Note 757 — Chapter XXIX · CONCLUSION

The writer finds it impossible to agree with a recent critic, M. de Wyzewa, who, in a review of Dr. Ganz’s Holbein, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, January 15, 1912, speaks of the “half-confidences” of Holbein’s portraiture, and holds that although the painter himself sees clearly the inmost depths of his sitters’ characters, he yet refrains from revealing them to us. When the moment comes for laying bare their deepest feelings “the prudent Swabian workman, through his instinctive reserve, holds back.” In this respect, therefore, he compares him unfavourably with such masters as Dürer, Rembrandt, and Velazquez, “who abandon themselves to their genius for psychological divination,” whereas Holbein refuses us access to the souls of his sitters, though at the same time indicating that he himself has penetrated to the mysterious depths. He speaks of this as his “professional hypocrisy,” and says that he cannot be excused for thus concealing the exact truth of the characters of the great personages who sat to him. He sees similar traits in Holbein’s sacred paintings, and this insensibility he regards as not real, but feigned, springing from the intelligence rather than from the heart. Lovers of Holbein’s art, however, will find it difficult to follow him in his contention.