobs, Opening Doors: The Early Netherlandish Triptych Reinterpreted (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 151–86.

18 Bret Rothstein, “Gender and the Configuration of Early Netherlandish Devotional Skill,” in Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Agency, Identity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 15–34.

19 Laura D. Gelfand and Walter S. Gibson, “Surrogate Selves: The ‘Rolin Madonna’ and the Late- Medieval Devotional Portrait,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 29, no. 3/4 (January 1, 2002): 119–38.

20 Corine Schleif, “Hands That Appoint, Anoint and Ally: Late Medieval Donor Strategies for Appropriating Approbation through Painting,” Art History 16 (March 1993): 1–32; See also Corine Schleif, “Men on the Right - Women on the Left: (A)symmetrical Spaces and Gendered Places,” in Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 207–49.

8 paintings, including altarpieces, devotional works, votives, and epitaphs in order to more explicitly situate the Darmstadt Madonna in terms of form and function. Chapter 1 contextualizes the Darmstadt Madonna in relation to late medieval pictorial conventions of family groups to demonstrate that the painting innovatively interpreted the genre. The first half of the chapter examines the broader visual patterns of donor family portraiture in German and Netherlandish paintings in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and counters Phillipe Ariès’s assessment of family groups as “naïve, clumsy, monotonous work without style.”21 By the sixteenth century, patrons and artists were seeking diverse pictorial solutions, drawing upon multiple sources to achieve complex objectives in sacred paintings containing donor portraits. In the second half of the chapter, I discuss how the Meyer family group retains some elements of the genre, such as scalar hierarchy, gendered privilege, and compositional arrangement. I also contend that the painting incorporates verisimilitude, compositional strategies, and iconographic adaptations to dismantle some of these pictorial devices effectively.

The subsequent chapters analyze how Holbein navigated the archaic constraints of donor portraiture to develop a contemporary image of a sixteenth-century family in a specific historical moment. I propose in Chapter 2 that Holbein constructed a devotional image that ostensibly fulfilled the patron’s spiritual agenda, yet also expanded the parameters of the genre during the socio-historical upheaval of the Reformation. The

Darmstadt Madonna embodies this fractious confusion and anxiety by drawing unprecedented attention to the donor family and its personal modes of piety. Chapter 3

21 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Knopf, 1962), 41.

9 considers the impetus for Jakob Meyer’s decision to alter the painting two years after it was first completed, in 1528, upon Holbein’s return to Basel from England. These revisions to the altarpiece, most notably to Anna’s and Dorothea’s portraits, are evident by comparison of the painting as it now appears to preparatory studies and infrared reflectograms. These changes were likely urgent: they revealed a critical social moment for the Meyers when Anna was approaching marriage. By commissioning these revisions,

Jakob was responding to the pervasive social scrutiny of marriage and family during the period while strengthening the projection of his own paternal and spousal authority.

In conclusion, this thesis situates the Darmstadt Madonna as an iconographically, spiritually, and socially transitional work that pushed the limits of donor family portraiture during the formative years prior to the official Protestant conversion of Basel.

Given the historical flux of early sixteenth-century Basel, the visual vocabulary of medieval gendered devotion was no longer adequate to express the binary modes of affective and internal piety that was prevalent in older German and Netherlandish representations. The formal departures from these conventions allowed a more dynamic and complex portrayal of the Meyers and the self-fashioning of their relationships with the Holy Family. The painting’s revisions in 1528 marked a crucial junction in the Meyer family’s lives, one that was responding to pressures of change in contemporary concepts of marriage, paternal authority, and procreation. The Darmstadt Madonna is a painting that ultimately represents a family’s relationships and devotional practices during a period of contradictory socio-religious values.

10 CHAPTER 1

TRADITIONS AND TRANSITIONS: DONOR FAMILY PORTRAITURE IN

EARLY GERMAN AND NETHERLANDISH PAINTINGS

“These family groups are naïve, clumsy, monotonous works without style; their painters, like their models, remain unknown or obscure.”1

Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood

In his seminal study on the social history of childhood and families, Philippe

Ariès described the nascent state of late medieval visual representations of the family as mundane and unremarkable. He was articulating a common view of such pictures, since these works were neglected by family historians as well as art historians. Ariès’s scholarly objective was not to engage in art historical analysis, but to use works of art as documents by which to understand family life and the social history of children.

Unsurprisingly, his generalized observations disregarded the genre’s artistic innovations and the sophisticated means in which donor figures mediate between the viewers and the holy scenes. Nonetheless, Ariès did single out the exceptional quality of the Meyer family portrait in Hans Holbein the Younger’s Darmstadt Madonna.2 In contrast to this dichotomous assessment, donor family portraiture deserves a more nuanced and deeper analysis that clarifies the visual traditions of the genre as well as the circumstances that prompted the production of the Darmstadt Madonna.

This chapter traces the development of donor family portraiture in German and

Netherlandish paintings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I argue that the Meyer

1 Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 41.

2 Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 41.

11 donor family portrait retains some formal elements of those late medieval norms, but also incorporates significant invention in its dilution of the hierarchical scale, compositional and spatial arrangement, and extensive verisimilitude. As one of Holbein’s last major

Catholic works painted on the eve of the Reformation, the Darmstadt Madonna can be understood as a new paradigm for the representation of families in sacred art, one that moves beyond earlier works in this genre by emphasizing the personal roles and relations within the family and new expressions of piety.

Donor Imagery: Kinship and Spirituality

“Donor family portraiture” is defined in this thesis as a visual genre that depicts presumed adult patrons, their dependent children, and in some cases, other relatives, in the presence of holy figures. For the purposes of analyzing the Darmstadt Madonna, I will focus on examples of early German and Netherlandish paintings. The portrait elements of these images are created with attention to the likeness of the sitters. At the same time, donor family portraits are artificial constructions that cannot be considered mere family records of relations and resemblances; they are often subject to considerable revision and selectivity on behalf of the patrons in order to convey specific messages.

Donor portraits of adults first became commonplace in the fifteenth century, and were commissioned by both men and women.3 In some cases, these images commemorated the deceased and were commissioned by the deceased person’s surviving relatives.4 The eventual integration of children in these images suggests that patrons became

3 Schleif, “Hands That Appoint, Anoint and Ally,” 1.

4 Schleif, “Hands That Appoint, Anoint and Ally,” 1.

12 increasingly interested in commissioning art that conveyed more complex social and spiritual messages about the family unit.

These images of family groups are products of late medieval systems of familial and temporal relations that resist linearity and boundaries. Susan Karant-Nunn observes that medieval people perceived their world within a larger social fabric consisting of generational kinship ties.5 Their view of life as extended, intertwined networks encouraged fluid relationships with the deceased.6 Thus, these images sometimes brought together family members who did not live together or even know each other. In David’s

Baptism of Christ of 1502 - 1508 (fig. 4), a portrait of donor Jan des Trompes appears on the right wing of the altarpiece while representations of his first wife, Elisabeth van der

Meersch, and the couple’s daughters are located on the interior left wing. His second wife, Magdalena Cordier, and their daughter are depicted on an exterior wing (fig. 5). In this painting, time is compressed because all of the children from the first marriage and even the daughter from the second marriage are shown as approximate in age.7 A primary motive for this commingling of the living and the dead was to show a fuller picture of ancestry and lineage. In some examples, the male patron’s successive wives and their respective children are integrated into one panel. The Votive Painting of Ulrich Schwarz of 1508, by Hans Holbein the Elder – father of Hans the Younger – presents the donor accompanied by his three wives and a legion of children and grandchildren (fig. 6).

5 Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “Reformation Society, Women and the Family,” in Reformation World, ed. Andrew Pettegree (London: Routledge, 2000), 433–34.

6 Karant-Nunn, “Reformation Society, Women and the Family,” 433–34.

7 Warner, “Remembering the Mother, Presenting the Stepmother,” 97–98.

13 A few cases of donor portraits with children can be seen in early fifteenth-century

German paintings.8 However, children did not appear regularly in Netherlandish donor portraits until after the 1450s, when they began to be portrayed in large public altarpieces.

Two of the earliest surviving Netherlandish altarpieces that include many, if not all, of the patrons’ children were Hugo van der Goes’s Portinari Altarpiece circa 1475 (fig. 7) and Hans Memling’s Moreel Triptych of 1484 (fig. 8).9 These two examples of donor family portraiture feature the genre’s distinctive adaptability in accommodating contractions and expansions in the family. In these images of families, children are modeled after their exemplary donor parents in kneeling poses and hands in prayer.

However, infants and very young children are almost never present. Perhaps the omission of the youngest family members was rooted in devotional practice because children must be older than a toddler in order to kneel. 10 This absence also could have been a pragmatic solution by excluding the children until they survive infancy. Regarding the Moreel

Triptych, the donors, Willem Moreel and his wife Barbara van Vlaenderberch, or van

Hertsvelde, had five sons and thirteen daughters.11 Dirk de Vos observes that only eleven

8 Jacobs, Opening Doors, 312, n. 22; Margaret L. Koster, “New Documentation for the Portinari Altar-Piece,” The Burlington Magazine 145, no. 1200 (March 1, 2003): 169; Robert Wheaton, “Images of Kinship,” Journal of Family History 12, no. 4 (1987): 389–405. Jacobs relied on Koster’s article. I find Jacobs’ and Koster’s conclusion that German paintings included donors and children prior to Netherlandish paintings to be too generalized. However, my own research suggests that the earliest examples of donors and children could have been found in early fifteenth-century German paintings, but these works were epitaphs and votive paintings and served different functions than Netherlandish altarpieces. Wheaton notes that family portraits originated in Germany and the Low Countries.

9 Jacobs, Opening Doors, 321–22, n. 48.

10 Jacobs, Opening Doors, 317, n. 108. Charles Talbot points out that the consensus in dating the Portinari Altarpiece based on the presence of the three eldest children may not be accurate because infants and toddlers were not painted because they could not kneel.

12 W.H.J. Weale, “Généalogie de La Famille Moreel,” Le Beffroi 2 (65 1864): 179–96. Weale’s account is the earliest identification of the Moreel children.

14 daughters were represented, and speculates that perhaps the two daughters not accounted for had not yet been born when the painting was made.12 According to x-ray analyses, the children present in the altarpiece were not initially included in the painting: six heads were later added over the landscape.13 Depicted children also were sometimes painted out and relocated to make space for the new siblings.14 In an alternative pictorial approach, the Portinari Altarpiece includes three of the couple’s seven children, but was never updated to include the newest family members. This information serves as evidence to date the production of the painting between 1474 and 1475.15

The presence of children in these religious images helps to advance the social and spiritual objectives of their parents. The inclusion of the children vouches for the success of the couple in their most important marital duty: procreation. Children signify the couple’s conformity to this fundamental social expectation and the continuation of the family line. Children also participate in the internal hierarchy and organization of the family, including birth order and gendered privilege. For example, the male child in

Gerard David’s Baptism of Christ has closer access to the central scene and is visibly privileged over his sisters.16 Because these religious works are often situated in public or

12 Dirk de Vos, Hans Memling: The Complete Works (Ghent: Ludion Press, 1994), 241.

13 Vos, Hans Memling, 241.

14 Vos, Hans Memling, 241.

15 Maryan Wynn Ainsworth, Gerard David: Purity of Vision in an Age of Transition (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 162. See discussion of Memling’s portraits of Tommaso and Maria Portinari in Julia I. Miller, “Miraculous Childbirth and the Portinari Altarpiece,” The Art Bulletin 77, no. 2 (June 1, 1995): 256.

16 Jacobs, Opening Doors, 167.

15 semi-public settings, the donor portraits channel a range of messages about the internal organization and unity of the family to a wider audience beyond that of their own family members. By doing so, the painting presents its family unit as socially and spiritually archetypal. Indeed, children who appear in donor family portraiture serve a variety of spiritual purposes. These images exhibit the children’s exemplary dutifulness in praying for their parents’ salvation. The parents may have wanted to teach, inspire or remind their offspring to pray for their souls after death. The patrons also would have wished for the children themselves to be the beneficiaries of intercessory grace by placing them in proximity to saints and holy figures in the altarpiece.17 The inclusion of the children highlights the spirituality of the family unit and the piety of each family member. By including the parents and their progeny in the commissioned altarpiece, the patrons aim to elevate the family’s spiritual status and ensure its perpetuity.

In the earliest images of family groups, German votive paintings and epitaphs routinely conformed to gendered divisions in the family and hierarchical order by age.

The variance in figural scale between saints and donors remained markedly more pronounced than that in later Netherlandish altarpieces. In some cases, the donor figures were placed below the holy scene rather than on the left or right wings of an altarpiece. A

1437 epitaph of Klara Löffelhoz (fig. 9) of Nuremberg shows male and female family members placed beneath a painted border that separates them from an event of the

Passion. The family members are reduced in scale in relation to the figures in the central scene and are arranged by gender and age along the bottom margin.

17 Jacobs, Opening Doors, 321–22, n. 48.

16 By the sixteenth century, German votive paintings also began to exhibit heightened naturalism and individualization in the depiction of donor families. The

Votive Painting of Ulrich Schwarz preserves the medieval gendered split and pronounced scalar differences between donors and saints. Ulrich is shown as the largest family figure and occupies the central position in the lower register, while his wives, children, and grandchildren are arrayed by gender. When compared to earlier works, such as the epitaph of Klara Löffelhoz, there are greater variations in faces, gestures, and costumes of the family members. The display of piety also differs for some Schwarz family members, especially the offspring. Two of the Schwarz daughters, one in a white bonnet and one in brown, seem distracted from the somber and intense task at hand and lean toward each other as if conversing. The nonconformity and animation in these figures create a certain conceptual tension, insofar as they distract from traditional visual codes of spiritual propriety that emphasize uniformity in pose and contemplative stillness.

Along with increased naturalism, donor portraiture developed several distinctive trends. One popular schema is the conflation of patrons and saints in both individual and family portraits.18 This pictorial device provides a point of reference by transferring the religious story into a contemporary context. Lucas Cranach the Elder followed this direction in the Torgau Holy Kinship of 1509 (fig. 10) by painting the patron, Frederick the Wise, along with his brother, Duke John, in the guises of Alphaeus and Zebedee.19

18 An example of the conflation of holy figures and portraits can be seen in Bernard van Orley’s Margaret of Austria as the Magdalene, c. 1520. Some scholars also believe that the faces of St. George and St. Eustace on the wings on Albrecht Dürer’s Paumgärtner Altarpiece, c. 1500, were ostensibly those of Stephan and Lucas Paumgärtner, the brothers who donated the altarpiece.

19 John Dillenberger, Images and Relics: Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in Sixteenth- Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 80.

17 This representation differs from earlier images of family groups because the patrons participate in the extended family of St. Anne. Cranach was mindful of maintaining decorum by incorporating Frederick the Wise and Duke John as Anne’s sons-in-law, not as her husbands. The figures of the patrons in the guises of Alphaeus and Zebedee occupy the wings of the altarpiece and are separated from the central panel. It is difficult to ascertain reasons for such a commission, although the choice of this apocryphal theme evidently had complex personal, social, and religious implications. Since Frederick the

Wise never married or had children, perhaps the depicted Holy Kinship substituted for an earthly family. The conflation of the patrons and religious figures creates a space for active emulation and participation by Frederick and John, who were likely the primary viewers of this work. Although Holbein does not follow this performative trend to such a degree in the Darmstadt Madonna, we will see in the next chapter that Holbein adopts a comparable strategy by enhancing the parallelism between the Meyer women and mother-saints in order to strengthen the donors’ spiritual interconnections.

Patrons and artists were gradually seeking more diversified representation of the family to satisfy secular interests, yet experimental portraiture continued to be pursued in the context of religious themes. These developments signaled a greater attention to the characteristics and needs of the family and less preoccupation with the holy scenes.

Bernhard Strigel’s Conrad Rehlinger and His Children of 1517 (fig. 11) most likely served as a votive in memory of Conrad’s wife and the children’s mother, Barbara

Rehlinger, who had died two years earlier.20 The diptych is dominated by the imposing

20 Martin Schawe, Alte Pinakothek: Altdeutsche und altniederländische Malerei (Munich: Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlungen, 2006), 280–81. Schawe’s catalogue identifies the mother as Barbara Rehlinger.

18 figure of Conrad on the right panel and eight of his children on the left panel. The painting has a continuous scene unifying the two panels within a domestic interior by an open window. The full-length, standing poses of the Rehlinger family members have no known precedent in donor portraiture.21 The corporeal gestures and composition depart significantly from the pictorial norms of spiritual devotion. Conrad occupies the space that is typically reserved for the Virgin and his paternal authority informs the narrative.

The schutzmantelmadonna does not dominate the privileged right panel but is instead suspended in the distant horizon, outside of the window and the domestic realm behind the children. The painting thereby inverts the standard hierarchical scale and its meaning by minimizing and displacing the image of the Madonna from the central focus. This painting is not quite a secular portrait, but the visual conventions of devotional art seem purposefully manipulated to stress most emphatically Conrad’s paternal authority within his household.

Still, medieval visual forms were resilient: they persisted into the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Some German paintings of donor families in altarpieces continued to adhere to such gendered differentiation between men and women and exaggerated scalar discrepancies between the laity and holy figures.22 Holbein’s Oberried Altarpiece of 1521-22 (fig. 12), for instance, reflects traditional models. The small figures of the

Oberried family are aligned in the bottom register as seen in German religious works.

The family members do not share the sacred space of the holy figures, although their

21 One primarily secular precedent in full-length, standing figures in portraiture is Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434), although there is no evidence that Bernhard Strigel knew of this work.

22 This characteristic can be seen in examples such as Albrecht Dürer’s Paumgärtner Altarpiece (1503), Baldung Grien’s The Trinity and Mystic Pietà (1512), and Holbein’s Oberried Altarpiece (c. 1520).

19 heads peak above the border and overlap the central scene. The placement and hierarchical arrangement of the figures based on gender and age are also standard. These faces and bodies are more similar than personalized, with the exception of Hans

Oberried’s carefully rendered portrait.23 However, some naturalism extends to the gestures and expressions of the family members. The parents seem to model exemplary devotion, while the children’s levels of playfulness and distraction are inversely proportional to their age. Overall, though, the Oberried Altarpiece is nearly outmoded in the presentation of the family and seems unaffected by new artistic trends.

A Modern Family Portrait

In the Darmstadt Madonna, Holbein seems to be grappling with the problem of the constraints involved in using an established visual syntax for a modern interpretation of the family’s spiritual and social agenda. The image of the Meyer family embraces many characteristics of donor family portraiture: the gendered division of the family members, their kneeling poses, and intra-familial hierarchy, are all pictorial conventions.

The medieval compression of time and the role of the extended family is also evident in this painting, as seen in the arrangement of Jakob’s successive wives side-by-side.

However, the painting is visually remarkable on several levels because Holbein’s impressive repertoire contributed unconventional visual solutions to several artistic problems. The overall effect of the painting is striking, even slightly disconcerting, since

23 Müller and Kemperdick, Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 254–55. Scholars have debated whether Holbein painted this donor family since neither the modeling of the faces and figures nor the application of paint to the surface bears the refinement of his other works. It is probable that Holbein completed the drawing of the family, but only painted the face of Hans Oberried.

20 the Madonna and Child are innovatively countered by the prominence and intrusiveness of the donor figures.

The portrayal of the Meyer family was especially problematic for Jakob and

Dorothea in the depiction of children. The youngest female figure in the altarpiece, located in the foreground at the right, has been firmly identified as Anna, the daughter of

Dorothea and Jakob. However, primary sources on the Meyer family are scarce, and scholars have long debated the identities and roles of the two boys in the painting. Early scholarship on this issue suggested that the two boys were deceased Meyer children, but there are no official records of Meyer boys in the Basler Archive.24 An archival document on guild activities indicates that there was possibly one Meyer boy, a legitimate son of

Jakob and Magdalena, born in 1504.25 Since there is no other documentation about this boy after the date of his birth, it is possible that the boy died young. The scant records on the Meyer family only confirm that at the time of Jakob’s death in 1531, Dorothea and

Anna were declared heirs.26 In either case—if Anna were indeed the only child or the only surviving offspring at the time of the painting—then depicting the Meyer family posed a visual challenge because of the gender imbalance in the donor portrait. It also

24 Kemperdick, “Ein Meisterwerk, ein Rätsel,” 32, 39–41, n. 43; Eduard His, “Die Basler Archive über Hans Holbein den Jüngern, seine Familie und einige zu ihm in Beziehung stehende Zeitgenossen,” in Jahrbücher für Kunstwissenschaft, vol. 3, 1870, 113–73. Kemperdick notes that most of the very limited archival data on Jakob Meyer and his family was collected in 1870 by Eduard His, a source still considered valid by scholars.

25 Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 102; Kemperdick, “Ein Meisterwerk, Ein Rätsel,” 39–41, n. 42. Kemper’s footnote indicates that Paul Koelner mentioned this primary source in his work, Die Zunft zum Schlüssel in Basel (1953). Koelner’s source states that on the day that Jakob Meyer bought a lifetime membership to the guild in 1504, he brought his son, who was born on the same day. His son was denied free membership into the guild.

26 Kemperdick, “Ein Mesterwerk, ein Rätsel,” 39–41, n. 42.; Bätschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 154.

21 presented a conceptual issue, insofar as pictorial conformity would have exposed

Dorothea and Jakob’s insecurity and anxiety because of their scarcity of offspring, and a sole female child at that.

With these points in mind, I propose that in order to compensate for the absence of a male Meyer heir, Holbein exercised considerable conceptual liberty by expanding the Meyer progeny to downplay the family’s vulnerability in the face of matrilineal inheritance through a lone daughter. Although donor family portraits are fluid in representing members and relationships, Holbein included figures that were purposefully ambiguous. The formal cues suggest that the two boys in the painting are not strictly images of Meyer children. The older boy is not praying along with the rest of his family, and nude infants are almost never depicted in images of donor families. More recently, some scholars suggested that the male youth is St. James the Greater, or in German, St.

Jakobus based on the iconography of the pouch.27 If so, the youth departs from the orthodox image of the saint as a hirsute pilgrim with a walking stick and cockleshell hat

(fig. 13). Holbein invented an image of a male youth who could have simultaneously signified Jakob’s patron saint, the deceased son, or the ongoing desire for a male child.

Many scholars also believe that the infant is John the Baptist from the Italian tradition of

John and Christ iconography, as exemplified by Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch and

Mantegna’s Madonna della Vittoria.28 Infrared studies of the painting help to resolve

27 Quentin Buvelot, “The Meyer Family with the Madonna, Christ and John the Baptist, known as the Darmstadt Madonna, c. 1525/26 and 1528/29,” in Hans Holbein the Younger, 1497/98-1543: Portraitist of the Renaissance (The Hague Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis; Zwolle: Waanders, 2003), 54.

28 Müller and Kemperdick, Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 338. According to Müller, the two boys follow “idealizing and Italianising” pictorial patterns.

22 some questions about the identities of the two boys. Jochen Sander argues that the

Madonna, Christ Child, and the two boys changed very little between the underdrawings and the two completed versions in 1526 and 1528.29 Unlike the rigorous reworking of the

Meyer family members, which I will discuss at greater length in Chapter 3, these figures were idealized and did not require substantial revisions. Therefore, it is not likely that the boys were portraits of living family members at the time of the painting. In any case, the identities of the two boys do not necessarily need to be resolved. Rather, they create an illusion of multiple offspring that compounds the polysemy in the altarpiece.

Another conspicuous point of departure from established donor representation in the Darmstadt Madonna is the moderation of figural hierarchy. The Virgin’s form, to be sure, remains the largest. The crown that adorns the Virgin’s head nearly grazes the upper edge of the shell-shaped cornice because it is not centered in the semicircular niche. The roundness of the Virgin’s body, accentuated by the breadth of her cloak, further magnifies her stateliness and hierarchical status. As we have seen, German donor portraits, unlike their Netherlandish counterparts, amplified the hierarchy of scale to distinguish between holy figures and the laity.30 But with the Meyer family, Holbein reduced the range of hierarchical values in order to relate the figures more effectively to the Madonna and Christ Child. In doing so, he minimized the figural disparity seen in the

Oberried Altarpiece and as other examples of German religious works.

The figural hierarchy persists, albeit slightly, within the Meyer family. Jakob and

Magdalena are the most privileged family members, and their bodies appear to be

29 Buck and Sander, Portraitist of the Renaissance, 41.

30 Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art, 191.

23 roughly congruent in size although Jakob’s figure is more visible and less obstructed.

Furthermore, Holbein used this gradation to privilege Magdalena as the first wife because her body is noticeably larger than that of Dorothea. The scalar values are also applied to distinguish between the generations. Anna’s height does not reach her mother’s shoulder.

She and the male youth, given their adolescent ages, are both under-scaled relative to the adults. Indeed, these figural calibrations of the Meyers are easily overlooked because of the portraits’ startling naturalism. A close examination of the bodies is necessary to discern the nuanced preservation of hierarchy in the donor portrait.

Holbein also experimented with the near-dissolution of the spiritual threshold between the Meyer family and the Madonna and Child. Lynn Jacobs, in her study of early

Netherlandish altarpieces, describes the “miraculous threshold” as a fluid space that simultaneously fuses and separates the earthly and sacred realms and allows for transfer and access through diverse means of negotiation.31 The conventional visual barrier separates the human figures from the holy ones through a variety of pictorial devices. In some altarpieces, the liminal space is maintained through an incongruous placement of donors in the central scene or by situating the donors on wings. For example, the donor family in Hans Memling’s Moreel Altarpiece shares a compatible figural scale with the saints and occupies the continuous landscape in the triptych. However, the patron and his wife kneel at prie-dieux in rugged outdoor surroundings that are inconsistent with the holy event. This thematic disjunction as well as in the physical barriers of the wing panels thus signify the spiritual threshold. In Holbein’s composition, however, the arrangement of these figures in front of a shell niche and delineated by a patterned rug is not specific

31 Jacobs, Opening Doors, 43.

24 to a church or a domestic environment, but negotiates a more accessible space between the two realms. The devotional scene depicts a single activity concentrating on the Meyer family’s spiritual contemplation in the immediate vicinity of the Holy Family, with minimal external embellishments and contextual references. The altarpiece’s integrated narrative constructs two compositional foci by partially deflecting the attention from the holy figures onto the donor family.

By juxtaposing the Meyers with the Madonna and Christ Child, Holbein reconceptualized the spiritual threshold and blurred the distinction between the sacred and the secular. This threshold is not a representation based on hierarchical scale or physical separation, but one determined by differing stylistic choices. As we have seen, sixteenth-century donor portraits accommodated growing preferences for naturalism. The details and verisimilitude of the Meyers in the Darmstadt Madonna are even more explicit. The Meyer portraits are rendered with personal features that underscore the identity of each family member.32 The effect of this heightened individualization draws immediate attention to the supplicants. At the same time, the faces of the Virgin, Christ, and the two boys are not portraits but idealized with Italian and German aesthetics. The

Virgin’s closely-spaced facial features, broad forehead, elegant dip of her head, and

Gothic curve fulfill German ideals while elements of the Italian vernacular style and

Petrarchan model of blond hair, dark eyes, and flushed cheeks are also evident.33 The

Christ Child and the two boys also share this stylistic blend of physical characteristics.

32 Buck and Sander, Portraitist of the Renaissance, 41–43.

33 Paola Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 85–86.

25 The threshold is barely sustained between the naturalism of the Meyer portraits and the idealized faces of the holy figures. Holbein’s figural arrangement creates proximity and intimacy between the mundane and divine entities. It also creates tension and intrusion because the donor portraits compete with the image of the Holy Family.

Thus, the Meyer family group portrait raises the question of decorum and propriety in light of the devotional subject of the altarpiece. Holbein treads vigilantly between artistic innovation and tradition. The tight compositional integration of the

Meyer family with the holy figures seemingly disregards distance and figural scale and minimalizes the liminal spaces between the earthly and the divine. The heightened individualistic rendering of the Meyer family members results in a new type of relationship that enhances the intimacy between patrons and holy figures. This innovative pictorial conception of the donor family brings an unprecedented level of familiarity between the donors and divinity. At the same time, however, the very carefully calibrated standards result in a new pictorial dilemma in which the family comes perilously close to provoking spiritual transgression and thwarting the religious purposes of the genre. The socio-religious implications of Holbein’s inventive approach to constructing the Meyer family portrait are addressed more deeply in the following chapters.

26 CHAPTER 2

THE DEVOTIONAL MATRIX: EMERGING MODES OF

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE PIETY

In early sixteenth-century Basel, concepts of gender, family, and piety were under fire from reformers within the Catholic Church as well as from Protestants. These debates extended beyond the academic and intellectual interests of theologians and Christian humanists, pervading the social fabric and daily lives of laypeople. A serious point of contention was the reverence and representation of the Virgin, which did not correspond easily to a Catholic or Protestant divide. Another emerging issue was personal piety, which was promoted by humanists and reformers in various strains that were often difficult to untangle.1 The shifting and competing ideas of piety and spirituality create what I characterize here as a devotional matrix, wherein medieval expectations of gender and rigid displays of spiritual competency were no longer sufficient to reflect the larger socio-religious debates.

Images of the Madonna

The immediate focus of the Darmstadt Madonna is the Virgin Mary, whose representations in this era acted as metaphorical proxies in the theological and intellectual conflicts at hand. Prior to the Reformation, laypeople in the late medieval period venerated the Virgin as an exalted mother-saint and spiritual intercessor. The schutzmantelmadonna was a cult image that was prevalent in southern German regions.

1 Erika Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3–8, 46. Rummel suggests that humanists were interested in personal piety as moral or ethical concerns, while Protestant reformers were more invested in doctrinal interpretations.

27 In this iconography, the Virgin’s cloak signifies her intercessory and salvific power and protects various communities of supplicants by enveloping the figures.2 These supplicants are viewed as a collective first and foremost, and as individuals only secondarily. They are mostly shielded by the Virgin’s voluminous cloak and considerably minimized in scalar values. A sculpture by Gregor Erhart of Augsburg for the Kaishem Altarpiece of

1502-1505 exemplifies the visual heritage of this theme in Holbein’s hometown and the surrounding Germanic regions (fig. 14).3 Hans Holbein the Elder, whose family was living in Augsburg at the time, also created a woodcut print of the Virgin sheltering monks for the same Cistercian Kaishem Abbey, dated 1502-1505 (fig. 15). The young

Hans Holbein could have been familiar with these works as well as many other variations on the theme.

The rapid advent of Protestant ideology required negotiation of Mary’s unique status and complex role from an exalted intercessor to a domestic and humanized persona. In the early decades of the Reformation, Mary was venerated as a protector more than a mother.4 These roles are not necessarily discrete, however, because Mary’s

2 James France, “Cistercians Under Our Lady’s Mantle,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2002): 399–401. A Cistercian monk, Caesarius of Heisterbach, recorded one of the earliest textual accounts of the image in the Dialogus miraculorum in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. This widely-read collection of miracles and stories popularized the imagery of the Madonna’s cloak in ceremonies such as adoption and marriage. The potency and adaptability of the theme contributed to its ubiquity throughout Europe and its application to a diverse range of representations of the Virgin’s protective act.

3 Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980). Baxandall discusses the development of the artist and humanist community in Augsburg at the turn of the sixteenth century, including the arrival of Hans Holbein the Elder. The Kaishem Altarpiece is now destroyed.

4 Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500-1648, Past and Present Publications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 271.

28 intercessory power is in large part attributed to her maternity and her privileged role as the mother of Christ.5 Women may have responded to Mary’s motherhood in various means: Mary’s maternity at once confirmed the experiences of ordinary women, yet she was a female model that was not attainable since no other woman was a virgin mother of the divine.6 Mary also exercised significant spiritual influence on men and was linked to the experiences and expectations of fathers as protectors of their family and children.7

Luther, along with other Protestant leaders, displaced the Virgin’s intercessory power as part of his argument against the cult of saints, and advocated her instead as a virtuous and modest housewife. Luther flatly dismissed the protective role of the

Madonna of Mercy by stating, “To invoke the Virgin Mary and the saints may make a beautiful show of holiness; but we must stay together under the Head, or we are eternally damned. What will become of those who rely on St. Barbara and St. George, or those who crawl for shelter under Mary’s cloak?”8 In lieu of Mary’s salvific efficacy, Luther devised a model of the Virgin as a humble servant. He described the Virgin as a beneficiary of God’s grace in the Commentary on the Magnificat of 1521. After the

Annunciation, Mary “seeks not any glory, but goes about her meals and her usual household duties, milking the cows, cooking the meals, washing pots and kettles, sweeping out the rooms, and performing the work of a maidservant or housemother

5 Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany, 269.

6 Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany, 263–70.

7 Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany, 269–70.

8 Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: Sermons on the Gospel of St. John, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, trans. Martin Bertram, vol. 22 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1957), 490; Heal, “Images of the Virgin Mary and Marian Devotion,” 25.

29 [hauszmackt odder hauszmutter] in lowly and despised tasks.”9 Mary should be revered because her humility and simplicity set a human model for all people. Luther and other

Protestant reformers thus placed import on Mary’s role in motherhood, the family, and domestic life.10

The image of the Virgin in the Darmstadt Madonna stresses her traditional role as a holy mother and intercessor, but it also lends to semiotic instability. Holbein’s unusual depiction of the Holy Family seems to craft a familial relationship between the Virgin,

Christ Child and the two boys at the lower left of the composition. As with Holbein’s other innovations in this altarpiece, this implied extension of the Virgin’s children, or at least her younger relatives, is also disconcerting. The older boy’s facial features and tilt of his head closely parallel those of the Virgin. He is dressed in fanciful aristocratic clothing that seems better suited for nobility, thereby aligning him more legibly with the

Virgin than with the upwardly mobile yet less richly dressed Meyer family.11 The puffed sleeves, rounded neckline, and brass buttons of his costume link to the Virgin’s robe and cape. The posture of the male youth also implies that he could be interpreted as a saint- like figure because he is not kneeling like the other Meyers. The standing infant shares attributes with John the Baptist, who is naked like the Christ Child. The Virgin’s emotional and human bond is emphasized through the gentle tilt of her head toward the

Christ Child. These four figures share physical resemblance as a family and accentuate the maternal role of the Virgin and the prevalence of children.

9 Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany, 284. Heal provided the translation.

10 Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany, 264.

11 Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art, 193.

30 Through Holbein’s innovations, the symbolic meanings of the Virgin’s intercessory and protective role over Jakob and his family simultaneously become destabilized. The schutzmantelmadonna iconography, along with the hierarchical elements of donor family portraiture, seemingly favors Jakob’s access to Mary. Jakob may indeed be depicted in a position of privilege, but the Virgin turns away from him and toward the women. The Virgin’s cloak is asymmetrically draped and only partially covers

Jakob’s left shoulder. To heighten the tension, the Jakob appears as if he is about to stand up or emerge from this sheltered position as the cloak comes precariously close to sliding off his back. Jakob’s intensely individualized features, his affective gaze upon the Virgin, and his near-comparable figural scale present a naturalistic portrait of a supplicant that disrupts the traditional iconography of the Madonna of Mercy with her multitudes of anonymous worshippers.

These innovative and subtle iconographic elements do not indicate that Holbein was actively subverting Jakob Meyer’s Catholicism. Nor would Jakob have taken issue with the representation of the Madonna. The pictorial strategies seem meticulously designed to convey a privileged role for the patron and to employ popular Marian iconography. The Darmstadt Madonna reinforces the Virgin’s intercessory potency, maternal attributes, and the affective relationship between the viewer and the image.

Jakob’s selective invocation of the schutzmantelmadonna attempted to buttress traditional iconographic readings that upheld tenets of Catholicism. However, there were multiple exigencies: Jakob’s desire for spiritual intimacy, the firm assertion of personal identity, the image of the Madonna as an intercessor, and Jakob’s hopes for descendants through

Anna. Through his innovative manipulation of the iconography and formal elements,

31 Holbein effectively reconciled these complicated objectives. The result is an altarpiece that noticeably deviates from the schutzmantelmadonna visual heritage, and an image of the Virgin that is open to new interpretations.

Personal Piety

The Darmstadt Madonna establishes the semiotic ambiguities in the iconography of the Virgin by suggesting that new modes of personal piety and devotional skills were emerging. Personal piety was rooted in medieval monastic practices, and did not suddenly appear with Protestantism.12 Certain pre-Reformation devotional imagery attests to practices of seeing and reverence based on the concepts of the vita activa and vita contemplativa in medieval theology. Augustine’s extensive and influential writings about the active and contemplative lives in medieval Christian devotional practices emphasized their complementary pairing rather than their opposition.13 These foundational theological concepts were expressed through the schema of the affective and internal display of devotional skills in donor portraiture in Netherlandish and German art in the late medieval period. For example, Rogier van der Weyden’s Crucifixion (fig. 16) represents a gendered division in the affective and inward displays of devotion of a donor couple.14

The male donor in this altarpiece manifests the affective, or emotional narrative as he gazes from a slightly oblique angle at Christ on the cross. His proximity to Christ

12 Paul A. Russell, Lay Theology in the Reformation: Popular Pamphleteers in Southwest Germany 1521-1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 39–42.

13 Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought: The Interpretation of Mary and Martha, the Ideal of the Imitation of Christ, the Orders of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 18–19.

14 Rothstein, “Early Netherlandish Devotional Skill,” 15–34.

32 confirms his privileged position. In contrast, the figure of the wife demonstrates an intellectual, or internal display of piety.15 Her line of sight is indeterminate, and perhaps without a concrete focal point.16 Her demeanor is such that she seems almost detached from the holy scene. The woman is inserted between her husband and the margin of the central panel, which limits her access to Christ. Bret Rothstein argues that both donors have distinctive roles that work in unison to fulfill spiritual competency, but the affective component takes priority and is assigned to the male figure.17

A close examination of the Meyer family portrait confirms a similarly gendered duality in Jakob and Dorothea’s coordination of piety. Jakob exhibits an affective piety through his uplifted face, fervently imploring gaze, and tightly clasped hands. Dorothea’s gaze, by contrast, is not quite fixed. As with the female donor in the van der Weyden altarpiece, Dorothea’s gaze is unfocused. She may be looking at her husband but also could be looking at nothing at all. Dorothea also appears to be dissociated since she does not seem to visibly acknowledge the immediate presence of the Virgin and Christ Child.

Her solemn demeanor counterbalances Jakob’s emotional display of piety. The couple’s portraits thus collaborate in tandem and tension within a medieval schema of piety.

However, the duality of the male-female, affective-cerebral spiritual synchronization of Jakob and Dorothea’s practices is disrupted by the devotional competency of their daughter, Anna. As Jakob gazes upward at the Christ Child, Anna gazes downward at the standing infant/John the Baptist. The vectors point directionally in

15 Rothstein, “Early Netherlandish Devotional Skill,” 17–18.

16 Rothstein, “Early Netherlandish Devotional Skill,” 17–18.

17 Rothstein, “Early Netherlandish Devotional Skill,” 24–25.

33 a clockwise circuit. In so doing, they subvert traditional binary and gender interdependencies. Anna, therefore, deviates from her parents’ traditional acts of seeing and claims spiritual grace for herself as a new exemplar of piety. She offers an alternative demonstration of piety, one that mitigates the ascribed formula presented by

Jakob and Dorothea. This new devotional matrix engages each Meyer as befitting his or her role in the family. These overlapping and diversified displays of piety strengthen their cases for the Virgin’s intercessory grace through their spiritual awareness at both the personal and familial levels.

Likewise, Magdalena participates in the family’s collective piety through her own unique depiction. Magdalena’s strict profile pose signals both her virtue and posthumous status, as possibly borrowed from older forms of Italian female portraiture.18 Magdalene embodies a liminal state; she is at once weighty and ethereal. Her figure lacks perspectival depth, and the direction of her gaze is indeterminable. She may be gazing at

Jakob and elevating his authoritative role in the family as well as signaling his eligibility for salvific grace. Magdalena also could be gazing at the Virgin’s belt and womb, thus reinforcing the procreative and spiritual privilege of the Meyer women. Another extraordinary detail in the painting shows Magdalena kneeling on the Virgin’s robe, creating folds in Mary’s drapery (figs. 27, 28). In a variation on this motif, St. John the

Evangelist steps on the Virgin’s robe in Rogier van der Weyden’s Deposition of 1435

(fig. 19). Yet supplicants, and even saints, are rarely depicted in direct contact with the

18 Patricia Simons, “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (New York: IconEditions, 1992), 38–57.

34 Virgin or her robe.19 Saints who are portrayed standing on the drapery of holy figures in imagery of this period are privileged in a liminal role between the earthly and the divine.

Magdalena is likewise in this special position because she bridges the spiritual threshold and connects the generations of the Meyer family with the Holy Family.

Magdalena’s exceptional depiction implies her crucial role as a familial and familiar surrogate for an intercessory saint. Personal piety during the Reformation emphasized the role of the individual and a direct relationship with Christ. Protestant reformers consistently challenged the invocation of saints.20 However, these ideas were not restricted to Protestant teachings. Christian humanists also encouraged reforms within the Catholic Church. Erasmus, for example, did not align himself with the Protestant movement but criticized the laity’s dependence on the salvific power of saints in numerous writings. In “The Sermon,” a dialogue in Colloquies, Erasmus incorporated a passage of the apostle Paul from Colossians and cautioned against the worship of saints:

“To put your hope of salvation in Christ alone is religion; to expect it from angels or saints is superstition.”21 Erasmus argued that pious devotees should model themselves after saints rather than worship the saints themselves.22 Magdalena’s figure could be read as a transition from a cult of saints to an individual’s ability to emulate saintliness. She

19 A rug is often used to either separate the donors from the Madonna and Child (as in Jan van Eyck’s Madonna with the Canon van der Paele, c. 1430) or conversely to unify the figures (as in Hans Memling’s Donne Triptych, c.1478).

20 Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany, 56.

21 Desiderius Erasmus, “The Sermon, or Merdadus,” in Colloquies, ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 947.

22 Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 37–38.

35 serves as an exemplar for the family in this shift toward a more direct, personal form of devotion.

Within the social and religious upheaval of the 1520s, the Darmstadt Madonna is a product of contradictory forces. The customization of each depicted Meyer family member suggests an appreciation for individual and family portraiture within a religious context. The placement, gesture, and gaze of each Meyer family member reveal that devotional skill operates in an individualized mode, which complicates and enhances spiritual cohesiveness in the familial register. To represent this matrix of individual and group piety, Holbein develops visual cues through studied variations in the pious demonstration of each Meyer figure. In doing so, he made donor portraiture more responsive to contemporary concerns about what constitutes exemplary devotional competency.

36 CHAPTER 3

FATHER OF THE BRIDE: PATERNAL AUTHORITY AND

PROCREATIVE ANXIETIES

In the Institution of Marriage, Erasmus offered a litany of advice on the screening and selection of spouses in creating an ideal match. Among his recommendations was the following:

In this area, as I have said, the assessment of parents or elders will be more reliable than the children’s; it is better to trust them, since they have learned from their own and other’s misfortunes and what to look for and what to avoid, rather than give youthful inexperience the chance to learn wisdom from its own mistakes.1

Erasmus, along with other humanists, theologians, and the laity in the early sixteenth century, contributed to an ambitious social agenda that promoted parental authority, reformed marriage, and redefined the family unit. Both Catholics and Protestants supported the rehabilitation of parental – and especially paternal – approval over their children’s marriages.2 These debates affected parents with children of marriageable age, such as Jakob and Dorothea Meyers.

This chapter explores these concerns about marriage and related anxieties about fatherly authority and procreation, which likely inspired Jakob to commission the

Darmstadt Madonna in 1526 and subsequently order revisions to the altarpiece in 1528.

The changes to the altarpiece are slight, and are most visible in Anna’s and Dorothea’s

1 Desiderius Erasmus, Erasmus on Women, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 85–86.

2 Joel F. Harrington, “Hausvater and Landesvater: Paternalism and Marriage Reform in Sixteenth- Century Germany,” Central European History 25, no. 1 (1992): 52–75.

37 portraits. However, they carry weighty symbolic meanings and perhaps even a measure of urgency, since Jakob pursued them shortly after Holbein’s return to Basel in 1528. The modifications are socially transformative, for they reshape the represented ideal family from one reliant upon the matrilineal networks of the late medieval period to a more modern conception of the family as situated around marriage. The results disrupted the original painting’s formal allusions to iconographies of mother-saints and matriarchal lineage in favor of a new representation of a smaller family unit. These pictorial adjustments reflect the Meyers’ stake in Anna’s marriage and procreative continuity during the period when society was closely scrutinizing parental roles. They also visually affirm paternal authority at a critical moment: when the marriage of daughter Anna was under negotiation.

Mother-Saints

Anna’s portrait was an important feature of the Darmstadt Madonna from the start, since Holbein intensively reworked the image in the production of the 1526 version.

The image can be reconstructed from x-rays and infrared reflectograms, pentimenti in the painting, and Holbein’s preparatory drawing of Anna (figs. 20, 21).3 The technical studies indicate that the drawing was developed mid-execution, after Holbein had already experimented with various figural arrangements.4 These technical analyses also reveal

3 Buck and Sander, Portraitist of the Renaissance, 40–43; 160, n.13. Some of these original elements are now visible to the naked eye. Sander argues that in the 1526 version, Holbein worked extensively on the figures of Jakob, Dorothea, and Anna before the painting’s completion. These chalk portraits were not preliminary drawings per se, because Holbein had already reworked the Meyer figures significantly in the painting before settling on these sketches in the course of production.

4 Buck and Sander, Portraitist of the Renaissance, 40–43. X-ray and infrared analyses confirmed that the underdrawings of the Meyer family members initially had the women in strict profile. Magdalena

38 that the features Holbein assigned to Anna in the preparatory sketch were recognizable, but not precisely replicated, in the 1526 version of the painting. In the drawing, Anna’s facial features are naturalistic and individualized. Her long light-colored hair falls down her back. She wears an embroidered white dress and slouches slightly. She lowers her eyes but neither reads nor looks at the book in her hands, for the direction of her gaze does not align with it. Her pose is relaxed; her head and body are slightly turned toward the viewer such that the smallest tuft of her right eyebrow is visible and so are her right arm and the right side of her chest. Some discrepancies between the drawing and the painting are also evident. In the painting, Anna holds rosary beads, which replace the book in the sketch. Holbein also tweaks the decorative embroidery pattern on the white dress and eliminates the red sash around her waist. Anna’s body is now stylized and rendered with a curved posture, with sloping shoulders and rounded abdomen. Her body is now set in strict profile, which is only softened by the downward tuck of her chin and her intent gaze upon the standing toddler. Overall, Anna’s facial features and pose became more idealized in the painting.

These aesthetic choices construct expedient parallels between Anna and images of the young Virgin Mary. Anna’s white dress and long loose hair allude to Mary in some northern Nativity scenes. In making this connection, Holbein endows Anna with both the virginal and motherly attributes of a young Mary. This specific depiction of the Virgin and the Nativity was first described in a mystic vision of Saint Birgitta in the fourteenth century:

When I was at the manger of the Lord in Bethlehem, I saw a most beautiful virgin who was pregnant and clothed in a white mantel and a looked up at the Virgin, while Anna’s head was tilted lower and she looked at the ground. Dorothea looked at Jakob.

39 light gown through which I could clearly see her virginal body.... The Virgin took the shoes off her feet and put away the white mantle she had on. She removed the veil from her head and laid it next to her, keeping only her gown on, her beautiful hair spread out like gold over her shoulders.5

An early pictorial precedent based on this revelation is the Nativity on the left wing of

Rogier van der Weyden’s Miraflores Altarpiece of 1445 (fig. 22), which shows a young

Mary with long golden hair, kneeling in a white dress, and adoring the Christ Child.6 In the triptych’s narrative, depicted across three panels, Mary’s white robe prioritizes her virginity, her red robe represents her suffering in the Pietà, and her blue robe signals the grace of Christ’s appearance after the Resurrection.7 The Virgin’s unbound hair in the

Nativity panel accentuates her youth and contrasts with her fully covered head in the latter two scenes, in the central panel and the right wing. In the Darmstadt Madonna,

Anna’s downward gaze at the standing toddler emulates the Virgin’s adoration of the

Christ Child in the van der Weyden altarpiece. This visual allusion implies Anna’s generative and maternal possibilities while also claiming her virginal status. Anna’s inferred relationship with the naked infant underscores the maternal aspects of Mary’s human experience and Anna’s own potential to replicate it, including the prospects of

5 Bridget Morris, ed., The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden. Vol. 3: Liber Caelestis, Books VI- VII, trans. Denis Michael Searby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 250. I removed the verse numbers in this quote.

6 There are several precedents for the Virgin in white, kneeling and adoring the Christ Child in a Nativity scene. Such paintings include The Master of Flemalle’s (Robert Campin’s) Nativity, c. 1420, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon; Rogier van der Weyden’s Bladelin Altarpiece, c. 1445-48, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Petrus Christus’s Nativity, c. 1452, Groeninge Museum, Bruges; and Hans Memling’s Nativity, c. 1470–1472, Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Cologne.

7 Dirk de Vos, Rogier van Der Weyden: The Complete Works (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 226–27. Vos points out that Panofsky, Birkmeyer, and Grosshans also have commented on the iconography of the colors in the Virgin’s robes.

40 bearing a male child. These points of reference stress themes of family and procreation that align with Jakob and Dorothea’s interest in their own family’s continuity through their daughter.

In this respect, Anna’s gaze at the standing infant can be read as a meditation on maternity and procreation. Anna holds a string of rosary beads, an essential devotional aid for Catholics that was widely used in early sixteenth-century Germany in rituals such as weddings and funerals.8 Especially relevant in this scenario is that the rosary was closely associated with protection for pregnant women and childbirth as part of its efficacy in warding off evil spirits.9 The precious material of coral, of which Anna’s rosary seems to be made, was believed to have apotropaic qualities affiliated with fertility, childbirth, and baptism.10 Coral rosaries, therefore, were used as potent amulets and their associations with childbirth made them appropriate for young marriageable women. Furthermore, the rosary beads and the folded red tassel in Anna’s hair visually cross-reference the Virgin’s fringed sash. The red belt accentuates Mary’s rounded belly, thereby drawing attention to the curve of Anna’s abdomen. In Holbein’s proclamation of

Anna’s piety, the devotional aspects of the spiritual and the practical, the maternal and the generative, are all intrinsically linked.

8 Bob Scribner, “Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late-Medieval and Reformation Germany,” The Journal of Religious History 15, no. 4 (December 1989): 452. The rosary’s popularity was promoted by Jakob Sprenger, a Dominican prior who founded rosary confraternities in Cologne and Augsburg that were open to all laypeople regardless of their social standing.

9 Scribner, “Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception,” 452.

10 Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Boydell Press, 2012), 143; See also John Cherry, “Healing Through Faith: The Continuation of Medieval Attitudes to Jewellery into the Renaissance,” Renaissance Studies 15, no. 2 (June 2001): 155–57.

41 The Darmstadt Madonna also borrows expediently from images of another maternal saint, Mary’s mother, Anne. The grouping of the elderly Anne, the Virgin, and the Christ Child as a family is known as Anna Selbdritt, a motif that emphasizes the maternal and corporeal lineage of Christ. In Southern Germany, this cult image was heavily promoted by confraternities through paintings, prints, sculptures, and various media. Tilman Riemenschneider’s sculpture in the Mainfränkisches Museum, Würzburg, exemplifies a standard arrangement in which Anne holds Mary and the Christ Child (fig.

23). In this work, Anne is the central figure and her enlarged scale and bodily mass support the young Virgin and Christ Child. Anne’s lined face and sunken cheeks accentuate her middle age. She also wears a scarf around her neck and over her chin that was typical of married women. As the mother in the Meyer family, Dorothea shares the maternal role and physical attributes with Saint Anne. In the reconstructed earlier version of the family portrait, Dorothea wears a large bonnet with a folded pleat over her head, while her chinstrap covers her lower face and reaches just below her lower lip. The

Meyer women thus recall the figures in a typical Anna Selbdritt: matronly Dorothea as

Saint Anne, long-haired Anna as Mary, and the naked standing toddler as Christ.11 For the

Meyer family, the adaptation of this popular religious iconography in their donor portrait presents a means of emulating this maternal trinity and complementing their devotion to the Virgin.

The family portrait’s allusion to the late medieval visual tradition of Anna

Selbdritt is not surprising, since the Catholic sanctification of motherhood and the

11 Jürgen Müller, “Herr, du siehst und du hast Augen,” in Geschichte und Ästhetik: Festschrift für Werner Busch zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Margit Kern (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2005), 22. The author makes a brief comparison between the Meyer figures and Dürer’s painting Anna Selbritt of 1519.

42 intercessory power of the mother-saint were deeply ingrained in the socio-religious practices of southern Germany. The reverence of Saint Anne peaked in this region during the last decades of the fifteenth century. As Mary’s mother, Anne was venerated for her intercessory efficacy associated with maternity, fertility, childbirth, and family.12 The prevalence of this imagery may be attributed to a burgeoning mercantile and middle class that became interested in ancestry and lineage.13 Anne’s multifaceted human experiences and struggles in her female life cycle were probably very appealing for diverse demographic segments, including burghers such as Jakob Meyer.14

The Meyer family portrait also alludes to a more figuratively complex variation of the Saint Anne iconography: the Holy Kinship. This late medieval Germanic tradition places Saint Anne as the matriarch of a multigenerational household and an extensive, blended kinship network through her three marriages and three daughters. The composition of the Holy Kinship usually builds upon the Anna Selbdritt motif and surrounds the maternal trinity with Anne’s husbands, extended family, and offspring. The

Holy Kinship focused on maternal lineage via the procreative potential of women through

Anne and her daughters.15 As exemplified in a painting attributed to Matthäus Gutrecht

12 Ton Brandenbarg, “Saint Anne: A Holy Grandmother and Her Children,” in Sanctity and Motherhood: Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages, ed. Anneke B Mulder-Bakker (New York: Garland, 1995), 38.

13 Ton Brandenbarg, “St Anne and Her Family,” in Saints and She-Devils: Images of Women in the 15th and 16th Centuries, ed. Lène Dresen-Coenders and Petty Bange (Portland, OR: Rubicon, 1987), 120–22.

14 Brandenbarg, “St Anne and Her Family,” 120–22.

15 Pamela Sheingorn, “Appropriating the Holy Kinship: Gender and Family History,” in Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 173.

43 the Younger’s Holy Kinship circa 1500-1510, images of Anne and her descendants often expand laterally to accommodate intricate kinship networks (fig. 24). The women in the

Gutrecht painting are seated in the middle register on either side of the Trinity while the children play in the foreground. The fathers and husbands, who act as supporting players, are separated by a physical barrier from the women and children. Ton Brandenbarg argues that the emphasis on the cognate family relationships in this horizontal layout promotes the female line and fertility.16

Holbein revises this genealogical motif in the Darmstadt Madonna by incorporating several features seemingly of his own invention. His aim was likely to organize each generation of the Meyer family and their relationships to one another in very specific configurations. The figures are arrayed in a vertical format, originating with the Virgin and Christ Child in the center. This upright alignment of the Meyer family forms a hybrid network of relatives and spiritual descendants that can be read in paired and semi-paired registers of descending generations: Magdalene and Jakob, Dorothea and

Jakob, Anna and the youth, and finally Anna and the standing toddler. The figures’ scale and proximity to the Virgin and Christ Child reinforce the generational hierarchy. Jakob and Magdalena’s bodies flank the Virgin and Christ Child, thereby demonstrating their seniority and privilege in the family.

However, Holbein also diverges from the rigid pictorial formula of donor family portraiture. The male youth, the toddler, and Anna skip the linear sequence and occupy the foreground in front of the Virgin rather than the margins. This composition solution suggests that the youngest members and newest generations of the Meyer family demand

16 Brandenbarg, “Saint Anne: A Holy Grandmother and Her Children,” 41–42.

44 special attention in the family portrait. The elongated red accents in Anna’s coral rosary, the boy’s stockings, and the Virgin’s belt triangulate the visual connections that confirm the privilege bestowed on Anna and the male youth. This young couple bypasses the established familial order to claim spiritual and generative favor directly from the Virgin.

The Virgin’s gaze further bestows the procreative and spiritual favor on Anna as she turned away from Jakob and toward the female side. The knot in the Virgin’s draped belt pinpoints the Virgin’s womb and signals both her virginity and the generative capacity of her body. It decisively angles toward to the female side, thus connecting the

Virgin with the Meyer women. The Virgin holds the Christ Child against the swell of her abdomen to emphasize her corporeality and maternity. Furthermore, the dramatic wrinkle of the coarse and tactile rug bears the Virgin’s bodily weight under her feet. This very distinctive detail not only guides the viewer to the site of the altar, but also stresses the materiality of the Virgin as well as the spiritual and procreative continuity through the

Meyer women.

Within this generational spectrum, female piety and procreative possibilities circumvent the gendered privileges assigned to Jakob. Magdalena’s profile is echoed in

Anna’s livelier profile portrait and creates an intergenerational connection with Anna that extends from the deceased to the living. The arrangement of the kneeling women produces an illusion of nesting from Magdalena’s large frame to Dorothea’s and Anna’s smaller bodies. These female bodies are not just physically adjacent; they are adjoined. A lack of perspectival depth embeds the female figures in one another and emphasizes their bodies as procreative sources. Magdalena’s stiff posture contrasts with Dorothea’s more relaxed pose and even more so with Anna’s graceful curvature. All three women also

45 appear to be holding rosaries or prayer beads. Magdalena’s visibly clenched index finger and pressed thumb resemble those of Anna’s and Dorothea’s hands and imply that she was also holding prayer beads.17 These formal qualities reinforce the generative and spiritual conduit between the women that culminates in Anna’s unobstructed body in proximity to the picture plane, thus signaling the tension between Anna’s and Jakob’s competing narratives in the painting.

The 1528 Revisions to the Portraits of Anna and Dorothea

The care that Holbein took in developing the complex family relationships in the painting makes it all the more remarkable that he revised the original version of 1526 only two years later upon his return to Basel. In the reworked painting, Anna’s hair is now secured behind her head in neatly tucked braids. Red and pink carnations and sprigs of rosemary, the traditional symbols of marriage, adorn her elaborate headdress.18

Dorothea’s original portrait had a large bonnet and scarf similar to the one depicted in the preparatory drawing (fig. 25); pentimenti reveal traces of the original chinstrap along

Dorothea’s cheek. Her new portrait incorporates a streamlined bonnet, lowered chinstrap, and uncovered face. These revisions may be visually subtle, yet they critically shift the iconographic associations of the work by tempering the reading of the Meyer family as extensions of the Anna Selbdritt and Holy Kinship iconographic programs. These pictorial details transform the representation of the ideal family presented in the

17 Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany, 279. The rosary carries gendered significance because it was a piece of jewelry that was commonly passed on from mother to daughters.

18 Bätschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 259; Müller and Kemperdick, Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 338.

46 matrilineal imagery of Saint Anne to one that is contemporary and centered around marriage as the foundation of the family.

The incentive for the realignment of family interests in the painting may be traced to Jakob’s response to the broader socio-cultural developments in early sixteenth-century

Basel. I propose that Jakob requested these modifications to the family portrait to convey an image of an exemplary father and husband who effectively managed his family amid conflicting societal expectations. Scholars have consistently agreed that the impetus for the revision to the Darmstadt Madonna in 1528 was Anna’s betrothal to her future husband, Nikolaus Irmy, but some pressing questions remain. Jochen Sander believes that

Anna was engaged to Nikolaus between Holbein’s departure from Basel in 1526 and his return in 1528.19 Christian Müller notes that the headpiece and hairstyle with which

Holbein represented Anna in the revised painting were typically used to depict young, marriageable women. He therefore speculates that Anna was betrothed at the time of the revisions.20 Eduard His’s definitive compilation of 1870 on the limited biographical records of the Meyer family only indicates that Anna was married before Jakob Meyer died in July 1531.21 There is no primary source confirming that Anna was betrothed at the time of the revision, except for the painting itself. Unlike with Jakob and Dorothea, for whom such a marriage portrait survives, there is no extant evidence of a marriage portrait or pendant pair of Anna and Nikolaus.

19 Buck and Sander, Portraitist of the Renaissance, 38.

20 Müller and Kemperdick, Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 340.

21 Eduard His, “Die Basler Archive über Hans Holbein den Jüngern, seine Familie und einige zu ihm in Beziehung stehende Zeitgenossen,” in Jahrbücher für Kunstwissenschaft, vol. 3, 1870, 113–73; Kemperdick, “Ein Meisterwerk, ein Rätsel,” 32; Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art, 219, n. 30. Kemperdick and Nuechterlein, among others, reference His’s archival research.

47 The revisions to Anna’s portrait in the Darmstadt Madonna were undertaken, I argue, to assert Jakob’s authority over Anna’s marriage by circumscribing the bride within her family of origin. The image of Anna as a decorous, marriageable young woman who is firmly situated within her family conveys a message to Anna and other viewers of filial compliance and parental control. The adjustments to the painting validate the parental achievement of Jakob, and perhaps Dorothea too, in maintaining order within the family and shaping the morality of their daughter. The new portrait could have promoted Anna as an exemplary young woman who would fulfill parental wishes.

Jakob’s commission of these revisions can also be viewed as a didactic, even positive reminder to Anna about the proper path to marriage: Anna could envision herself as being marriageable and devout at the same time.

The revised portraits, instead of alluding to the late medieval iconography of maternal saints as with the initial renderings, turn instead to issues currently at stake for the Meyers and across German territories. The phenomenon of children marrying without parental approval was of grave concern to late fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century reformers. Clandestine marriages, in which minors married without parental consent, were especially worrisome.22 The volume of contemporary literature on the subject strongly suggests that these illicit unions were deeply undercutting parental authority.23

Joel Harrington has concluded that social objections to these illicit unions dominated

22 Klaus Michael Lindner, “Courtship and the Courts: Marriage and Law in Southern Germany, 1350-1550” (Th.D., Harvard Divinity School, 1988), 5–8. Lindner discusses several working definitions of clandestine marriages in early modern Germany and France. For Protestant reformers, clandestine marriages typically meant that two people married secretly without the consent of their parents.

23 Harrington, “Hausvater and Landesvater,” 55.

48 religious and secular discourse and preoccupied Catholic and Protestant leaders alike.24 In his Colloquies and various writings on matrimony, Erasmus cautioned against impulsive and foolish marriages for young people.25 Luther insisted on parental consent and public acknowledgment to validate a Christian marriage.26 The Swiss reformer Zwingli agreed with other Protestant reformers and abolished clandestine marriages in the court that he established in Zurich in 1525:

No one shall marry, engage or give to another his son or daughter without the favor, knowledge and will of the father, mother, guardians or others, who are responsible for the young people. Whoever transgresses this shall be punished according to the manner of the case, and the marriage shall be invalid.27

Contemporary intellectuals and church reformers supported marriage reforms as a social antidote because they believed that the Church had fundamentally negated parental authority in reserving full jurisdiction over marriage.

Jakob Meyer, with a daughter on the verge of marriage, commissioned the 1528 revisions at a moment when the need for such renewed authority was broadly recognized.

He did so, I suggest, to affirm his and Dorothea’s parental rights and responsibilities in

Anna’s betrothal and marriage, and perhaps even more importantly, his own authority in the process as the husband and father. Although the transitions from an extended family to the nuclear family occurred over the centuries leading up to the Reformation and

24 Harrington, “Hausvater and Landesvater,” 54–55.

25 Erasmus, Erasmus on Women, 25–38.

26 James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 551–52.

27 Huldrych Zwingli, Selected Works of Huldrich Zwingli, (1484-1531) The Reformer of German Switzerland, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1901), 120.

49 beyond, sixteenth-century secular and religious leaders increasingly placed greater scrutiny on the role of the father and the institution of the family.28 The visual allusions to matrilineal and medieval iconographic traditions in Holbein’s original painting were insufficient to express these social shifts. By portraying Anna in the revision as marriageable yet securely situated within the Meyer family, Holbein carved out a sphere of paternal influence in which Jakob proclaimed his fatherly right to approve any suitor and betrothal. Notably, Jakob did not request a change to the male youth’s idealized features to reflect the image of Nikolaus Irmy or any other specific individual. Perhaps, at this time, Jakob’s desire for a son-in-law and a respectable marriage for Anna was still just a wish. The result is a more complicated family portrait that not only references established traditions but also serves contemporary social purposes in asserting parental and paternal rights and hopes.

Anna’s new portrait, representing her as an eligible bride, also invites a reinterpretation of her relationship with the two boys in the foreground in the painting.

The enigmatic male youth in front of Jakob may now operate not only as a namesake saint or a possible image of a deceased son, but also as a stand-in for Anna’s future husband. The representation of male youths as eligible marriage partners has precedent.

In the near-contemporary painting by Bernhard Strigel, the Portrait of Emperor

Maximilian I and His Family of 1516 (fig. 26), the boys wear wreaths to signal their upcoming marriages.29 The two young people depicted by Holbein form an idealized

28 Philip David Grace, Affectionate Authorities: Fathers and Fatherly Roles in Late Medieval Basel (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 1.

29 Sheingorn, “Appropriating the Holy Kinship: Gender and Family History,” 189.

50 marital pair within the larger Meyer genealogical tree. A viewer could imagine Anna and the male youth as a suitable spousal match and the foundation for a desired future family.

The nude, fleshy toddler also plays an important role by signifying procreation, fertility, and the Meyers’ hope that their daughter and her husband eventually produce a future generation and male heir. As discussed in earlier chapters, the identity of the standing infant has been debated by scholars and remains polysemous. Holbein could be playing on the infant Christ–John motif by fully revealing John the Baptist’s nudity to the viewer, but discretely concealing that of the Christ Child. This distinction is deliberate because the humanity of the baby John is more conducive in accommodating multiple identities as a possible deceased son, a saint, or a signifier of a potential grandchild. The sturdy and rosy-cheeked infant’s import is magnified by his placement near the center of the painting and close to the picture plane. The conspicuous triangulation of Anna, the boy, and the standing infant symbolically forms a prototype of the nuclear family unit.

The altarpiece integrates an ex-voto function and can be understood as Jakob and

Dorothea’s wish for Anna to marry and procreate.

The revisions to the Darmstadt Madonna not only redefine Jakob’s role as a father but also as a husband, as evident in Dorothea’s image. Scholars have attributed the modifications Holbein made to her bonnet and chinstrap to a fashion statement, or to assert the second wife’s subjectivity and identity independently of the first wife.30 This may be, but other changes by Holbein are perhaps more telling, as evidenced by his paintings of the Meyers of 1516. In the pendant portrait, Jakob is depicted turning to the

30 Müller and Kemperdick, Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 340; Warner, “Remembering the Mother, Presenting the Stepmother,” 110–12.

51 left and holding a coin in his hand. He is presented in three-quarter profile, but he looks upward to an undefined space in the left corner. This template is also used in Jakob’s donor portrait in the Darmstadt Madonna, although his gaze clearly focuses to his upper left, on the Virgin Mary. As for Dorothea, the features of her original donor portrait in the altarpiece vaguely resemble those in her pendant portrait. However, after the sartorial alterations to a sleeker bonnet, Dorothea’s donor portrait more closely validates her identity as the wife in the pendant portrait. In this revision, Holbein seems to have transferred a typus from one portrait to another, a stylistic device which he sometimes deploys.31 The portraits of Jakob and Dorothea in the Darmstadt Madonna correspond to the templates of their earlier pendant pair, even though the poses and gazes are not exact duplicates. This citation of their earlier images as a married couple clarifies Jakob and

Dorothea’s marital status in the altarpiece.

The pictorial and gendered conventions in the Meyer pendant portraits are typical for late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century German marriage portraits. An example for comparison is Hans Burgkmair’s Portraits of Barbara and Hans Schellenberger of 1505 and 1507 (figs. 29, 30). These paintings are formally congruent in their representations of married couples positioned before matching arches and continuous backgrounds. One significant difference between the two sets, however, is that Hans’s portrait appears on the heraldic left side. It was probably painted as a single work before Barbara’s, since

31 David R. Smith, “Portrait and Counter-Portrait in Holbein’s ‘The Family of Sir Thomas More,’” The Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (September 1, 2005): 498–99; Bätschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 229–31. Smith points out that Bäschmann and Griener originally coined the term typus to describe the portraits of Erasmus as templates. He further theorizes that Holbein’s typus can be seen in multiple examples to express an intense reciprocity and relationship between the two sitters, often in an ironic light. My interpretation is slightly different, since I argue that Holbein’s typus can function as a strong self-referent between multiple portraits of the same sitters, including those of Jakob and Dorothea Meyer.

52 Hans is not on the traditionally gendered heraldic right.32 He holds eyebright blooms that probably express his interest in matrimony.33 Both sets of pendant portraits suggest that marriage portraits vary in their production and timing, and could be repurposed from an existing painting or modified at a later date. As discussed in Chapter 1, donor family portraits also share this flexibility and were often modified to serve new objectives. For

Jakob to alter the Meyer family portrait in the Darmstadt Madonna is not surprising, but to merge the function of an altarpiece with that of a bridal portrait was exceedingly rare.

These observations about the revisions to Dorothea’s and Anna’s portraits in the altarpiece strongly suggest an increased gendered anxiety on Jakob’s part between 1526 and 1528, and a renewed interest in reinforcing his spousal control during this transitional period when Anna was becoming an adult. Indeed, in the 1520s, the influx of Protestant teachings on the husband’s authority did not break from Catholic tradition, but further clarified and intensified it. Luther, for instance, believed that Scripture supported the subjugation of the wife to the husband:

This means, if the Lord joins to one [a man] either someone wild or mild, the wife is a half-child. Therefore, the man who marries a wife should know that he cares for a child… Indeed, this one is a foolish animal; recognize her weakness.... If she does not always proceed rightly, endure her infirmity. A woman remains eternally woman.34

Marriage here serves as the foundation of the family unit, but the husband must act as the head of the household and manage his wife. Jakob and Dorothea’s spousal relationship in

32 Elisabeth Vavra, “Ehe-Paar-Bilder,” in Ritual, Images, and Daily Life: The Medieval Perspective, ed. Gerhard Jaritz (Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2012), 141–42.

33 Vavra, “Ehe-Paar-Bilder,” 141–42.

34 Susan C. Karant-Nunn and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Luther on Women: A Sourcebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 94. See “Sermon on the second Sunday after Epiphany, WA XV, Predigten des Jahres 1524,” P. 420.

53 the revised Darmstadt Madonna emerges as the essential modern unit based on the revitalized social discourse on marriage and the family. Dorothea’s gaze at Jakob subordinates her in their marriage – he does not reciprocate in engagement with her – while elevating Jakob’s authority as the husband. The revisions to both Anna and

Dorothea not only reflect Jakob's interest in upholding this discourse, but also distance and differentiate the women from their previous visual associations with the Anna

Selbdritt and the Holy Kinship iconography. Anna was represented an exemplary girl in her devotional and filial piety; now she is presented as an ideal bride. Dorothea's maternal resemblance to Saint Anne is now downplayed, but her role as the Meyer wife is given priority. Such alterations to the Meyer women affirm Jakob's fatherly and spousal responsibilities and authority during this transitional period for the family.

Parents, Erasmus gently reminded his readers, know best when it comes to marriage.35 Jakob may have considered the benefit of portraying Anna as betrothed to signal the Meyer family’s compliance with social expectations and to assure procreative continuity in the 1528 version of the painting. These revisions subsequently changed the function of the altarpiece and possibly its setting. However, it remains unknown whether the painting remained with Jakob and Dorothea or transferred to Anna’s new family at the time of her marriage. In the absence of convincing alternatives for explaining certain formal features of the painting, socio-historical contexts provide a means by which to understand the modifications to the Meyer women and their relationships to the other

35 Desiderius Erasmus, “The Institution of Marriage,” in Erasmus on Women, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 79–130.

54 figures in the painting. Jakob, and even Dorothea, surely appreciated the imagery’s claims for Anna as an ideal bride and mother.

55 CONCLUSION

The starting point for my investigation of the Darmstadt Madonna was an assessment of the painting within the genre of donor family portraiture. The altarpiece follows medieval trends in gender division, strictness of hierarchy, and formal arrangements of the donor figures. The Meyer family group, however, transcends these medieval constraints in several important aspects. Because of the precise and individualistic features of each Meyer, the close arrangements of their bodies with the holy figures, and the application of a comparable figural scale, the liminal threshold between the supplicants and the Madonna and Christ Child is barely perceptible. I argued that the unexpected elements contribute to the startling and dynamic quality of the painting, yet also threaten the established decorum inherent in donor family portraiture.

The Meyer portrait also can be understood as a product of the socio-religious environment in the formative years of the Reformation in Basel. During this period, the distinction between Protestant and Catholic ideology was far from clear and instigated much anxiety and confusion for theologians and laity alike. Although Jakob himself was defiantly Catholic, the image of the Madonna and Christ Child accompanied by donors was vulnerable to reinterpretation. Socio-religious shifts were replacing the older binary and gendered forms of devotion with personal piety; they were also calling attention to the role of the family and its individual members. The donor portrait of Anna breaks from rigid adherence to the medieval modes of piety. Furthermore, the exceptional formal qualities attributed to Magdalena, as evidenced through her contact with the Virgin’s robe, extol her as a spiritual exemplar. The Darmstadt Madonna reveals such

56 diversification in the Meyers’ displays of personal piety that were experienced by

Catholic and Protestants alike during this period.

In order to understand the gender, familial and spiritual relations in this painting, I proposed that the primary narrative belongs to Anna rather than to Jakob. The pictorial solutions that Holbein confronted are closely associated with the representation of the daughter and her precarious status as the sole surviving offspring in the Meyer family.

The inclusion of the two boys in the painting resolved critical problems in addressing the gender imbalance and paucity of children. The event of Anna’s upcoming marriage, or perhaps simply her coming of marriageable age, is worthy of commemoration in the painting.

Alterations are common in donor family portraits, but a significant question about the 1528 revisions arises from the unorthodox merging of a marriage or bridal portrait with a pre-existing donor family portrait within an altarpiece. This arrangement could have been prompted by the heavy social scrutiny of the family, marriage and paternal identity during the socio-religious turmoil of Basel in the 1520s. The unconventional merger of the two genres implies that Jakob was ambitiously attempting to achieve multiple objectives in this work. He was asserting his control over the family and Anna’s potential marriage since he was vested in the procreative prospects through his daughter.

Thus, Jakob could have utilized Anna’s image as a virginal and marriageable young woman, along with the subtle iconographic references of the powerful and maternal

Virgin, to resolve his anxieties about the family lineage.

In this thesis, I considered the Darmstadt Madonna as a donor family portrait, but the painting could also be examined within the context of the family group portraits that

57 were to follow. It would be a productive inquiry, I believe, to compare the Darmstadt

Madonna in relation to these paintings and within the larger socio-historical movement that shifted donor family portraiture to secular family group portraits. Demand for religious genres quickly dissipated after the Darmstadt Madonna, in part because of the iconoclastic riots in Basel on February 9, 1529 and the subsequent conversion to

Protestantism in Basel. Many artists struggled during this period and sought new clients and lines of work. Holbein returned to England in 1532 and, for the most part, settled there for the remainder of his career. During a brief and migratory period between 1526 and 1529, he created three major family portraits: the Darmstadt Madonna, the Sir

Thomas More Family Portrait of 1527 (fig. 29), and the portrait of his own family c.

1528-1529 (fig. 30).1 Within these three or four years, in other words, Holbein painted widely diversified representations of the family for very different clients. Perhaps these portraits would yield insights when studied collectively. To what extent did Holbein’s experience in England painting the Sir Thomas More Family Portrait in 1527 influence the revision of the Meyer family in 1528? What prompted the intense psychological intensity in the artist’s own family portrait that was not previously evident in his earlier family groups? These questions, and others, are still open for investigation.

1 In addition to Holbein’s painting of the Sir Thomas More Family Portrait, which was lost in a fire in the eighteenth century, there are several other surviving versions. Holbein created a study of the More Family Portrait in 1527 that was given to Erasmus on behalf of Thomas More. Rowland Lockey made two copies of the More Family Portrait as well as a miniature in 1593 and 1594.

58 ILLUSTRATIONS

Note: Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations are not reproduced in the online version of this thesis. They are available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources Center, Art Department, Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, D.C.

Figure 1: Hans Holbein the Younger, Darmstadt Madonna, 1526/28, oil on panel, Schwäbische Hall, Germany: Johanniterkirche

Figure 2: Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Jakob Meyer, 1516, oil on panel, Basel, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum Basel

Figure 3: Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Dorothea Kannengiesser, 1516, oil on panel, Basel, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum Basel

Figure 4: Gerard David, Baptism of Christ (interior), 1502 -1508, oil on panel, Bruges, Belgium: Groeninge Museum

Figure 5: Gerard David, Baptism of Christ (exterior panel), 1502 -1508, oil on panel, Bruges, Belgium: Groeninge Museum

Figure 6: Hans Holbein the Elder, The Votive Painting of Ulrich Schwarz, 1508, Augsburg, Germany: Staatsgalerie Altdeutsche Meister

Figure 7: Hugo van der Goes, Portinari Altarpiece, c.1475, oil on panel, Florence, Italy: Galleria degli Uffizi

Figure 8: Hans Memling, Moreel Triptych, 1484, oil on panel, Bruges, Belgium: Groeninge Museum

Figure 9: Unknown, Epitaph of Klara Löffelhoz, née Münzmeister, 1437, Nuremberg, Germany: St. Sebaldus Church

Figure 10: Lucas Cranach the Elder, Torgau Holy Kinship Altarpiece, 1509, oil on panel, Frankfurt, Germany: Städel Museum

Figure 11: Bernhard Strigel, Conrad Rehlinger and His Children, 1517, oil on panel, Munich, Germany: Alte Pinakothek

Figure 12: Hans Holbein the Younger, Oberried Altarpiece, c. 1520, unspecified paint on pinewood panel, Freiburg, Germany: Freiburg Cathedral

Figure 13: Hans Baldung Grien, St. James the Greater from Christ and the Apostles, 1519, woodcut, New York, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Figure 14: Gregor Erhart, schutzmantelmadonna sculpture for the Kaishem Altarpiece, 1502-1505, (now lost)

Figure 15: Hans Holbein the Elder, Single-sheet schutzmantelmadonna woodcut from Kaishem, 1502-1505, Munich, Germany, Alte Pinakothek

Figure 16: Rogier van der Weyden, Crucifixion, c. 1445, Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum

Figure 17: Hans Holbein the Younger, Darmstadt Madonna, detail of Magdalene kneeling, oil on panel, 1526/28, Schwäbische Hall, Germany: Johanniterkirche

Figure 18: A. Werthmann, detailed drawing of the Darmstadt Madonna, 1871

Figure 19: Rogier van der Weyden, Deposition, oil on panel, c. 1435, Madrid, Spain: Museum del Prado

Figure 20: Hans Holbein the Younger, Darmstadt Madonna, infrared reflectogram detail of the Meyer women

Figure 21: Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Anna Meyer, chalk on paper, 1526, Basel, Germany: Kunstmuseum

Figure 22: Rogier van der Weyden Miraflores Altarpiece, oil on panel, 1445, Berlin, Germany: Berlin Gemäldegalerie

Figure 23: Tilman Riemenschneider, sculpture of Anna Selbdritt, wood, c. 1500, Würzburg, Germany: Mainfränkisches Museum

Figure 24: Attributed to Matthäus Gutrecht the Younger, Holy Kinship, oil on panel, c. 1500-1510, Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art

Figure 25: Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Dorothea Meyer née Kannengiesser, chalk on paper, 1526, Basel, Germany: Basel Kunstmuseum

Figure 26: Bernhard Strigel, Portrait of Maximilian I and His Family, oil on panel, 1516, Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum

Figure 27: Hans Burgkmair, Portrait of Hans Schellenberger, oil on panel, 1505, Cologne, Germany: Wallraf-Richartz Museum

Figure 28: Hans Burgkmair, Portrait of Barbara Schellenberger, oil on panel, 1507, Cologne, Germany: Wallraf-Richartz Museum

Figure 29: Hans Holbein the Younger, Study of Sir Thomas More Family Portrait, pen and brush on chalk, 1527, Basel, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum Basel

Figure 30: Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife and their Two Elder Children, mixed techniques on paper, mounted on wood, 1528-1529, Basel, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum Basel

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