Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception by Mark Roskill; John Oliver HandReview by: Sara Nair JamesThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 318-319Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20476934 .

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318 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXV/1 (2004)

Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception. Ed. Mark Roskill and John Oliver

Hand. Studies in the History ofArt 60.Washington, DC: National Gallery ofArt; New

Haven:Yale University Press, 2001. 262 pp., ill., port. $55.00. ISBN 0-300-09044-7.

REVIEWED BY: Sara Nair James, Mary Baldwin College

The scholarship represented in this book is the outgrowth of a symposium held in 1997

at the National Gallery of Art,Washington.The symposium was inspired in part by an exhi

bition at the National Gallery, London on Holbein's enigmatic but fascinating painting The

Ambassadors and, at the same time, honored the 500th anniversary of the artist's birth. The

slightly oversize format, lavish illustrations, and careful attention to fine layout and design

make the book a handsome addition to the series of Studies in the History of Art produced

by the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery. Seventeen

international scholars contributed to editing, composing prefatory remarks, and writing

fourteen essays that cover a wide range of Holbein and Holbein-related topics.The scholars

aim to present new findings on the artist's work and demonstrate concrete perceptions on

the growing appreciation of Holbein's art, the artist's versatility, and the seeming paradoxes

in his work. Following the organization of the symposium, the essays in the book reflect five

themes: Holbein's artistic exchanges, book and print production, conservation and technical

studies, portraiture, and historiography and reception.

Although innovative in approach and subject, the articles tend to be specialized and not

necessarily related to one another beyond the focus on Holbein. Otherwise, the organization

of the book tends to move from the general to the more specific, and it ends with the articles

that address issues of theory, criticism, and reception. Several of the articles are translated

from German. Articles with the broadest appeal include those by Christian Muller on illu

sionistic effects in Holbein's early work, Stephanie Buck on international exchange and sources for prints, Peter Parshall on prints dealing with the theme of death, and Mark Roskill

on portraiture.Two articles address technique: those by Ashok Roy and Martin Wyld and by

Susan Foister. Jurgen Muller, and Till-Holger Borchert deal most directly with theory and

criticism, but these topics pervade other articles as well. Articles that treat art contempora

neous with Holbein and contextual issues include Joseph Leo Koerner's confessional por

traits by artists that surrounded Holbein, and Lothar Schmitt's examination of the education

of sixteenth-century artists. These articles would appeal as much to scholars of Northern

Renaissance art as to Holbein specialists.These two articles, along with those addressing por

traiture by Matthias Winner, historiography and reception by Pascal Griener and Erika

Michael, and connections to Italian art by Oskar Batschmann also incorporate intellectual

and theoretical issues. While addressing subjects that reflect Holbein's versatility, the book does not create a

full picture of the artist, nor is either inclusiveness or balance a goal. Instead, the authors

move sharply away from traditional areas of scholarship surrounding Holbein's work. Areas

of omission include his English commissions, royal portraiture, patronage, and style. Some

discussion of Holbein as a draughtsman is interwoven into Bitschmann's essay on Italian

influence, and Muller's on the artist's illusionistic effects in his early works; however, the art

ist's many surviving drawings are not addressed separately. Holbein's talent and versatility as

a printmaker receive considerably more notice.

The articles are meticulously documented, which gives fine bibliographic resource

material to students of Holbein and Renaissance art. However, the specialized nature of this

book and the often dense prose make the audience correspondingly limited. Scholars of

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Book Reviews 319

English art or Tudor studies may be disappointed that so little is related to their interests.The book most effectively serves Holbein enthusiasts, scholars of sixteenth-century German art, theorists of Renaissance art, and scholars of Renaissance studies.

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Shakespeare's Tragic Skepticism. Millicent Bell. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. xvii + 283 pp. $26.00. ISBN 0-300-09255-5.

REVIEWED BY: Manfred Weidhorn, Yeshiva University

This is an old-fashioned book. Like A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1905), which began modern Shakespeare criticism a century ago, it is concerned mainly with the canonical Big Four plays, which Bradley established as the apex of Shakespeare's work in this genre.And, despite three decades of new ideological approaches, Bell's book is blissfully innocent of all theory even though her central idea has some affinities with the deconstructionist outlook. Bell consequently makes her journey without the baggage of jargon and footnotes; nor is there the obligatory roll call of the Shakespeare scholars and critics of the last half century. The result is easy, pleasant reading. Hewing to the text and exercising common sense, she can be relied on to give a sane, balanced interpretation.

As the title indicates, Bell has a theme which ties the plays together. Her thesis about Shakespeare's skepticism is hardly pioneering. Keats sensed it, and various scholars (Rossiter, Rabkin, Sanders, Soellner, Booth, Bradshaw, and Cavell) have explored it, sometimes in peculiar ways. She especially emphasizes the influence of that godfather of revived or mod ern skepticism, Montaigne.

In her interpretation, the tragic heroes, lacking clear, consistent character and motives, suffer a disjunction between thought and deed. They defy easy summary. Hamlet's "I have that within which passeth show" and Iago's "I am not what I am" are interestingly inter preted as referring not to a secret, private self but to the absence of any self. The pithy cli mactic remarks, "ripeness is all" and "the readiness is all"-Shakespeare's "most considered wisdom"-"surrender any expectation of human knowledge" (259-60).

Iago, far from being unusual, is merely an extreme case of the elusiveness of motives to be found as well in Hamlet and Othello and, by extension, in us all. Othello's suspicions can be neither removed nor confirmed, as Desdemona's virtue is to him the philosopher's inaccessible "thing in itself." Macbeth is commonly thought to end happily, but Bell shrewdly notes how Malcolm's pretended confession to Macduff of his own villainy is a "vision of pos sibility," a suggestion of a cyclical view of history, of an endless pattern of one heroic rebel replacing another who has soured and then in turn been corrupted by power.

The plots, moreover, are weak on cause and effect. Events often are strung together paratactically, as in a chronicle-"and then ... and then...." Appearances and impressions repeatedly prove to be unreliable. Macbeth, for example, never clarifies whether the witches

merely read or actually cause the future, whether Macbeth chooses his fate or is chosen by it.The comparison of life to a theatrical performance in many of these plays is another symp tom of the insubstantiality of events.

An epilogue deals with the two Roman plays that frame the Big Four.They labor with similar difficulties.That Brutus became in post-Shakespearean tradition either a noble repub lican or a traitor would not have perplexed a Shakespeare who, in his portrayal of him, inti

mates, via Montaigne, "the skeptical view of the constancy of selfliood." Caesar is equally

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