Portrait and counter-portrait in Holbein's the family of Sir Thomas More

David R. Smith

Early in 1527 Hans Holbein painted two portraits of Sir Thomas More, the great English humanist and statesman who had become his host and patron when he moved to London from Basel in the fall of 1526. The first is the half-length portrait of More the courtier and public man in the Frick Collection (Fig. 1), which is a straightforward but rather impersonal likeness, in which his robes of state and the Tudor rose on his gold livery collar tell us as much, or as little, about him as his detached gaze. (1) The other portrait showed him at home with his family and was at once more private and more monumental. Painted in watercolor on linen or canvas, this eight-by-thirteen-foot masterwork perished in a fire in 1752. (2) It survives, however, in three late-sixteenth-century copies, as well as in Holbein's small preparatory drawing (38.9 by 52.4 millimeters) in Basel (Fig. 2), which is my main subject. (3) The two works are complementary in ways hitherto unrecognized, and partly for that reason I mean to call The Family of Sir Thomas More a "counter-portrait."

When Desiderius Erasmus received the drawing as a gift from More after Holbein returned to Basel at the end of 1528, he said it made him feel as if he was there, in More's home, which is no empty compliment in that he knew the household intimately. (4) Eight years earlier, in fact, he had written a famously warm and richly nuanced description of the family in a letter to the German humanist Ulrich von Hutten. In some ways Holbein's picture seems to echo Erasmus's words, as in the details of the monkey scampering up Dame Alice More's skirt on the far right or the viol hanging in the upper left of the curtain in the background. Erasmus specifically mentions More's monkey in telling of his love of animals and says that music was a family passion. Likewise, the presence of his jester, Henry Patensen, standing by the door on the right, confirms Erasmus's assertion that More loved clowns and fools. It is possible, too, that the clutter of books at More's feet reflects Erasmus's reference to his congenital messiness, though this pictorial detail more likely just points to heavy reading in this exceptionally learned household. (5) More generally, though, Holbein has captured something of the letter's tone, its evocation of domestic warmth and informality. The small prayer books in the hands of most of the family members suggest that they have gathered for prayers, but not in the manner of the average stiffly ceremonious family donor portrait of the time. The subject is the gathering, not the praying. On the far left Elizabeth Dauncey, the second daughter, has only just arrived, since she is pulling off her gloves. Next to her, More's foster daughter, Margaret Clement (nee Giggs), chats about a book with his father, Sir John More, while a little farther to the right Anne Cresacre, his ward and future daughter-in-law, passes quickly and unceremoniously behind him. On the other side of the composition, the figures are more settled, but the youngest daughter, Cecily Heron, evinces the same conversational mood with a fleeting glance at her kneeling stepmother. (6) And what is a monkey doing at a prayer service?

Erasmus actually called his letter a "portrait," and it may well have helped to plant the idea of a family portrait in More's mind, since he would have read his friend's description of his household in a collection of Erasmus's letters published in 1519. (7) If this connection has any meaning, however, it reflects a new conception of portraiture, one more closely tied to biography than to the ceremonial conventions that had dominated Renaissance family portraits up to this point. The literary scholar Margaret Mann Phillips, in fact, considers the letter to von Hutten the first real biography in the full modern sense. (8) Certainly, these are the terms in which critics have approached Holbein's portrait. Almost without exception they have interpreted its naturalism and informality as a fairly direct mirror of everyday life in the More household. John Rowlands, for example, speaks of the artist "recording the family when the buzz of talk has just subsided," which implies that Holbein simply set down an actual moment of domestic life as it passed before him. (9) More recently, Stephanie Buck has praised the picture's "intimacy" and tied it to "an important function of portraits in this period, one that photography would assume at a later date, namely to provide those far away with an image of the people they love," in this case" ... enhanced by depicting the person in his or her characteristic surroundings and engaged in everyday activities." (10) For the most part, these qualities have seemed more or less self-explanatory, and calling this portrait the first conversation piece outside Italy has summed up what Holbein seemed to have had in mind.

No doubt the Family Portrait deserves this label, along with its connotations of impending modernity. As an explanation, however, it begs a number of critical questions. For example, Rowlands's much-quoted "buzz of talk" seems tailored to a casually conversational model of the family that began to become a portrait convention only one hundred years later. Where did Holbein get the idea? Helpful as Erasmus's letter may have been for various facts and anecdotes, it could not inspire a new artistic genre by itself, nor does the snapshot analogy implicit in Rowlands's and Buck's remarks carry much weight. It is possible, as many have thought, that Holbein derived the idea from the only previous conversation piece, Andrea Mantegna's Portrait of the Gonzaga Family in the Camera degli Sposi (Fig. 3) of fifty years earlier, which is built around a specific family narrative. (11) But the evidence is decidedly mixed as to whether Holbein ever visited Mantua, and both the narrative and the formal structure in Mantegna's mural are too different from Holbein's picture to account for its distinctive character. (12) By the same token, while the Basel drawing clearly served Erasmus as an intimate reminder of absent friends, this description hardly suited the monumental painted version, which must have hung like a tapestry in a major room of More's palatial manse in Chelsea. By no stretch of the imagination can the Family Portrait be taken for a mere "snatch of life" or an exercise in modern bourgeois realism in the usual sense. It is a highly constructed image, in which ambiguities and contradictions abound.

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First of all, the family was not really constituted in this way. Holbein has left out More's sons-in-law and grandchildren, despite the fact that his daughters and their families all lived together under his roof in a domestic arrangement that was unusual even in Tudor England. (13) There is no reason to think that More had his sons-in-law excluded for hostile or derogatory reasons, since his relations with them generally seem to have been good. (14) Rather, their omission indicates that the portrait is as much about a conservative, dynastic social order as about a descriptive record. (15) Flanked by his father, Sir John the Elder, and his son, John the Younger, Sir Thomas presides in the center of the composition before a cloth of honor that marks a ceremonial axis. In effect, his living room doubles as a throne room. Obviously, extra males not belonging to the blood line would have upset this arrangement by creating competing forms of relationship and, not least, by overcrowding the picture space.

Yet the central contradiction is that Thomas More himself has been quoted, body and soul, from the portrait in the Frick (Fig. 1). This is not just a question of using the same cartoon for both faces. (16) Holbein also has copied the lavish garments and gold livery collar that to Oskar Batschmann and Pascal Griener mark More in the Frick painting as "a truly magnificent King's servant" but that strike them as "a rather improbable feature" in the conversation piece. (17) Other scholars, to be sure, have not seen an anomaly here, presumably because they have taken it for granted that this simply is Thomas More, whether at home or at the office. But the impulse to take portraits "at face value" is as naive as it is common, and especially so in the case of a man like More, who wore so many hats, played so many roles: lawyer, judge, politician, knight, courtier, statesman, diplomat, father, husband, patriarch, humanist intellectual, social critic, wit. Portraits are rarely exercises in replication alone but images of social identity, too. The word "persona" means "mask." (18) And here, in the midst of his wife and children, his monkey and his books, Thomas More defines himself entirely in terms of his public mask as Tudor courtier and official. Stranger still, it was an identity that made him uncomfortable, especially at home. According to Erasmus, his friend had little use for flashy attire of any sort and disliked court hierarchy and ceremony, for "by nature he has a great love of liberty and leisure." (19) Holbein acknowledges the implicit incongruity by abstracting More from the people and the goings-on around him. In his public guise he holds no book, carries on no dialogue, but stares off into space with a neutral, objectified expression. Only Margaret Roper, his eldest child, follows his example in the lower right.

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This incongruity, this conflict, has led me to label The Family of Sir Thomas More a "counter-portrait." The term refers less to the obvious contrast between the Basel drawing and the Frick portrait than to this deeper contradiction built into the Family Portrait itself, which amounts to a form of parody. In this case parody does not connote the kind of negative satire and heavy-handed ridicule so common in its modern incarnations. Holbein and More were certainly capable of mocking laughter, and this does play a part here, as will soon be evident. That it has gone unnoticed until now, however, indicates how understated Renaissance parody can be and, especially here, how multilayered. Holbein's satire exists in dialogue with gentler forms of irony as well, so much so that together they fall under the rubric of the seriocomic, a mode more familiar in his day than our own. (20) The point of the picture's irony is not so much to negate Thomas More's public persona as to render it ambivalent, and in this respect it draws on some of the deepest resources of humanist social and moral thought, as I hope to show.

All the same, More's roles as patriarch and Tudor official were entirely legitimate, and in any case he was hardly in a position to relinquish them. More to the point, ambivalence and relativity seem intrinsically foreign to the image of authority he projects. The cloth of honor, the symmetry, and the ceremonial air attending him all carry a sense of visual sufficiency and a social iconography of closure that forestall questions about who or what might lie behind the mask of office. Nor could Holbein redefine his subject by drawing on the social and artistic conventions of private family life that pervade later conversation pieces. Boundaries between the family and society at large that are taken for granted today were far more fluid in the early sixteenth century, to the extent that privacy as we know it scarcely existed, nor did domesticity yet have metaphoric status, at least not in portraiture. By the same token, dynastic conceptions of the family easily merged with more public forms of social hierarchy. (21)

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This, of course, is precisely what Holbein has done in coupling Thomas More the patriarch with More the Tudor official. In overstating the point, though, he injected much of the portrait's understated irony. In addition to More's ceremonious demeanor and courtly attire, Sir John More wears his red robes of office as Judge of the King's Bench, hardly the right outfit for a visit with his grandchildren, one would think. Even more incongruously, Dame Alice, the lady of the house, has been banished from her rightful place beside her husband to the periphery of the composition. As a measure of family values, dynasty has trumped marriage itself. The result is a deep and highly purposeful friction between competing social forms and meanings. Having concocted an almost hieratic axiality for Thomas More the public man, the artist unravels it in the rest of the composition. I have already mentioned the transitory pose of Elizabeth Dauncey, who actually might as easily be leaving as arriving. And the monkey on the right has a positively anarchic effect on Dame Alice's prayers. But Holbein does not just play with the margins of the group. The centrifugal effects begin in the center, where More's father and son are subtly turning away from his static, abstract axis toward the livelier, book-centered milieu of the women. John More the Elder carries on an outward dialogue with Margaret Clement; John the Younger is immersed in an inward dialogue with his book, rendering him oblivious to his public position as son and heir. Worse still, his fiancee, Anne Cresacre, ignores ceremonial proprieties altogether by breezing past the patriarch's throne with a careless glance over her shoulder. Placed on the axis of abstraction and authority, she implicitly relativizes and subverts that axis and, with it, the public persona of Thomas More.

These frictions must have been especially apparent in the life-size, painted version. For where the intimate size of the drawing lends itself to the modern bias toward domesticity, the painting's monumental scale would have suited the symmetry, the pomp, and the regal values associated with the image of the patriarch as public man. The same impulse toward the ceremonial probably explains why Holbein initially envisioned the scene as a prayer service--as a social occasion defined by ecclesiastical norms. Only as the new, secular logic of the conversation piece became clear to him did he remove Dame Alice's prie-dieu, the rosary in Cecily Heron's lap, and the prayer books in the drawing and replace the latter with classical texts in the painting, as shown in the copies, which are discussed below. The tensions in the portrait between male and female behavior, center and periphery, cloth of honor and mundane household detail strongly suggest that domestic informality could only take on meaning in ironic dialogue with that which it was not. (22) These social tensions also set the Family Portrait sharply apart from Mantegna's mural (Fig. 3). Ludovico Gonzaga appears there as a working ruler, not a father enthroned, and his household is inseparable from his court. Consequently, the Gonzaga portrait's informality is held together by a seamless court ethos that leaves little room for social irony. (23)

A close parallel to these social and formal gymnastics can be found in Holbein's The Madonna of Burgomaster Meyer in Darmstadt (Fig. 4), the first version of which he had completed just before moving to London late in 1526. Jakob Meyer and his family kneel in the side wings before the Madonna of Mercy, who stands in the higher, more sanctified space of a classical niche. (24) Even more than the enthroned Thomas More, she provides a strong axis of form and meaning. Yet here, too, the composition is more unstable on its margins, as the eyes of most of the family members wander away from the object of their devotion. Just visible behind the Meyers are the branches of a fig tree against a blue ground, a decorative motif Holbein frequently used as a symbol of fallenness and sin; for in the biblical lore of the time, the fig was as often the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge as was the apple. (25) Like Thomas More and his womenfolk, the Madonna and her worshipers, despite their proximity, belong to separate worlds, and the resulting strain contributes to the complex, shifting relations between the figures. (26) Rowlands sees a close and reciprocal relation between the two family groups. (27) This would not be the only time Holbein based a portrait on a religious image, (28) but here the borrowing is ironic, since he has reversed the other picture's formal dynamic. Where the one is centripetal, moving inward from the distracted glances of Jakob Meyer's wives and children to his own rapt gaze at the Madonna, the Family Portrait pulls in the opposite direction, so as to undermine the axis of authority at its center.

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As a reversal of the altarpiece, of court ceremonial, and of Thomas More's public image, the Family Portrait reflects a Renaissance taste for what Thomas M. Greene has labeled "ceremonial play." In a thoughtful essay he calls attention to Renaissance humanism's restlessness with the medieval tendency to invest personal and communal identity in rituals and in the secular or ecclesiastical norms and archetypes those rituals symbolized. By the early sixteenth century that restlessness had found expression in the increasingly negative connotations of the word "ceremony" itself, as well as in a widespread inclination to undercut ritual through parody. Erasmus's The Praise of Folly, for example, parodies the formulaic ritual of the university oration by replacing the professor with Stultitia, Dame Folly. (29)

The Praise of Folly makes a telling foil for the idea of counter-portraiture as ceremonial play, since it touches so closely on both Holbein and More. Erasmus wrote the book in the latter's house and dedicated it to him as the one who he says inspired him to write it. (30) As it happens, one of the artist's first commissions on arriving in Basel as a teenager in 1515 was to draw marginal illustrations in Oswald Myconius's copy of the book. (31) The project marked the beginning of Holbein's engagement with that university town's humanist culture and its ironic temper. He produced title pages and book illustrations for humanist texts, and antique imagery and classical lore, much of it witty, pervade his early work. (32) Long before he met More, he was also making portraits of scholars, especially of Erasmus, who sat for him repeatedly during these years. (33) These works make it plain that by 1527 Holbein was well attuned to the kind of sophisticated irony found in Family Portrait. But so was More. Quite apart from his natural interest in the project as client and sitter, he was intimately familiar with the most adventurous ideas in Renaissance portraiture. He had received Quentin Massys's "Friendship Diptych" of Erasmus and Peter Gilles (the latter, a character in Utopia) as a gift from those two friends in 1517 and had expressed his delight in these scholar portraits, with their multiple layers of meaning and allusion. (34) He also would have known Holbein's at least equally sophisticated Portrait of Erasmus in the National Gallery, London, from 1523, discussed below, which belonged to his friend William Warham, the archbishop of Canterbury. (35) It seems inescapable that the Family Portrait grew out of an active and highly creative collaboration, in which each man left his unmistakable imprint on the work.

Holbein, of course, played the dominant role as artist and inventor, but More seems nonetheless to have shaped the picture's overall character in ways large and small. Many of its symbols and allusions bear the distinctive imprint of his subtle, ironic humor. Along these lines, we can look at the picture as a variation on one of his favorite rhetorical figures, litotes, wherein a thing is affirmed by denying its opposite, as when we say "not bad" instead of a simple "good," or, in this case, "unpretentious" instead of "humble" or "modest." Even these commonplace examples of the form suggest some of the reasons why what looks like mere indirection or understatement merits theoretical exposition and a Greek label (from litos, meaning "plain, small, or meager"). Much as in the Family Portrait, even the simplest litotes elicits at least two points of view and thus is inherently dialogical. Especially in the hands of a humanist as closely attuned to the play of language as Thomas More, litotic understatement could conjure up skewed or double meanings that generate ambiguity. As the opposite of hyperbole, it also implies modesty and moderation, values he prized.

In a celebrated article Elizabeth McCutcheon has shown the importance of litotes as "a major element in the fine brushwork of Utopia." (36) As she points out, these rhetorical subtleties are especially rich in More's original Latin and sometimes have been lost in translation. (37) In any case, "As More uses litotes again and again, continuously affirming something by denying its opposite, the figure becomes, ultimately, a paradigm of the book as a whole, echoing, often in the briefest syntactical units, the larger, paradoxical and double vision which will discover the best state of the commonwealth in an island called Noplace." (38) The values of hierarchy and ceremony that the Family Portrait ironically inverts are much the same as those reversed in Utopia, which, many have observed, is the antithesis of Tudor England. Certainly, the litotic irony in both works is similarly subtle. Nor is it a coincidence that both have resisted definitive interpretation for so long.

There are other ways, too, in which More himself lends support to an ironic interpretation of Holbein's picture, which otherwise so contradicts our customary assumptions about Renaissance portraits and their sitters. Eight of his Latin epigrams (nos. 69, 70, 74, 75, 76, 79, 80, and 122), for example, cast an ironic or ridiculing eye at the art of portraiture. (39) In this they reflect the same disdain for pomp and pretense reported by Erasmus in his letter to von Hutten. (40) One might draw this conclusion as well from Utopia, where the island's inhabitants delight in natural pleasures of mind and body but look down on the false enjoyment of "empty fictions," which distract the mind from the sources of genuine happiness. These fictions include fancy clothes, notions of social status, and "empty ceremonial honors." (41) Moreover, there are no marks of rank in Utopia: "Not even the prince is distinguished from his fellow citizens by a robe or crown; he is known only by a sheaf of grain carried before him, just as the high priest is distinguished by a wax candle." (42)

Utopians also look down on lawyers, "a class of men whose trade it is to manipulate cases and multiply quibbles." (43) Needless to say, lawyering was More's own trade, and this passage, better than most in the book, confirms his sense of humor, which by now seems the most indispensable--and most overlooked--feature of the Family Portrait. For, of course, all the subversions of his identity in the picture really amount to a joke by and on More himself. In this same self-deprecating vein, he seems to have been fond of punning on More and moria, the Greek word for folly. (44) Also, according to J. B. Trapp and Hubertus Schulte Herbruggen, who have thoroughly perused his writings, "one of Sir Thomas More's favourite adjectives is 'merry.'" (45) Erasmus describes him as "always friendly and cheerful, with something of the air of one who smiles easily, and (to speak frankly) disposed to be merry rather than serious or solemn." (46) Likewise, Erasmus says, "From boyhood he [More] has taken such pleasure in jesting that he might seem born for it." (47) His biographer Thomas Stapleton tells us still more in the chapter "His Quick Wit." Especially telling for Holbein's portrait is what he says about More's ability to keep a straight face:

  But as in most serious matters he tried always to be pleasant and
  humorous, so in the midst of jokes he kept so grave a face, and even
  when those around were laughing heartily, looked so solemn, that
  neither his wife nor any other member of his family could tell from
  his countenance whether he was speaking seriously or in jest, but had
  to judge from the subject matter or the circumstances. (48)

The Evidence of the Copies

The best evidence we have of the extent of More's engagement with the Family Portrait appears in the Basel drawing itself, where annotations and alterations in oxidized brown ink show that it was very much a work in progress. Most of these changes appear in a life-size painted copy at Nostell Priory in Yorkshire (Fig. 5), which the English miniaturist Rowland Lockey executed in the early 1590s, apparently for Margaret Roper's branch of the family. (49) In all likelihood these notes and additions represent corrections requested by More, for almost all of them concern the character of the family and its members rather than formal and compositional problems in the narrow sense. Moreover, the corrections show that some of the most novel and ironic features of the portrait took shape only at this stage, after Holbein had finished the initial sketch.

For example, it was at this point that the artist and his patron abandoned the idea of showing the family at prayer. Written on a slip of paper pasted next to Dame Alice are the words "Dise soll sitze" (this one should sit), that is, she should not be kneeling in prayer. In the painting she sits reading a book, a change that required only a minor adjustment in her figure, but it meant breaking with the common practice of defining social identity in terms of ecclesiastical identity, which Holbein probably had adopted as a matter of course. Given his deep piety, More also may not have wanted the portrait's ironic treatment of hierarchy and ceremony to carry over to Christian forms and rituals. In any case, it is surely no coincidence that the abandonment of ecclesiastical meanings seems to have gone hand in hand with a loosening of formality and decorum. Both the anarchic monkey climbing up Alice More's skirt and the books strewn on the floor are also later additions, drawn in brown ink.

Dispensing with the settled structure of religious communion meant that the artist had to organize the family around a new framework of meaning. In light of Erasmus's letter to von Hutten, More himself possibly had envisioned such a framework from the beginning. In any case, descriptive realism was not enough by itself. This might explain why the naturalistic, but essentially meaningless, still-life objects on the windowsill and sideboard in the drawing are replaced by the three large bouquets of flowers in the Nostell Priory painting. Their colors alone made them good additions to the painted version, but they probably also bore symbolic meanings, as flowers often do in the art of the time. (50) The same is true of the musical instruments. In the drawing brown ink, once again, marks the viola da gamba hanging behind Margaret Clement as a later addition, and just above it is written, also in brown, "Claficordi und ander / seyte spill uf dem buvet sitze" (clavichord and other string instruments on the buffet). Translated onto the sideboard in the painted version, these become a lute and a viol. Not only do they testify to the More family's love of music, but as string instruments, they also serve as familiar symbols of harmony. Finally, Lockey's copy gives the titles of several of the volumes that have taken the place of the prayer books. Along with their obvious connotations of humanistic learning, they seem to carry ethical meanings as well. Among the books on the sideboard is Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy, which speaks to Stoic values, as does the copy of Seneca's Epistles under Elizabeth Dauncey's arm. (51) Of equal significance is the passage in act 4, scene 4 of Seneca's Oedipus that lies open on Margaret Roper's lap. Nor is it likely to be a coincidence that More's friend Juan Luis Vives prescribed Seneca's tragedies as suitable reading for well-educated young ladies. (52)

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In addition to the changes marked in brown ink, other notable differences exist between the Basel drawing and the Nostell Priory copy. Were these alterations by Holbein, at More's request, or by Lockey, at the request of More's descendants? Lockey's other two copies, both in London, show the distortions a younger generation's dynastic pretensions and plain ignorance could inflict. The first is in the National Portrait Gallery (Fig. 6), dated 1593; the second, a somewhat later miniature, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig. 7). (53) Both make room for the family of Thomas More II, the patron of the work and son of John More the Younger and Anne Cresacre, simply by deleting all the members of Holbein's group who did not belong to the More blood line: Dame Alice, Margaret Clement, and Henry Patensen. The one obvious exception is Anne Cresacre, who also appears as a middle-aged matron in a portrait hanging behind her son in the 1593 version. For the most part, the empty-headedness of these alterations only makes the Nostell Priory copy more credible, leading one to assume that its differences from the drawing in Basel came from More and Holbein rather than the grandchildren. One change that must have been done at More's request is the inclusion of his secretary, John Harris, who looks into the room from the doorway on the right. Like Henry Patensen, he was an intimate retainer who would have held no interest for later generations. From More's point of view, Harris's intrusion enhanced the household's learned, humanist ambiance. Including him also helped Holbein to balance the composition, which is slightly weighted to the left in the drawing. Centering the green curtain and the clock behind More served the same purpose, so this, too, must come from the lost original. The greater symmetry likewise enhanced the air of grandeur in the painted version, as did the addition of the yellow curtain with the red-trimmed canopy on the left, though this detail has another meaning as well (as I intend to show). Finally, replacing the books at More's feet with a polite lapdog and adding a better-behaved monkey on the far right probably reflect a simple tidying impulse in a portrait that had taken on more monumentality and abstraction in the translation from drawing to painting.

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The same shift toward greater decorum may have figured in the reversal of the positions of Elizabeth Dauncey and Margaret Clement in the Nostell Priory copy. In some ways this change is not an improvement, since separating Margaret from Sir John quiets the "buzz of talk" in the room. Elizabeth also loses her centrifugal effect on the composition, though John Harris takes her place as a threshold figure. In all likelihood the rearrangement was proposed by More, who would have been less sensitive than Holbein to formal nuances. (54) But it seems unjust to suggest, as some have done, that he did so for dynastic reasons, in order to marginalize Margaret as a mere foster daughter. (55) His writings voice markedly antidynastic views, (56) and two letters quoted by Stapleton vividly show that he considered her a full and much beloved member of his family. (57) Margaret was probably shifted to the far left so as to bracket the scene on both sides with women with open books, a move that would again have underscored the family's intellectuality. The text in Margaret Clement's hands, which seems to have been readable in the original painting and was likely very important, (58) may also have complemented the one held by her "cradle mate," Margaret Roper, across the room. If so, some sort of dialogue between the two women was probably implied, though Holbein's preparatory drawing of Margaret Clement at Windsor argues against actual conversation. Her eyes there are distinctly downcast, and in the Basel drawing Margaret Roper has an abstracted look. (59) In any event, the latter plays a critical role in Holbein's larger theme of the "deconstruction" of Thomas More, one that cuts deeper than the relatively simple frictions between public and private values dealt with so far. Through her, counter-portraiture also involves a "doubling" of the man, which probes the multiplicity of his roles and the layers of his character.

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At the time many considered Margaret Roper to be virtually her father's double, and she in fact plays this role in the portrait as well. Stapleton devotes a whole chapter to Margaret, More's most brilliant and beloved child and the one most like him. "More than all the rest of his children," he says, "she resembled her father, as well in stature, appearance, and voice, as in mind and in general character." (60) A page later he adds, "no one understood and sympathized with her father's mind more fully than she," (61) an observation confirmed by her husband, William Roper, who in his own biography of More tells of how she alone shared his innermost secrets. (62)

The physical resemblance of father and daughter is readily apparent in the Basel drawing. More striking, however, is their common demeanor, which sets them apart from the other members of the family. While everyone else engages in some form of inward or outward dialogue, they stare abstractedly into space, oblivious to their surroundings. Shortly before returning to Basel in 1528, Holbein doubled another father and child in almost the same way in his Portrait of Thomas Godsalve and His Son John, in Dresden (Fig. 8). (63) Where John Godsalve is his father's shadow, however, Margaret is More's mirror image and hence his reverse, in more ways than one, for whereas he sits enthroned on the axis of power and authority, she kneels on the floor in a posture of humility. The subtle comparison Holbein poses between the two appears to be directly related to the passage from Seneca's Oedipus in the open book on Margaret's lap, which is readable in the Nostell Priory copy. The left-hand page tells of mildness and moderation: "Were it mine to shape fate at my will, I would trim my sails to gentle winds, lest my yards tremble, bent 'neath a heavy blast. May soft breezes, gently blowing, unvarying, carry my untroubled barque along...." In contrast, the lines on the right-hand page, her father's side, ominously invoke the rash pride of Icarus: "... madly the lad sought the stars, in strange devices trusting, and strove to vanquish true birds in flight...." (64) This is just the kind of learned device that Holbein repeatedly uses to unlock hidden meanings in many of his best portraits.

In More's eyes, humility was one of Margaret's greatest virtues. In a letter to her published by Stapleton, he praises her uncomplaining acceptance of the restrictions and disregard she had to bear as a woman when she knew herself to be much abler and smarter than most men. (65) By the same token, he considered pride the worst of the deadly sins: "the prime plague and begetter of all others," as Raphael Hythloday says at the end of Utopia. (66) Louis Martz has argued that it was primarily as an antidote to pride and vainglory that More wore a hair shirt beneath his clothes, not as an exercise in monastic asceticism. (67) Certainly, that is the context in which William Roper reports this uncomfortably itchy practice of his father-in-law. (68)

Close as she is to her father, Margaret also undercuts his position in a way that raises the questions about appearance and reality in the portrait to an ethical plane that is at once higher and more personal. The values at stake are recognizably those of Christian stoicism, which explains the heavy emphasis on Seneca in the books and texts in the scene. Stoic views on the illusoriness of worldly position also account for the clock above More's head, a familiar vanitas symbol, and probably for the flowers in the Nostell Priory copy as well. (69) At the same time, Margaret's resemblance to her father provides a midpoint of sorts between the extremes of formality and informality in the portrait and, to that extent, makes it plain that the attitudes toward power and majesty expressed here are a matter of ambivalence rather than outright opposition. More is, after all, playing one of his legitimate roles. Although the ironies and frictions that Holbein built into the scene ultimately undercut that role's meaning, More's dignity is only compromised, not destroyed. One might even say that Margaret Roper validates her father's pose by imitating it, in however parodic a spirit. Otherwise, the parody would consume her as well. To various degrees, in fact, all the family members in the picture can be considered extensions of More, even as they complicate and unsettle his image. Holbein's purpose was not just to unravel or "deconstruct" Sir Thomas More but to conjure up the multiple and contradictory dimensions of his person.

Nevertheless, the notion of doubling or inverting Thomas More probably would remain fairly tame--and in the end harder to demonstrate--were it not for the one member of the group who lifts the subject out of conventional categories of social thought altogether. This is Henry Patensen, the forty-year-old retarded man who served as the household jester. He, too, is an extension of More, both of his comic side in general and of his love of fools and clowns in particular, as reported by Erasmus. (70) Given the absence of the sons-in-law and other members of the household, his inclusion in the portrait surely points to a deeper meaning as well. One clue to that meaning lies in the colors he wears in the Nostell Priory copy: yellow, red, and green, which are the fool's traditional colors in medieval and Renaissance art and custom, though they also are associated with other social outsiders, such as Jews, prostitutes, and heretics. (71) The three colors of More's fool establish the color scheme for the entire scene. Aside from the brown coat of John Harris, who is an outsider and a late addition to the composition, and a few minor details of flowers and furnishings, these are the only colors in the room. To be sure, some of these color choices, in and of themselves, have other explanations. Sir John More's red judicial robes are a prominent example. Likewise, green curtains like the one behind him and his son Thomas are common in Holbein's work. But the yellow curtain with the red-trimmed canopy on the left is highly unusual, as is its nonheraldic, off-center position. The artist added it after finishing the Basel drawing, when the theme of comic inversion had taken definite shape in his mind and almost certainly with the express purpose of echoing Patensen's costume. The idea of using the colors of folly symbolically must have come out of the same conversations with Thomas More that had led to the corrections in brown ink on the drawing. The proof of this theory is that Holbein also used the brown ink to redesign Margaret Roper's bodice (Fig. 9) so that in the painted version a vertical strip of red interrupts the overall black and plays off against her yellow sleeves. Cecily Heron, by contrast, wears the opposite combination: red sleeves with a yellow bodice. These colors also appear in most of the other figures' clothing, and Elizabeth Dauncey wears bright green sleeves and a green sash, with dashes of red and yellow.

Traditionally, the fool is a figure of inversion, and the implications of that role are vividly apparent in a Netherlandish Portrait of a Fool from the first quarter of the sixteenth century in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (Fig. 10). Clad in red, yellow, and green motley, he smirks at us through his fingers in the traditional gesture of one who "looks the other way" in the face of wrongdoing. His glasses also indicate folly as moral blindness. (72) Together, these attributes mark him as one who thumbs his nose at the established order. Similarly, another portrait of a fool from about the same date by the Master of the Angers Portrait in the Yale University Art Gallery (Fig. 11) features bread, wine, and a bloody fertilized egg in an apparent parody of the Mass. With his even more inane grin, which hovers between imbecility and revolution, this fool is the antithesis of the classical portrait medallion on his shoulder, which probably represents his master, and he, too, wears yellow, red, and green. (73)

Henry Patensen plays the same subversive role in Holbein's portrait, in part by being the only figure to meet our gaze. By mediating in this way between subject and beholder, he reminds us that we are an audience at a performance, which the Family Portrait enacts in more ways than one. Puncturing illusions in this fashion was one of the main jobs of fools and jesters, especially in the social theater of princely courts. There the fool enjoyed special license to ridicule pretense and turn upside down social rituals and solemnities, including the dignity of the king himself. (74) This was just the part Patensen played in Sir Thomas More's household, albeit on a more modest scale. Reportedly, he had a way of cutting through propriety and convention by uttering stupid jokes and blunt remarks or otherwise engaging in socially inappropriate behavior. It was said that he made fun of a guest's large nose and then tried to make amends by insisting that it was really a tiny nose--in fact, no nose at all. More found such antics hilarious and encouraged him, which of course gives a sharp insight into Sir Thomas's own irreverent attitude toward social niceties. (75)

Patensen thus embodies another of More's doubles, and in a way that is particularly tangible, even literal, given the latter's frequent puns on More and Moria. But clearly Patensen doubles in a way differently from Margaret Roper. Whereas she modifies her father's persona by revising it downward, by counterposing humility to his pride, the fool parodies his master by playing his opposite. The one sits while the other stands, one is central, the other marginal, one high, the other low, one smart, the other dumb. As in the painting by the Master of the Angers Portrait, master and fool also have opposite relations to their audience. Where More is the most abstracted member of the group, Patensen is the most engaged, though his vacant stare has an abstracted quality of its own. We can read these contrasts as purposeful and complementary because this kind of parodic doubling reflects the age-old relation between the fool and his master. Especially where the master is the king, this union of opposites is rooted in archaic notions of cosmic order and disorder. The fool's role is to ridicule and subvert--or appear to subvert--the social order over which the king presides. While this comic subversion is all playacting and hence safe, the interplay between king and fool nonetheless points to the ruler's vulnerability as a mortal being who claims to mediate between God and man. As William Willeford says in The Fool and His Scepter, "The fool helps to maintain a relativity between the king and his office and between that office and the facts of life and death." (76) To be sure, Sir Thomas More was no king, but by giving him regal attributes, Holbein must have meant to invoke the same basic dualism. For the relativity Willeford speaks of lies at the heart of Holbein's portrait and the image it presents of Thomas More the public man.

That More and Holbein meant Henry Patensen to be a comic and subversive presence is also indicated by his reappearance in Rowland Lockey's third variation on the lost original, the miniature in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig. 7). In it, Patensen peers into the room from behind the green curtain in the background, (77) restored to the outsider status that had led to his removal from the earlier, full-scale version in the National Portrait Gallery (Fig. 6), which the miniature otherwise closely resembles. Lockey probably knew the original better than any artist or critic since Holbein himself and was still culturally close enough to the latter to be able to read his code with ease. The return of Patensen indicates that Lockey preferred Holbein's view of Thomas More to the reductive, dynastic vision of his employers, the grandchildren. (78) Not only has Lockey made the fool even more of an outsider than before, but by looking in through the curtain he is the outsider as trickster, spy, and social critic, another of the fool's archetypal roles. Erasmus's Stultitia, the wise fool in The Praise of Folly who turns upside down the entire established order of things, is the quintessential Renaissance example. (79) In the visual arts another example from the early sixteenth century is Lucas van Leyden's Tavern Scene (Fig. 12), with a fool looking in the window at the immoral goings-on below him. (80) Where Lucas's fool points to sins of lust, Patensen's target must be, once again, the sin of pride, which had led Lockey's patron, Thomas More II, to flaunt his family tree so ostentatiously. Lockey makes the same point by transferring the family escutcheons to the yellow curtain on the left, where they become, in effect, emblems of folly.

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More, Lucian, and Humanist Wit

Mention of fools in general and The Praise of Folly in particular ties the humor in Holbein's portrait to a rich vein of irony and inversion in Renaissance humanism. Like his friend Erasmus, Thomas More was, in fact, a prime mover in the unfolding of that comic pattern. Their native wit aside, the role both men played in this regard stems from their early engagement with Lucian of Samosata, the Greek satirist of the second century CE. Together, More and Erasmus had translated Lucian's dialogues from Greek into Latin in 1505-6, in the process making him one of the most popular authors in the Renaissance. Indeed, in his own lifetime More was better known for these translations, which went through fourteen editions by his death in 1535, than he was for Utopia, which was reissued only six times. (81) Erasmus considered them among his own most important works. (82)

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With these translations they reintroduced the ancient seriocomic genre of Menippean satire into Renaissance literature, where it flourished in a multitude of forms and often reached new levels of profundity. Much of its adaptability and appeal lay in its status as "antigenre," Scott Blanchard's term for a literary form that typically breaks conventional generic boundaries and seeks to subvert the social and literary norms those genres represent. (83) Blanchard argues that the success of Menippean satire in the Renaissance, as in postclassical antiquity, reflects the unsettled character of an age riven by class conflict and social mobility and one in which the scholars and intellectuals who were the form's main audience increasingly saw themselves as outsiders: (84)

  Menippean satire is first and foremost intellectual satire practiced
  by an intellectual elite upon itself; it depends for its success upon
  a thorough knowledge of canonical literary forms by whose negation it
  defines itself, and in every case it expresses an anarchic impulse to
  dissolve some form of logical, rhetorical, or social organization by
  rejecting the claims of any one social group (whether the aristocracy,
  the bourgeoisie, or professional philosophers and philologists) to
  master or systematically organize the social or intellectual polity.
  (85)

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It is easy to see how this characterization suits Erasmus's The Praise of Folly, which C. R. Thompson deems "indisputably the best of many Lucianic compositions of the age." (86) But Lucian's example also shaped More's Utopia in critical ways. Indeed, Mikhail Bakhtin points out that the very notion of a utopia is rooted in the Menippean theme of the journey to unknown lands. (87) Lucian's True History is a prime example and an obvious model. (88) Along these same lines, R. Bracht Branham sees the influence of Lucian's Menippus in More's inquiry into the ideal society and the questioning of conventional wisdom that accompanies it. Not unlike Utopia's Raphael Hythloday. Menippus descends into Hades in search of the best way of life, having cast aside the empty ideas of the philosophers of his day. (89) And if Alistair Fox is right in seeing Hythloday's sparring partner, Morus, as the literary type of the "foolish interlocutor," More must have based him on Lycinus in Lucian's dialogue The Cynic. Just as the Portuguese explorer generally prevails in his debates with Morus over social goods and evils, the Cynic successfully defends his ascetic morality against Lycinus. But in Lucian's dialogue it is a Pyrrhic victory, since he subtly makes the anonymous philosopher look ridiculous by his posturing and overstatements, tipping the reader's sympathy toward his "foolish" adversary. As Fox points out, the fact that More renamed Lycinus "Lucianus" in his translation shows that he saw the joke and shared his predecessor's ironic laughter. The corollary, of course, is that the same irony carries over to the dialogue in Utopia. (90) Many now recognize that the book is not the didactic exercise in social engineering it has often been taken to be, but a far more slippery, ambiguous work of literature and, as such, well suited to Menippean satire. (91)

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In Fox's view, "More's encounter with Lucian taught him how to dramatize ambiguity as an integral function of meaning." (92) If earlier he had professed a didactically moralizing, in some ways even Manichean, view of the world, the discovery of an ironic mode of thought and expression allowed him to accommodate multiple and contradictory levels of reality and meaning. (93) This delight in irony and ambiguity is manifestly as much a part of the Family Portrait as it is of Utopia. So is the tangible influence of Lucian and Menippean satire. The notion of "counter-portraiture" certainly seems to fit Blanchard's ideas about antigenre; Patensen's presence also suits this form, which Blanchard calls a "literary anarchist's ars poetica." (94) There may be a smaller, finer touch, too, in the inclusion on the sideboard of Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy, a late, but nonetheless canonical, Menippean work, which freely mixes poetry with prose and Stoicism with ironic wit. (95)

The most Menippean, and most Lucianic, aspect of the Family Portrait, however, lies in its fracturing and relativizing of identity--what Bakhtin would call Thomas More's failure "to coincide with himself." The great Russian scholar believes that one of Menippean satire's most profound contributions to ancient thought and to subsequent literary tradition was the recognition of this separation between the self and its roles, which arises from a sense of the instability of external position and of life itself as theater. (96) More would have found this idea of man as an actor in its most explicit form in Lucian's Menippus, in a passage in which the title character meditates on the faceless dead and the futility of the status they had held and the roles they had played in life:

  I suppose you have often seen these stage-folk who act in tragedies,
  and according to the demands of the plays become at one moment
  Creons, and again Priams or Agamemnons; the very one, it may be, who
  a short time ago assumed with great dignity the part of Cecrops or of
  Erechtheus soon appears as a servant at the bidding of the poet. And
  when at length the play comes to an end, each of them strips off his
  gold-bespangled robe, lays aside his mask, steps out of his buskins,
  and goes about in poverty and humility.... That is what human
  affairs are like, it seemed to me as I looked. (97)

Fox calls the idea "purloined from Menippus ... that life is like a play--the very keystone of More's subsequent philosophy and modus vivendi." (98)

The Doubling of Thomas More

Like the notion of "ceremonial play," Lucianic humor provides a distinct framework for the ironies and inversions in the Family Portrait, which contradict so many customary assumptions about Renaissance portraiture. These ideas also anchor the portrait in an audience equipped to grasp such meanings, the witty and learned circle of humanist intellectuals to which More and his family belonged. Holbein, too, was at home in this circle, and his portraits of other members of the humanist elite frequently show the same kind of subtle fracturing or doubling of identity that he applied to Thomas More. Which is to say that counter-portraiture and its variations are rooted in a larger humanist ethos, within which the "failure to coincide with oneself" takes on rich and positive social meanings.

Perhaps the best example of this portrait ethos is Erasmus, who introduced Holbein to More in 1526. The artist clearly was on familiar terms with this patron and benefactor and portrayed him a number of times. Of particular interest here is his Portrait of Erasmus from 1523 (Fig. 13), presently on loan to the National Gallery, London. (99) Holbein painted it as a gift from Erasmus to the latter's great friend and benefactor William Warham, archbishop of Canterbury, who was also a close friend of More. Hence, the picture probably figured in the dialogue with Holbein that led to the Family Portrait. A generation ago, William Heckscher laid out much of the painting's intricate web of analogies and learned allusions, which in some ways resemble those in the group portrait. The key image is the lavishly bound red book the sitter rests his hands on, which is titled in Greek "The Labors of Hercules." Connecting this detail to a letter Erasmus wrote to the archbishop comparing himself to Hercules, Heckscher argues that the portrait draws the same analogy between scholarship and the physical trials of the Greek strongman. In fact, this same analogy neatly fits the image of "the Gallic Hercules," an invention of Lucian in which the hero's power comes from eloquence--or smooth talk--rather than physical strength. In other words, Erasmus, like More, has a double of sorts, and given his notoriously puny physique, the Lucianic inversion becomes all the wittier and more paradoxical. Holbein evokes further dichotomies between ancient and modern and between artifice and reality by pairing Erasmus with the classical pilaster to his right, as well as drawing an implicit parallel between him and Saint Jerome, each in his respective study. Finally, the green curtain behind Erasmus has been drawn back to reveal several more books and a glass flask resting on a shelf. According to Heckscher, the flask may be an allusion to the Virgin Mary, the subject of Jerome's most faithful devotions. Matthias Winner has argued that the drawn-aside curtain stands for the unveiling of Erasmus's soul. (100) The idea seems all the more plausible given the number of green curtains, drawn and undrawn, elsewhere in Holbein's work, including in the Frick portrait of Thomas More (Fig. 2). Be that as it may, Holbein's name appears on one of the tomes on the shelf, with a Latin inscription about excellence and the futility of envy based on an axiom credited to the Greek artist Zeuxis. It effectively likens the artist to his sitter, in terms of the same struggles with envious colleagues that Erasmus's letter to Warham complains of in comparing himself to Hercules. (101)

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The allusions to Greek and Roman antiquity obviously celebrate Erasmus's standing as the preeminent Renaissance humanist. The portrait's witty interplay of word and image, artifice and reality, however, also reflects an ambivalent, contradictory strain in humanist culture itself, which largely accounts for Erasmus's and More's taste for Lucian. As Thomas Greene has argued, this sensibility arose from the inevitable frictions between past and present, classicism and anachronism, paganism and Christianity, dichotomies at the heart of the humanist project. (102) Another good example of these frictions is Albrecht Durer's large woodcut portrait of his humanist friend Ulrich Varnbuler (Fig. 14), published in 1522, just a year before the Erasmus portrait in London was painted. By incongruously mixing Roman and Gothic ornament and epigraphy in the name at the top and the dedication on the right, Durer plays on Varnbuler's double identity--much like More's--as classical scholar and German public official, as noted in the inscription in the cartouche. The way his profile oscillates between an unclassical physicality and the decorative shapes and contours of the cartouche also results in an unstable, ambiguous doubling. (103)

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The youthful Holbein's Portrait of Benedikt von Hertenstein of 1517 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Fig. 15), plays on some of the same equivocations by mixing Latin and German in the inscription with an interplay between a man of the present and a classical triumphal frieze borrowed from Mantegna's The Triumphs of Caesar. (104) Holbein, however, has turned Mantegna's fairly sedate, archaeologically correct Roman triumph into a much rowdier parade of nudes and wildmen. Given the inherently uncivilized, outsider status of wildmen, the frieze wittily subverts both classical culture and the urbane, pink-clad figure of von Hertenstein. In effect, the wildmen function in the same way that Henry Patensen does in the Family Portrait. (105) But to grasp fully how the latter is intertwined with the Erasmus portrait in particular, we must turn to another, more concrete variation Holbein made on the latter in the same year.

The Portrait of Erasmus represents what Batschmann and Griener call a typus, a recurrent construction of pose and image that migrates from one portrait, one identity, to another in Holbein's work, often casting one or both sitters in an ironic light. The resemblance between More and his daughter Margaret in the Family Portrait represents such a typus, as does the Portrait of Thomas and John Godsalve (Fig. 8). (106) They directly parallel the carefully constructed resemblance between Holbein's Erasmus and his Portrait of William Warham in the Musee du Louvre, Paris (Fig. 16). (107) Holbein painted the latter in the same year as the Family Portrait, 1527, and the crossing and mixing of Erasmus's and Warham's poses and social identities shed light on the multiple roles Holbein constructed for Thomas More as well. In the Erasmus and Warham portraits, however, there is nothing covert or conjectural about the similarities involved. Clearly, Warham commissioned his portrait as a deliberate echo of Erasmus's, which he had received from the latter four years earlier, and, like that picture, as a testimony to their abiding friendship. Just as clearly, Holbein set out to make an explicit comparison between the two men, for he not only portrayed them in the same pose but underscored their kinship by giving them both fur collars and cuffs, as well as similar black caps. He also painted two copies of Warham's portrait, one for the sender and one for the recipient, so the comparison would have been ready at hand for the archbishop, if not for Erasmus. (108) Yet having established this reciprocity, Holbein took care to differentiate their respective identities, their persons. Whereas Erasmus wears the black robes of an academic, the archbishop dresses in priestly white. Warham's other attributes, too, are ecclesiastical and liturgical rather than humanistic: they define him in terms of his office rather than his intellect. In each portrait, however, Holbein draws a deliberate and highly charged comparison between the objects and the men. Thus, the scholar's pagan pilaster is paralleled by the crucified Christ on the bishop's staff on the left, and the latter's miter and the books beneath it on the right stand in for Erasmus's bookshelf, with its subtle thematics of excellence and envy. Probably this badge of episcopal status and authority also precludes any need to play on the ambiguities of the inner soul implied by Erasmus's drawn-aside green curtain: Warham's curtain is closed. Yet his breviary in the right foreground is open, whereas Erasmus's expensive Greek tome is closed.

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Recently, Jurgen Muller has noticed that the right page in the Louvre portrait--the left one from our viewpoint--contains a list of Apostles and saints, while the opposite page shows the Kyrie, the sinner's prayer for mercy. In other words, a text about high standing in the Kingdom of God is contradicted by words of lowliness and humility. Accordingly, this prince of the church has laid aside his staff and miter, the gilded symbols of his office, and rests his hands on the prayer cushion that has taken the place of Erasmus's self-proclamation as a humanist Hercules. (109) No doubt the moral dichotomy between pride and humility applies first of all to the archbishop himself, but he--or Holbein--probably also meant to tweak his friend's vanity by the subtlest of jests. Given the explicit parallels between his portrait and Erasmus's, it is hard to avoid reading Warham's breviary in the same light as the open copy of Seneca's Oedipus on Margaret Roper's lap in the Family Portrait: as a witty commentary on two kindred souls, be they humanist and churchman or father and daughter. For all the mixing and shifting of social canons and identities in these portraits, the essential moral value of humility over pride has held steady.

Finally, one more portrait by Holbein almost demands comparison with the Family Portrait, The Ambassadors of 1533 in the National Gallery, London (Fig. 17), surely the greatest of them all. Here again the subject is a friendship rather than a family, and the official standing of the French ambassador, Jean de Dinteville, on the left, and his fellow diplomat Georges de Selve, bishop of Lavaur, also makes this a more public image and in some ways a more formal one. But in their unusual monumentality, their humanistic ambiance, and their fundamental ambiguity, the two portrait groups are so profoundly alike that Holbein must have had the Family Portrait in mind when he undertook The Ambassadors six years later. The books and objects on the upper and lower shelves of the table, like those surrounding the More family, carry learned symbolic allusions having to do with celestial and mundane realms of being and, as John North has recently argued, with an ingenious zodiacal revelation of Christ's Passion. Whether or not the green, brocaded background curtain represents, like Thomas More's, a cloth of honor, it creates a similar air of abstraction, as does the one behind Archbishop Warham. Along with the grandeur and the pomp, The Ambassadors shares the Family Portrait's underlying friction between appearance and reality. Like others of Holbein's green curtains, the one in The Ambassadors can be pulled aside. The crucifix just visible behind it in the upper left corner testifies to hidden realities deeper than worldly knowledge and possessions. Other signs of friction are the Lutheran hymnal on the lower shelf and the broken string on the lute beside it. Together, they have the same disruptive effect as Dame Alice's monkey in the Basel drawing (Fig. 2). Although, the famous anamorphosis of the skull in the foreground of the London painting is a surpassing paradox, it carries essentially the same message of a world turned upside down as Henry Patensen's unsettling gaze. (110) Indeed, a Double Head of a Fool (Fig. 18) from a century later by Jacob van der Heyden shows that fools, too, could be subjects of anamorphosis. (111) In medieval and Renaissance culture, both Death and the fool are traditional figures of inversion, and they sometimes even merge, as in the skeleton jester of Holbein's own print The Queen (Fig. 19) from The Dance of Death. (112)

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It is easy to read the death's-head in The Ambassadors purely as an exercise in negation, particularly since the anamorphosis so unsettles one's sense of reality. Such is Stephen Greenblatt's position in his influential book Renaissance Self-Fashioning. This reading mainly serves him as an analogue for what he considers the radically polarized character and worldview of Thomas More, who supposedly could not reconcile his private values with his wholly illusory, "fabricated" public identity as Tudor courtier. (113) Comparing The Ambassadors with the Family Portrait at first might seem to confirm Greenblatt's interpretation, for the frictions between reality and illusion in the two pictures are real and pressing. Yet the interplay of Death and Folly accompanying the comparison lends those frictions an element of laughter that Greenblatt's analysis lacks. Likewise, the complex layering and the warmth of the relations in the Family Portrait intrinsically run counter to his almost Manichaean moral oppositions.

Alistair Fox's finely nuanced study of More provides a different view of the ambiguities and moral contradictions that undoubtedly did weigh on his mind. Fox acknowledges that early in More's life these frictions bred in him a polarity between humanistic optimism and a pessimism about a world gone mad, a polarity that led him toward asceticism and withdrawal. (114) But where Greenblatt views this polarization as a constant trait, Fox sees a process of growth and transformation, as More's perspective on human failings became more ironic and in the end more forgiving. He had to learn his irony from Lucian. According to Fox, More found in Lucian "a form of dialogue that dramatized ambiguity as a function of meaning, a demonstration that all aspects of human experience could be comprehended within an ironic view of life, and an active response that was non-despairing, even though it originated in a view of things as skeptical as More's own." (115) Utopia, Fox believes, represents the high point of this process of coming to terms with life. Like most other modern critics, Fox sees Utopia as a flawed society. As such, it served More as an "instrument of analysis" for uncovering humanity's intrinsic fallibility. (116)

That sense of human fallibility also represents the central, binding theme just beneath the surface of Holbein's portraiture. It is most evident in the dialogue between pride and humility in the Family Portrait and enters into other portraits discussed in this essay as well. In a more general sense, human fallibility and the rich possibilities for irony it provides are inherent in the latent divisions in nearly all of Holbein's subjects. His people are never wholly what they appear to be, and therefore are never fully socialized. That is to say that in their layerings and divisions Holbein's people resist definition by traditional social roles and ceremonial norms. (117) Human dividedness also largely accounts for the dialogic character of Holbein's portraits. This is not a question of simple oppositions between inner self and outer social mask, as Greenblatt would have it. Very little brooding or conspicuous self-absorption takes place in Renaissance portraiture, even among scholars, whose social attribute is mind work: reading or writing. What undermines the closed mask of social identity in Holbein's portraits is, rather, the ambiguous, open-ended dialogue between his sitters' multiple roles and layers of identity, which is frequently a source of irony and parody.

The irony and the dialogue are especially rich in his portraits of humanists because their identities touch on so many different social and intellectual levels, as the Latinized variations on their names often attest. Indeed, in The Praise of Folly, Erasmus pokes fun at his scholar friends' propensity for inflating or confecting their self-images in this fashion. (118) More himself could shift at will from his straightforward English name as citizen and lawyer, to the Latin Morus, author and semifictional narrator of Utopia, to the Greek Moria, the fool. This is the same mode of thought and association found in the National Gallery portrait, where Erasmus the puny, wizened scholar doubles as Erasmus the literary Hercules, or in the equally paradoxical relations between that work and the Warham portrait. Particular symbols and allusions aside, Batschmann and Griener's concept of the typus sheds special light on how Holbein's portraits reveal Renaissance understandings of selfhood and identity. On the one hand, the fact that Erasmus and the archbishop of Canterbury could share the same typus implies a larger archetype, which transcends their individual differences. On the other hand, those same differences effectively empty the form of specific content. Yet associations connected to each of them nonetheless cling to the form, allowing each to become a parody of the other to one degree or another. Granted, these allusions are exceptionally fugitive. They require a small, learned, and witty audience, available only in humanist circles or perhaps at court. Given this audience, though, Holbein's ironic layerings of allusion and counterallusion give insights into each sitter far deeper than description alone permits. His juggling of the typus's form and content likewise underscores the relativity of social identity, and to that extent validates the interior self as an individual agent capable of transcending any specific social role. (119)

That said, Holbein and More were finally more concerned with collective social values than with personal autonomy as such. The artist's ethical stance is perhaps clearest in the Portrait of William Warham, which gently contradicts the values centered on self expressed in the National Gallery Erasmus, which is, in effect, its pendant--or its shadow. Even as Warham is defined by his ecclesiastical office, not his personal accomplishments, he lays aside the symbols of his power to stand humbly before God. The same ambivalence toward pride and social station runs through the Family Portrait as well, so much so that the two pictures, which date from the same year, might have been painted side by side. Both invoke hierarchy and ceremony only to dismantle them: both use an open book to play humility against pride; both associate virtue with gentleness and meekness, most conspicuously in the figure of Margaret Roper in the group portrait. Each portrait also takes part in a network of doublings and inversions that utterly relativizes the notion of identity as a social value.

By virtue of its novelty and sheer scale alone, the Family Portrait made an especially powerful statement about the critical place of humility and collectivity in the Renaissance dialogue of the self, which would surely have been far less ironic or ambiguous were it concerned only with unfettered individualism. Many nuances of that dialogue in the portrait have been lost, either in the 1752 fire or, long before, by the deaths of those who understood them best. One detail is worth pondering, however, as a hint of how the portrait took shape around specific trains of thought. This is Sir Thomas's gold chain of office, which proclaims him a man of authority, but which seems so out of place in domestic surroundings. It also raises questions about More himself. Erasmus, who praises More's lack of pretense and his family spirit, says that "he never wears silk or scarlet or a gold chain, except when it is not open to him to lay it aside." (120) His son-in-law William Roper, writing long after his death, says he wore his gold chain "commonly," (121) Can both be right? Henry Patensen's presence supports Erasmus's version of More, since Patensen turns upside down everything the chain symbolizes; so, in her milder way, does Margaret Roper, his other double. Yet he cannot have worn the chain only as a joke. The answer probably lies in Alistair Fox's belief that Thomas More's words and deeds show a deep commitment to institutions as the only means of keeping a flawed human nature under control. (122) If this is so, then More surely wore the chain to confirm his stake in the established social order, even though he was also keenly aware of the pride and inflexibility that order was prey to. By the same token, the informal, centrifugal qualities of family life, which he clearly valued and almost certainly preferred, most likely seemed to him incapable of sustaining a viable alternative social order on their own. In the portrait these contradictions put hierarchy and domesticity in an open-ended dialogue that can never truly be resolved, but in which the irony and ambiguity it generates become rich sources of human meaning. Its humor is as urgent and deep as it is subtle.

[FIGURE 19 OMITTED]

David Smith teaches northern Renaissance and Baroque art at the University of New Hampshire. His articles and reviews in The Art Bulletin frequently have treated subjects related to portraiture [Department of Art and Art History, University of New Hampshire, Durham, N.H. 03824, Davids@cisunix.unh.edu].

Notes

In memory of my father, Professor Norris Kelly Smith (1917-1998).

I read a very preliminary version of this paper at the annual meeting of the College Art Association in New York in February 2000 and another, much closer to the present text, at the annual meeting of the Association of Art Historians in London in April 2003. My thanks to Alison Wright and Luke Syson, the London chairs, and especially to Christopher Wood, the New York chair, for getting the project off the ground by accepting a proposal that at the time amounted to little more than a few whimsical observations. It has grown steadily since, with the invaluable help of Laura Weigert, David Levine, Catherine Levesque, and especially my Vermont neighbor Margaret Sullivan, whose astute criticisms of an early draft greatly sharpened my argument. Further useful suggestions have come from an anonymous reader for The Art Bulletin. I am grateful to all these patient, sharp-eyed colleagues.

1. The Frick Collection: An Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 1 (New York: Frick Collection, 1968), 228-33; John Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger: Complete Edition (Boston: Godine, 1985), 132-33, no. 25; Paul Ganz. The Paintings of Hans Holbein (London: Phaidon, 1956), 231-32, no. 41; Stanley Morison and Nicolas Barker, The Likeness of Thomas More: An Iconographical Survey of Three Centuries (New York: Fordham University Press, 1963), 7-10.

2. Otto Kurz, "Holbein and Others in a 17th-Century Collection," Burlington Magazine 83 (1943): 279-81. The fire took place at Kremsier Castle, the Moravian summer residence of the portrait's last owner, Carl von Lichtenstein, archbishop of Olmutz. For further information on the history and provenance of this picture, see Morison and Barker, The Likeness of Thomas More, 18-20; Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 222-23, no. L10; and Ganz, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 276-84, nos. 175-76.

3. Christian Muller et al., From Schongauer to Holbein: Master Drawings from Basel and Berlin, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1999, 385-88, no. 175; and Paul Ganz, Handzeichnungen von Hans Holbein der Jungere: Kritischer Katalog (Berlin: Julius Bard Verlag, 1937), 7-8, no. 24.

4. Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen et al., vol. 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), no. 2212. See also Hans Reinhardt, "Erasmus und Holbein," Basler Zeitschrift fur Geschichte und Altertumskunde 81 (1981): 58-59.

5. Desiderius Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, vol. 7 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 16-24, no. 999. The Dutch humanist expresses especially high praise for the More family's learning in another letter, this one to the French humanist Guillaume Bude in 1521, in which he refers to his friend as "truly a man for all seasons." See ibid., vol. 8 (1988), 294-99, no. 1233.

6. The names and ages are inscribed in Latin on the drawing in the hand of Nikolaus Kratzer, Henry VIII's court astronomer, who taught the More children mathematics and was himself a friend and sitter to Hans Holbein. Elizabeth Dauncey was twenty-one, Margaret Clements, twenty-two, as was the oldest daughter, Margaret Roper, seated in the lower right foreground; John More the Elder was seventy-six, his grandson John the Younger, who stands to his father's left, was nineteen, Anne Cresacre, his fiancee, fifteen, Cecily Heron, twenty, Dame Alice More, fifty-seven, Henry Patensen, forty, and More himself, fifty. The documents differ as to whether Thomas More was born on February 6, 1477, or on that date in 1478. On the basis of this drawing, however, we can deduce that the first date is the correct one and that he turned fifty in 1527. The decisive proof is that Anne Cresacre was born in 1511, so she could not have been fifteen years old at any time in 1528. R. W. Chambers, Thomas More (1935; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), 220, gives Anne's birthday as April 22, which indicates that the Basel drawing was done between February 6 and April 22 of 1527. For all the birth dates in the portrait, see J. B. Trapp and Hubertus Schulte Herbruggen, "The King's Good Servant": Thomas More, 1477/8-1535, exh. cat., National Portrait Gallery, London, 1977, 8-11, 85-86. On Holbein and Kratzer, see Otto Pacht, "Holbein and Kratzer as Collaborators," Burlington Magazine 84 (1944): 138. Holbein's portrait of Kratzer, dated 1528, is in the Musee du Louvre, Paris. See also Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 73, 134-35, no. 30; and Ganz, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 233, no. 48.

7. Farrago nova epistolarum (Basel, 1519). The letter to Bude (see n. 5 above) was published in Epistolae ad diversos (Basel, 1522). On the complex problem of the relation between letters and portraits in northern humanism and on Erasmus's tendency to equate the two, see Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 9, 14-20, 27-60, 73-82, 149-74. On this matter, see also Oskar Batschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 30.

8. Margaret Mann Phillips, "Erasmus and Biography," University of Toronto Quarterly 42 (1972-73): 185-87.

9. Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 70.

10. Stephanie Buck. "Hans Holbein the Younger: Portraitist of the Renaissance," in Hans Holbein the Younger 1497/98-1543: Portraitist of the Renaissance, exh. cat., Mauritshuis, The Hague, 2003, 21.

11. Ronald Lightbown, Mantegna (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 99-117, 415-19, no. 20.

12. Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-Boek (1604; Amsterdam: Wereld Bibliotheek, 1946), 72, explicitly states that Holbein never went to Italy, and Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 29-30, 276 n. 17, also discounts the possibility. Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 146-48, it is true, have uncovered some tentative documentary evidence of an Italian trip, but the connection they cite is to Milan, not to Mantua. It is conceivable, of course, that even if Holbein never visited Mantua he saw some other artist's drawings of the Camera degli Sposi. The latest scholar to support the Mantegna connection, based mainly on perceived similarities between the two compositions, is Stephanie Buck, Holbein am Hofe Heinrichs VIII (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1997), 328. However, the visual relations between the two compositions remain relatively unspecific. Without clear documentation, the arguments over this influence will probably always remain unresolved. But see also n. 104 below.

13. Richard Marius, Thomas More, a Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 229.

14. William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, in Two Early Tudor Lives, ed. Richard Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 197, 208, 210, 216-17, gives a warmly affectionate account of his relation with his father-in-law, claiming that the latter continually called him "son Roper."

15. Berthold Hinz, "Holbeins 'Schola Thomae Mori' von 1527," in Wandel der Geschlecterbeziehungen zu Beginn der Neuzeit, ed. Heide Wunder and Christina Vanje (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 80-85, 93-94, sees the absence of the sons-in-law as part of a general attempt to separate the portrait from the traditional hierarchical patterns of family relations, so as to create an image of More's family as his "school," which in a sense it was. But the fact that More appears here as neither a scholar nor a schoolmaster significantly undermines Hinz's argument. Another flaw in this often insightful essay is that the author provides no image of a school in the art of the time on which to base his reading of the Family Portrait. The one parallel he cites, a drawing of Apollo and the Muses on Mount Parnassus that Holbein created six years later for the celebrations of Anne Boleyn's coronation, has only the vaguest relation to either the Family Portrait or the notion of a school. See Muller, From Schongauer to Holbein, 409-11, no. 184.

16. Portraitist of the Renaissance, 56-58, no. 3, notes that Holbein's life-size face study of Thomas More in Basel in chalk is pricked for transfer, though the marks do not precisely match the underdrawing in the Frick portrait, as revealed by infrared reflectography. But the catalog acknowledges that the relation between the two works is unmistakable, and this certainly seems to be true for the Family Portrait as well. There is another, somewhat weaker face study of More in the British royal collection, which may also have served as the model for one or both of the finished portraits. Also in the royal collection are face studies for six other sitters in the Family Portrait: John More the Elder, John More the Younger, Anne Cresacre, Margaret Clement, Elizabeth Dauncey, and Cecily Heron. See Ganz, Handzeichnungen von Hans Holbein, 8-9, nos. 25-31; and Holbein and the Court of Henry VIII, exh. cat., Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, 1978, 7-11, 23-29, 34-40, nos. 1-3. On Holbein's techniques for the various stages of preparatory drawing and transfer, see David Piper. "Holbein the Younger in England," Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 111 (1963): 740; Morison and Barker, The Likeness of Thomas More, 26-28; Maryan Ainsworth, "'Paternes for physioneamyes': Holbein's Portraiture Reconsidered," Burlington Magazine 132 (1990): 173-79; and Jochen Sander, "The Darmstadt Madonna: On the Genesis and Development of Holbein's Panel for Jakob von Hasen," in Portraitist of the Renaissance, 40-43.

17. Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 160-64.

18. See ibid., 149-50. For more general discussions of the relation between character and social identity in portraiture, see David R. Smith, Masks of Wedlock: 17th-Century Dutch Marriage Portraiture (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982), 3-11; and idem, "Rhetoric and Prose in Dutch Portraiture," Dutch Crossing, no. 41 (1990): 72-88.

19. Erasmus, The Correspondence, vol. 7, 18: "Simple clothes please him best, and he never wears silk or scarlet or a gold chain. except when it is not open to him to lay it aside." "... he has always had a special hatred of absolute rule and a corresponding love for equality. You will hardly find any court, however modest, that is not full of turmoil and self-seeking, of pretence and luxury, and is really free of any taint of despotic power. Even the court of Henry VIII he could not be induced to enter except by great efforts.... By nature he has a great love of liberty and leisure...."

20. See Robert Bechtold Heilman, The Ways of the World: Comedy and Society (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), 98-124; and Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 101-44, for discussions of how comedy and humor have steadily declined in subtlety and depth since the Renaissance.

21. In recognizing that privacy and the modern conception of family life are relatively recent developments in Western social history. Philippe Aries's L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien regime (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1960) began what has become a widespread discussion. In addition to Aries's book, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, abr. ed. (New York: Harper, 1979), 69-89; and Rogier Chartier et al., "Community, State, and Family: Trajectories and Tensions," in Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, vol. 3 of A History of Private Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 399-607.

22. Laura Weigert, a specialist in tapestry, has suggested that the painting's medium of watercolor on linen might have played a part in this inversion of meaning. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, cloth still had less prestige than panel as a support for painting. Its cheapness, portability, and adaptability to temporary forms, such as banners, gave it some advantages to compensate for its fragility, but cloth also generated a certain disdain, which its reputation as a "poor man's tapestry" only compounded. Sometimes the lowliness of the material could be put to metaphoric purposes, either as a token of Christian humility or for comic inversions. It may therefore be significant that five years after he painted the Family Portrait Holbein used cloth for two large and highly ironic allegories, The Triumph of Wealth and The Triumph of Poverty, painted in 1532-33 for the Hanse merchants of the Steelyard to celebrate the coronation of Anne Boleyn. By a twist of fate, both perished in the same fire that destroyed the portrait in 1752 (see n. 2 above). But their comic, inversionary tone is revealed by a preparatory drawing of the first in the Musee du Louvre, Paris, and a copy of the second in the British Museum, London, and of course they also played off one another and off classical triumph imagery in these terms. For a more conservative reading and more technical discussion of Holbein's paintings on Canvas, see Susan Foister, "Holbein's Paintings on Canvas: The Greenwich Festivities of 1527," in Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, ed. Mark Roskill and John Oliver Hand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 109-23. On the subject of early linen and canvas painting in general, see Diane Wolfthal, The Beginnings of Netherlandish Canvas Painting: 1400-1540 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4-6, 20-22, 31-37; and Emil D. Bosshard, "Tuchleinmalerei--eine billige Ersatztechnik?" Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 45 (1982): 31-42. On Holbein's allegories, see Kurz, "Holbein and Others," 279-81; Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, nos. L13 A, B: Ganz, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 284-88, nos. 177-78; Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 82-83; and Hans Koegler, "Holbeins Triumphzuge des Reichtums und der Armut," Offentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Jahres berichte, n.s., 28-29 (1931-32): 57-95. At the same time, it is important to recognize that research into the subject of painted cloths is in too preliminary a state to support any but the most speculative hypotheses, as Professor Weigert is careful to remind me.

23. On Mantegna's uniformly public, nonfamilial social milieu, see also Lightbown, Mantegna, 101-3.

24. Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 101-4; Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 131-32, no. 23; Ganz, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 223-24, no. 23; Portraitist of the Renaissance, 54, no. 2. When Holbein returned to Basel in 1528, the artist replaced the long hair of Meyer's daughter Anna in the first version with a cap symbolic of her recent betrothal. See the preparatory drawing from 1526 in Basel of Anna Meyer with her hair unbraided in Muller, From Schongauer to Holbein, 382-85, no. 174; and Ganz, Handzeichnungen von Hans Holbein, 6, no. 16. Batschmann and Griener argue that the naked boy in the left foreground is not a second son of Jakob Meyer, of whom no record exists, but the infant Saint John the Baptist. It was formerly thought that Holbein added Meyer's first wife, Margaretha Baer, who kneels in profile behind the second, Dorothea Kannengeisser, only in the second version. But we now know that she was part of the original composition. See Sander, "The Darmstadt Madonna," 38, 40-43.

25. Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 106, 154.

26. Max Imdahl, "Holbeins Darmstadter Madonna--Andachtsbild und Ereignisbild," in Wie eindeutig ist ein Kunstwerk? (Cologne: Dumont, 1986), 9-39, discusses the unsettled relationships between the Meyer family and the Madonna of Mercy in terms of Holbein's mixing and overlapping of devotional types and the friction he creates between narrative experience and timeless ritual.

27. Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 70-71.

28. See Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 177, on the frequently noted resemblance of the artist's Portrait of His Wife and Children of 1526 in the Offentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel, to an image of the Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist.

29. Thomas M. Greene, "Ceremonial Play and Parody in the Renaissance," in Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 281-93. See also n. 117 below.

30. Erasmus, The Correspondence, vol. 7, 19.

31. See Erika Michael, The Drawings, by Hans Holbein the Younger for Erasmus' "Praise of Folly" (New York: Garland, 1986), 370, no. 1, which depicts Folly as a professor lecturing her audience.

32. The extent of Holbein's classical learning remains uncertain, but Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 14-15, note that his rendering of the Chimaera in The Praise of Folly (Michael, The Drawings for Erasmus' "Praise of Folly," no. 54) is based on a passage in Horace's De arte poetica that Erasmus alludes to in only the briefest terms. Hence, even as a youth, Holbein must have been familiar with Horace's text in order to re-create this mythical beast. Other early works discussed below bear further witness to his increasingly witty command of sophisticated humanist lore, as does his learned clientele. See also Lothar Schmitt, "Education and Learning among 16th-Century German Artists," in Roskill and Hand, Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, 73-81.

33. See esp. Reinhardt, "Erasmus and Holbein," 41-70.

34. On these portraits, see Lorne Campbell, Margaret Mann Phillips, Hubertus Schulte Herbruggen, and J. B. Trapp, "Quentin Massys, Desiderius Erasmus, Pieter Gilles and Thomas More," Burlington Magazine 120 (1978): 716-25; and Larry Silver, The Paintings of Quentin Massys (Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld and Schram, 1984), 105-9, 235-37, no. 58. For a discussion of their place in the history of the friendship portrait, see Harald Keller, "Entstehung und Blutezeit des Freundschaftsbildes," in Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolph Wittkower (London: Phaidon, 1967), 167-68. The portrait of Erasmus survives in the royal collection at Hampton Court; Gilles's portrait is in the earl of Radnor's collection at Longford Castle.

35. These facts contradict the view of J. B. Trapp, "Thomas More and the Visual Arts," in Essays on the Renaissance and the Classical Tradition (1984; Aldershot: Variorum, 1990), 27-54, esp. 47, 54, who argues that More was relatively uninspired and conventional in his artistic tastes. Much of his reasoning is based on the antipathy toward pomp and visual splendor expressed in More's writings. The difference between his opinion and mine lies in Trapp's unwillingness to consider intentional irony as a factor in More's thoughts about art.

36. Elizabeth McCutcheon, "Denying the Contrary: More's Use of Litotes in Utopia," in Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More, ed. Richard Sylvester and Germain P. Marc'hadour (1971; Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1977), 263.

37. Ibid., 272.

38. Ibid., 265.

39. The Latin Epigrams of Thomas More, trans. Leicester Bradner and Charles A. Lynch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 164-66, 168, 180.

40. Erasmus, The Correspondence, vol. 7, 18.

41. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 56-57.

42. Ibid., 68.

43. Ibid., 68-69.

44. More invokes this pun in a verse appended to The Latin Epigrams, 243: "You delay, in case your expectation of staying be extended; even a fool can advise you, More on that score. Cease to delay and contemplate staying in heaven; even a fool can advise you, More, on that score." Likewise, in a letter to her stepsister Alice Alington reporting on a visit with her father in prison, Margaret Roper records Thomas More making the same pun on More and Moria, with all that it implies about his own foolishness. See The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elizabeth Frances Rogers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 519.

45. Trapp and Herbruggen, "The King's Good Servant," 85.

46. Erasmus, The Correspondence, vol. 7, 17.

47. Ibid., 18-19. In the letter to More that begins The Praise of Folly (Encomium moriae), Erasmus also jokes with him, saying, "you habitually play the role of Democritus by making fun of the lives of ordinary mortals." Erasmus also says there that More will enjoy the idea that his last name is the root of moria (see n. 44 above). See idem, The Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 1-2.

48. Thomas Stapleton, Life of Thomas More, ed. Ernest Edwin Reynolds (London: Burns and Oakes, 1966), 127.

49. Otto Kurz, "Rowland Locky," Burlington Magazine 99 (1957): 13-16; Roy Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, 2 vols. (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1969), vol. 1, 349; idem. The English Renaissance Miniature (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1983), 136-41; Angela Lewi, The Thomas More Family Group (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1974), 7; and Morison and Barker, The Likeness of Thomas More, 22-23. See also Maurice W. Brockwell, Catalogue of the Pictures and Other Works of Art in the Collection of Lord St. Oswald at Nostell Priory (London: Constable, 1915), 79-98, no. 1. At some point the date 1530 was wrongly added to the Nostell Priory painting, a fact that long caused confusion about its authorship. Lesley Lewis, The Thomas More Family Group Portraits after Holbein (Leominster. UK: Gracewing, 1998), 12-13, reports that when the Nostell Priory picture was slightly damaged in a fire in 1980, it was sent out for cleaning and restoration. There it was discovered that the flax from which its linen support was woven was cut down no later than 1520, which indicates that Rowley painted over a design by Holbein. Lewis suggests that this canvas may have held a life-size cartoon, such as Holbein apparently used as part of his preparatory work (see n. 16 above).

50. See Lewi, The Thomas More Family Group, 6.

51. On Renaissance perceptions of Seneca as an exemplary moralist and the significance of debates about whether to consider him Christian or pagan, see Letizia A. Panizza, "Biography in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: Seneca, Pagan or Christian?" Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres 2 (1984): 47-98.

52. Juan Luis Vives, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, ed. Virginia Walcott Beauchamp, Elizabeth H. Hageman, and Margaret Mikesell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 26-27. This text is discussed below. See also Hinz, "Holbeins 'Schola Thomae Mori,'" 84-93, 92-93, who deals at some length with ideas of women's education in the humanist circles around More.

53. Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, vol. 1, 345-51, no. 2765; Lewi, The Thomas More Family Group, 1-8, 17-19; and Morison and Barker, The Likeness of Thomas More, 22-24. The later dating of the miniature is based mainly on the fact that Thomas More II's younger son, Cresacre, sports a beard there, whereas he is clean-shaven in the National Portrait Gallery's version.

54. The only real alternative explanation would be that the grandchildren who commissioned the Nostell Priory copy harbored at least some of the same dynastic sentiments as their cousins in the London versions and ordered Lockey to make the change. Aside from Margaret Clement's awkwardly mechanical gesture in the painting, the best evidence for this reading may lie in the blank pages of her book. In the Basel drawing these pages bear lines of text, like those in Margaret Roper's book, which are readable in the painting. The blank pages could be Lockey's veiled, sarcastic response to being forced to deprive her of a listener for what was quite likely an important text in the lost original. Arguing against this explanation, however, is Holbein's preparatory drawing of Margaret Clement at Windsor (Holbein and the Court of Henry VIII, 37. no. 9; and Ganz, handzeichnungen von Hans Holbein, 9, no. 29). This sketch resembles the woman in the painting much more closely than it does the one in the Basel drawing, so the Windsor drawing must represent a later, intervening stage in Holbein's work on the final painting. For an alternative explanation of this discrepancy in Margaret's appearance in the painting and the drawing, see Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 142.

55. Those who lean toward this interpretation include Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 142-45; Louis L. Martz, Thomas More: The Search for the Inner Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 13; Morison and Barker, The Likeness of Thomas More, 20; and Piper, "Holbein the Younger in England," 740.

56. For example, More, Utopia, 44-45. He describes a social arrangement in which individuals are transferred from one household to another whenever the numbers in a given family exceed or fail to meet a set quota. This idea grows out of the communist organization of utopian society, to which the political and economic imperatives of dynasticism are inherently antithetical. At the same time, whereas in Utopia wives join their husbands' families, More's sons-in-law lived in his household. See also Hinz, "Holbeins 'Schola Thomae Mori,'" 83-85, who likewise discusses the promotion of antidynastic ideas among the members of More's intellectual circle.

57. Stapleton, Life of Thomas More, 98, 100. In the first More writes (in the third person) "to his dearest children and to Margaret Giggs [her maiden name], whom he numbers amongst his own," and in the second, "to Margaret, Elizabeth, Cecily his dearest daughters, and to Margaret Giggs as dear as though she were a daughter." She was, in fact, one of the most intellectual and morally engaged women of her time, had married one of More's disciples, John Clement, and was thus in every sense an ornament to the family. See Trapp and Herbruggen, "The King's Good Servant," 94-95.

58. See n. 54 above.

59. Ibid. The preparatory drawing of Margaret Roper does not survive (see n. 16 above).

60. Stapleton, Life of Thomas More, 103.

61. Ibid., 104.

62. Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, 224.

63. Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 172; Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 72-73, 135, no. 31; Ganz, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 233, no. 49; and Portraitist of the Renaissance, 72, no. 8.

64. Seneca, Oedipus, in Tragedies, trans. Frank Justus Miller, vol. 8 of Seneca (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 508-11. On the left, lines 882-89: "Fata si liceat mihi / fingere arbitrio meo / temperem zephyro levi / vela, ne pressae gravi / spiritu antennae tremant, / lenis et modice fluens / aura, nec ver[gens latus,] / ducat in [trepidam ratem]." On the right, lines 893-98: "astra dum demens petit, / artibus fi[sus novis,] / certat et v[eras aves] / vinc[ere, ac falsis nimis] / im[perat pinnis puer,] / no[men eripuit freto]." The bracketed words represent parts of the text that are hidden by Margaret's hands. Needless to say, this would not have stood in the way of their being reconstructed by More and Holbein's learned audience.

65. Stapleton, Life of Thomas More, 105.

66. More, Utopia, 90. Hythloday continues: "Pride measures her advantages not by what she has but by what other people lack. Pride would not condescend even to be made a goddess, if there were no wretches for her to sneer at and domineer over. Her good fortune is dazzling only by contrast with the misery of others, her riches are valuable only as they torment and tantalize the poverty of others. Pride is a serpent from hell which twines itself around the hearts of men; and it acts like a suckfish in holding them back from choosing a better life." On More's preoccupation with the sin of pride, see Alistair Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 25-27, 30, 87-88.

67. Martz, Thomas More, 14.

68. Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, 224: "And albeit outwardly he appeared honorable like one of his calling, yet inwardly he, no such vanities esteeming, secretly next to his body wore a shirt of hair." Roper reports, too, that More practiced self-flagellation. See also Stapleton, Life of Thomas More, 8.

69. On Christian Stoicism in Renaissance humanism, see especially Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 461-81, a chapter entitled "Reason in Madness," in which she treats at length Shakespeare's King Lear as a paradigm of Stoic themes in Renaissance thought.

70. Erasmus, The Correspondence, vol. 7, 19. See also nn. 46, 48 above. Like so much else, More's taste for fools was also shared by the inhabitants of Utopia. See More, Utopia, 68: "They are very fond of fools, and think it contemptible to insult them. There is no prohibition against enjoying their foolishness, and they even regard this as beneficial to the fools."

71. See Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), vol. 1, 35-56, at 55. Most of the negative and subversive connotations of these colors seem to have more to do with brightness and garishness than with intrinsic qualities of the colors themselves, which carried positive associations in other contexts. Sir John More, after all, wears bright red judicial robes. The negative associations of the colors may be largely a function of social inversion, since such festive colors ordinarily would have been a prerogative of the upper classes. Inversion is also implicit in the tendency to mix the colors chaotically in motley patterns. In the case of yellow, the dominant color in Patensen's costume and in those of fools in general, at least one special connection to folly lies in its being the color of saffron. In medieval religious lore saffron was thought to excite laughter and especially the laughter of fools. See Claude Gaignebet and J. Dominique Lajoux, Art profane et religion populaire au Moyen Age (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), 174-76. I owe this reference and much else I know about fools to Liz Guenther.

72. Kenneth M. Craig, "Proverb's Progress: 'A Fool Looking through His Fingers,'" in The Great Emporium: The Low Countries as a Cultural Cross roads in the Renaissance and the 18th Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 105-36. See also Gorel Cavalli-Bjorkman, "The Laughing Jester," Nationalmuseum Bulletin 9 (1985): 101-10; and Paul Vandenbroeck, Over wilden en narren, boeren en bedelaars: Beeld van de andere, vertoog over het zelf, exh. cat., Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, 1987, 45, 48-49.

73. Vandenbroeck, Over wilden en narren, 45-49, 207, no. 23. He points out that the Master of the Angers Portrait may have been the German artist Marx Reichlich.

74. Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), 3-52; and Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 1-16.

75. Chambers, Thomas More, 179.

76. William Willeford, The Fool and His Scepter (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 151-64, 208-25, 162-63. See also E. Tietze-Conrat, Dwarfs and Jesters in Art (New York: Phaidon, 1967), 9-15. In European popular culture the fool is closely related to the mock-king of carnival, who briefly reigns over a world turned upside down. In the extensive literature on carnival, see especially Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World; Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978); and Barbara A. Babcock, introduction to The Reversible World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 13-36. On the dichotomy between the king as mortal individual and sacred abstraction, see also Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

77. Trapp and Herbruggen, "The King's Good Servant," 86-87, no. 170. See also n. 53 above.

78. See n. 54 above.

79. Willeford, The Fool and His Scepter, 129-47, deals at length with the theme of the fool as a liminal figure, who stands at thresholds and boundaries, as here. See also Tietze-Conrat, Dwarfs and Jesters, 54-58; and Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956; New York: Greenwood Press, 1969).

80. Ellen S. Jacobowitz and Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, The Prints of Lucas van Leyden, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1983, 195-96, no. 72.

81. R. Bracht Branham, "Utopian Laughter: Lucian and Thomas More," in "Thomas More and the Classics," ed. Ralph Keen and Daniel Kinney, special issue, Moreana, no. 86 (1985): 23.

82. C. H. Thompson, The Translations of Lucian by Erasmus and St. Thomas More (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1940), 22.

83. W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars' Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 24. See also Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 118. Daniel Kinney, "Heirs of the Dog: Cynic Selfhood in Medieval and Renaissance Culture," in The Cynics, ed. R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Gaze (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 294-328, lays out a close parallel to these Menippean developments in the revival during the Renaissance of the ancient philosophy of Cynicism, with which Lucian was closely associated in both antiquity and the Renaissance. He focuses on the Cynics' proclivity for violating social canons and conventions, which was related to an emerging interest in marginality among the humanists in particular. Kinney likewise notes, 321-28, the ancient association between the Cynical philosopher and the fool and devotes considerable attention to the roles played by More and Erasmus in this intellectual revival.

84. Blanchard, Scholars' Bedlam, 37-44. See also Bakhtin, Problems, 119.

85. Blanchard, Scholars' Bedlam, 37. In part, Blanchard intends his emphasis on the intellectual, humanistic associations of the genre as a corrective to what he considers Bakhtin's tendency to associate Menippean satire with popular culture and carnival's theme of the world turned upside down. See Bakhtin, Problems, 112-34. In fact, Bakhtin nowhere explicitly separates Menippean satire from this intellectual milieu, and Blanchard himself, 26-27, 41-42, acknowledges the bonds between intellectual and popular forms of satire in their common assault on hierarchy and authority.

86. Thompson, The Translations of Lucian, 1. See also David Marsh, Lucian and the Latins: Humor and Humanism in the Early Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 167-76.

87. Bakhtin, Problems, 118. He specifically cites the example of Heraclides Ponticus's "utopian novel" Abaris. On the theme of the "fantastic voyage," see also Marsh, Lucian and the Latins, 181-97.

88. Alistair Fox, Utopia: An Elusive Vision (New York: MacMillan, 1993), 11.

89. Branham, "Utopian Laughter," 28-31. See also Marsh, Lucian and the Latins, 45-51.

90. Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence, 38-41, 52. The key to Fox's highly persuasive ironic reading lies in his interpretation of a letter More wrote at the time to his friend Thomas Ruthall, defending Lucian in didactic, orthodox Christian terms. Some scholars, including Branham, "Utopian Laughter," 24-26, have taken this letter as evidence that More could not fully share Lucian's unmoralistic, pagan wit. Fox, however, convincingly argues that the letter's message is "disingenuous" and "tongue-in-cheek."

91. For example, Richard S. Sylvester, "'Si Hythlodaeo Credimus': Vision and Revision in Thomas More's Utopia," in Sylvester and Marc'hadour, Essential Articles, 290-301.

92. Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence, 51.

93. Ibid., 41. In contrast, 9-10: "The young More seems to have been unable to hold all the components of his personality in any kind of balance capable of satisfying him; his early works are by turns comic, satiric, optimistic and pessimistic, and contain no consistent philosophical viewpoint that can be identified with his later thought. One gains the impression that More had to forge his understanding of the world out of a chaos of contradictory impressions and impulses...."

94. Blanchard, Scholars' Bedlam, 24. See also the discussion of "anti-rhetoric" in Renaissance Cynicism in Kinney, "Heirs of the Dog," 304-5.

95. Blanchard, Scholars' Bedlam, 18, 21, 28. See also especially F. Anne Payne, Chaucer and Menippean Satire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 55-85.

96. Bakhtin, Problems, 59, 116-19.

97. Lucian, Menippus, in Lucian, vol. 4, trans. A. M. Harmon (London: Putnam, 1925), 101. Blanchard, Scholars' Bedlam, 17, notes that Lucian derived his trope of the world as a stage from the diatribes of the Cynics (see n. 83 above).

98. Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence, 37. See also Branham, "Utopian Laughter," 28-30.

99. Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 56-59, 128, no. 13; and Ganz, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 229, no. 34.

100. Matthias Winner, "Holbein's Portrait of Erasmus with a Renaissance Pilaster," in Roskill and Hand, Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, 165.

101. William S. Heckscher, "Reflections on Seeing Holbein's Portrait of Erasmus at Longford Castle," in Art and Literature: Studies in a Relationship, ed. Egon Verheyen (1967; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press; Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1985), 281-307. See also Virginia W. Callahan, "The Erasmus-Hercules Equation in the Emblems of Alciati," in The Verbal and the Visual: Essays in Honor of William Sebastian Heckscher, ed. Karl-Ludwig Selig and Elizabeth Sears (New York: Ithaca Press, 1990), 41-57; Eugene F. Rice Jr., Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 116-36; Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 29-30, 157-58; and Winner, "Holbein's Portrait of Erasmus," 160-62, who argues learnedly that the pilaster is a reference to the Pillars of Hercules and, by extension, to the outer limits of knowledge. On the comic meaning of Lucian's "Gallic Hercules," see Edgar Wind, "'Hercules' and 'Orpheus': Two Mock-Heroic Designs by Durer," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 2 (1938-39): 206-18. Antoine Bodar, "Erasmus en het Geleerdenportret," Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 8 (1989): 58-59, sees the Hercules allusion on the book simply as a reference to Erasmus's dedication of his second edition of the works of Saint Jerome to Warham in the following year, 1524. Jurgen Muller, "Von der Odyssee eines christlichen Gelehrten: Eine neue Interpretation von Hans Holbeins Erasmusbild in Longford Castle," Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins fur Kunstwissenschaft 49-50 (1995-96): 187, however, rightly criticizes Bodar's reading as too narrow.

102. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 30-53, 93-103, 171-96.

103. David R. Smith, "Durer's Wit," in Realism and Invention in the Prints of Albrecht Durer, exh. cat., the Art Gallery, University of New Hampshire, Durham, 1995, 5-6, no. 69. The inscription reads: "Albrecht Durer of Nuremberg wishes to make known to posterity and to preserve by this likeness his singular friend, Ulrich surnamed Varnbuler, Chancellor of the Supreme Court of the Roman Empire and at the same time privately a distinguished scholar of language."

104. Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 24-27; Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 126, no. 6; and Ganz, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 225, no. 27. The inscription reads "DA.ICH.HET.DIE.GESTALT.WAS.ICH.22.IAR.ALT.1517. H.H. DIPINGEBAT." The German voice, which is Hertenstein's, speaks in the past tense; Holbein's Latin is in the imperfect tense, a distinction of specifically artistic expression that Holbein drew from Pliny the Elder's Natural History. See also Buck, Holbein am Hofe Heinrichs VIII, 156-58; and idem, "International Exchange: Holbein at the Crossroads of Art and Craftsmanship," in Roskill and Hand, Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, 61-63. She sees the relief as a "heroicizing" motif that casts Hertenstein in an entirely positive light, though she also discusses the ironic, multilayered relations between past and present, art and reality that the portrait presents. Another critical question the frieze raises is whether Holbein knew Mantegna's Triumphs from reproductive engravings alone or from seeing the works themselves in Mantua, a question that obviously bears on his familiarity with the Camera degli Sposi as well (see n. 12 above). At the time he did this portrait, he was painting the facades of the long-ago-demolished Hertenstein House in Lucerne with murals based in part on Mantegna's cycle. Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 65-68, consider it at least possible that Benedikt's father, Jakob von Hertenstein, sent the young artist to Mantua to examine his models.

105. On relations between the fool and the wildman in Western popular culture. see Vandenbroeck, Over wilden en narren, 133-36, 145-47.

106. Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbien, 157-58. The Portrait of Nikolaus Kratzer of 1528 in the Musee du Louvre, Paris (see n. 6 above), may be another example of a typus, for Kratzer's pose is virtually identical with More's in the Frick portrait (Fig. 2). See also Ueli Dill, "Der Bart des Philosophen: Holbeins Amerbach-Portrat--neu gesehen im Lichte eines bisher nicht beachteten Epigramms," in Hans Holbein der Jungere: Akten des Internationalen Symposiums Kunstmuseum Basel, 26.-28. Juni 1997 (Basel: Schwabe, 1999), 245-60, for an especially interesting early variation on the thematics of doubling in Holbein's portraiture.

107. Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 164; Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 133-34, no. 27; Ganz, The Paintigs of Hans Holbein, 233, nos. 46, 47.

108. Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 164; Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 133-34. no. 27; Ganz, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 233, nos. 46, 47. Contrary to Ganz, the portrait now in the Louvre is apparently the copy Warham kept for himself, while the one given to Erasmus is lost. Whether Erasmus kept a copy of his own portrait sent to Warham is unknown, but many versions of the portrait exist; none of the surviving versions, however, is by Holbein. See Rowlands, 128-29, no. 13.

109. Muller, "Von der Odyssee," 184.

110. John North, The Ambassadors' Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance (London: Hambledon and London, 2002), 81-163, 187-96, 253-65. North's most striking contribution lies in recognizing that the astronomical instruments on the upper shelf place the scene at 4:00 p.m., the moment of Christ's death, on Good Friday, April 11, 1533, a fact from which he draws many other inferences, some more persuasive than others. For the first decoding of the background and the symbolism of the London picture, see Mary F. S. Hervey, Holbein's Ambassadors: The Picture and the Men, an Historical Study (London: George Bell and Sons, 1900), 197-238; and, more recently, Susan Foister, Ashok Roy, and Martin Wyld, Making and Meaning: Holbein's Ambassadors (London: National Gallery, 1997). See also Batschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 184-88; Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 139-40, no. 47; Ganz, The Paintings of Hans Holbein, 241-43, no. 74; and Etty Dekker and Kristen Lippincott, "The Scientific Instruments in Holbein's Ambassadors," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62 (1999): 93-125, whose conclusions are much less daring than North's. On The Ambassadors in the history of friendship portraiture, see Keller, "Entstehung und Blutezeit," 168-69.

111. Lutz S. Malke, Narren, exh. cat., Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, 2001, 75, no. 85. The French and German caption "We are three" joins verbal to visual anamorphosis.

112. On Death and Folly, see Willeford, The Fool and His Scepter, 88-92, 199-200; and Lutz S. Malke, "Nachruf auf Narren," in Malke, Narren, 28-33. For interesting perspectives on Holbein's thematics of Death in relation to Renaissance intellectuals' preoccupation with ambiguity and paradox, see Peter Parshall, "Hans Holbein's Pictures of Death," in Roskill and Hand, Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, 83-95.

113. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 11-73. Greenblatt's interpretation of More's thoughts and motivations rests almost entirely on this analogy with Holbein's portrait, which effectively ignores the redemptive meanings of the hidden crucifix, and on a questionable reading of Utopia, which he sees as More's vision of a perfect society that is the antithesis of Tudor England. Most recent critics have found subtle flaws in the Utopian polity, which reflect More's ironic perspective on human fallibility. See Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence, 50-74; Chambers, Thomas More, 155; and J. H. Hexter, More's Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), 99-155. Three especially perceptive critiques of the modernist bias of Greenblatt's New Historicism and his ahistorical, "totalizing" view of culture and social causation are John Martin, "Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe," American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1311-23, 1338-42; Paul A. Cantor, "Stephen Greenblatt's New Historicist Vision," Academic Questions, Fall 1993, 21-36; and Frank Lentricchia, "Foucault's Legacy: A New Historicism?" in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 231-42.

114. See n. 93 above.

115. Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence, 36. Both in what he says about the positive quality of ambiguity as a framework of meaning and in the active response he claims it provoked in More, Fox here runs directly counter to Greenblatt, who at one point insists that More's sense of human absurdity induced in him a political passivity that prevented him from acting on his social criticisms. See Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 27.

116. See n. 113 above.

117. Greene, "Ceremonial Play and Parody," 284, in discussing the idea of "ceremonial play," which I applied to the Family portrait early in this paper, speaks not only of the meanings of specific medieval rituals but also of how "the more profound effect of a society organized by ceremony was to confirm personal identity, to inform each individual who he was and why he existed. This is why the decline of ceremonial power in the early modern period represented an incipient crisis." See also the discussion of the medieval ideal of concordia between the inner and outer self in Martin, "Inventing Sincerity," 1327-29.

118. Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, 83: "It is worth your while to watch how pleased they are with themselves ... when their full names with all three parts are there to be read on all the title pages--especially when those names are foreign and sound like the strange words of a magician's spell. Good lord! what are they, after all, but names?" The editor's note observes that three names were a sign of nobility in ancient Rome, an association still very much alive today.

119. This interpretation of the layered nature of Renaissance concepts of identity closely parallels historical studies of the subject by Martin, "Inventing Sincerity," 1321-38; and Ronald F. E. Weissman, "The Importance of Being Ambiguous: Social Relations, Individualism, and Identity in Renaissance Florence," in Zimmerman and Weissman, Urban Life, 269-80, Martin approaches the problem in light of Renaissance attitudes toward prudence and sincerity, each of which posits a division, albeit in opposite ways, between inward self and outward behavior, which for many Renaissance writers existed in dialogue and inevitably produced ambiguity. Discussing the importance of social ambiguity in Renaissance society, Weissman takes note of some critical differences between Renaissance and modern perceptions, 273: "In modern society, especially that of America and northern Europe, our varied roles are played for different audiences. The fragmentation of modern society allows our different social selves to have different contexts and most incongruities among the roles we play are marked by the segmentation and separation of our audiences. But in the Renaissance city, in which neighborhood and family bounded much of social life, numerous roles had the same audience." One of the corollaries of this distinction, he suggests, is that Renaissance observers had a greater tolerance for ambiguity than their modern counterparts, who tend to expect more unity and transparency in a given performance and to be more disillusioned when it proves otherwise.

120. See n. 19 above.

121. Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, 238.

122. Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence, 88, 138-39, 147-66.

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