The Holbein exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York requires good eyes and a lot of time.

In just two, but all the more densely hung rooms, the show concentrates on the smaller portraits and portrait drawings, while a separate section is dedicated to the woodcuts.

Holbein's virtuosity in the small images is breathtaking, especially as it never exhausts itself in the display of precision and technical ability, but always serves the purpose, namely the characterization of the sitter.

At the same time, the exhibition reveals a traditional painter whose compositions are relatively static and largely do without interaction with the viewer.

Holbein has every confidence in his ability to capture personality in facial features alone—and rightly so.

Born into a family of artists in Augsburg in 1497, he was drawn to Basel at a young age, where he met Erasmus of Rotterdam, whom he painted repeatedly and who provided him with a letter of recommendation that opened the door to the elite throughout Western Europe for him.

Wherever the well-travelled artist went, whether to Basel, France, Antwerp, Brussels or London, he always painted portraits of the most influential personalities and thus determined their appearance for posterity.

In any case, it is difficult to imagine Erasmus, Thomas Moore or Henry VIII in any other way than in his pictures.

This is certainly due to the seemingly unsparing realism of the portraits, which depict the long,

The remedy of the sfumato

But precisely the confrontation with the preliminary drawings, to which the show invites, makes clear how subtly Holbein manipulated the appearance in favor of the expression and certainly also idealized it in the process.

It is striking that, in contrast to the drawings, he almost always shows the subjects without eyelashes, probably to give the eyes more expressiveness.

He also regularly paints the mouths of the women's heads with a slight sfumato, while keeping the eyes clear and focused.

This makes the women appear wide awake and gentle at the same time.

This pluralism of styles in particular is a revelation of the exhibition.

For example, the remarkable panel with the emblem of Erasmus appears to have been painted with coarse brushstrokes and heavy sfumato, giving the impression that it was an oil sketch.

Here Erasmus can be seen as an antique torso, which seems to grow out of a block of marble and is crowned by a halo.

The hard stone, which seems to correspond to Erasmus' motto "I don't give way to anyone", is counteracted by a soft painting style that dissolves the forms, which in turn fits in with his second motto "Terminus".

In the competition of the arts

Through the means of painting, Holbein underscores both his strength of character and the finitude of life.

At the same time, this is a statement in the artistic competition that was so popular at the time.

For not only can Holbein's painting imitate sculpture convincingly, it can even trump it, because such a sfumato and thus the multi-senses achieved by Holbein, the oscillating between life and death, is not really possible for sculpture.