Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

he was a famous man; there were homes for him everywhere, and people begging him to endorse their religion or their political beliefs just by living among them. He had it easy.

      So Hans Holbein cut the old Dutchman off in mid-flow, just as he was pronouncing his favourite maxim: ‘Live every day as though it were your last; study as though you will live forever,’ and asked, abruptly, ‘How could I travel? And where to?’

      Hans Holbein wasn’t scared of moving. He and Prosy had managed to set themselves up in Basel when they were young men, after their father went bankrupt in Augsberg and even Uncle Sigmund started suing him for thirty-four miserable florins, the old skinflint. Hans had talked his way boldly into job after job – fresco painting and chapel decorating jobs he’d never actually done before, and certainly had no expertise in. But he’d coped. People trusted him. And he felt at ease with talking up his talents. No client of his would be disappointed in the results he produced. His kit packed up small and he was ready for anything. He’d een to Italy and France to look at the paintings of the south, and got back safely. He just needed practical advice.

      ‘Go to Aegidius in Antwerp,’ Erasmus said without a pause. ‘He can introduce you to Quentin Massys, who painted both our portraits long ago. Quentin’s a man of talent – he could help you. Or go to Morus in London. He can introduce you to people. England is full of rich men.’

      Hans Holbein pocketed Erasmus’ loan and went travelling, saying goodbye to Elsbeth and the children and the stink of the tannery without more than a moment’s sadness. She was pregnant again, but she’d be all right. She had the business to keep her, and the money he was going to make on his travels would make it up to her later. He was beginning to feel ashamed of the passion he’d felt for a younger, lovelier woman. He didn’t want to face up to the uncomfortable truth of how badly he’d behaved. He needed to get away from the resigned knowledge in Elsbeth’s eyes. He went by cart and on foot and slowly. Pieter Gillis in Antwerp (Hans Holbein refused to call him Aegidius) hadn’t been particularly helpful. But he’d got here in the end, had a quick stroke of luck with that easy commission from Archbishop Warham, and he could see straightaway that things would work out for him in London. It was just as Erasmus said. It might be cold and muddy in these streets, but it was quiet, and everyone was rich. And he hadn’t thought of Magdalena for more than an instant in months.

      So he was irritated to have his senses invaded again by the cloying memory of her as he looked at this English girl who was so unlike her. This long-nosed girl, Meg Giggs, whose dark blue eyes were snapping with intelligence in her pale face; who was leaning forward in her chair, ready to engage him in sprightly conversation, visibly trying to think of simple ways to talk to this foreigner whose grasp of her language was slow and whose grasp of Latin was almost non-existent.

      ‘Do you think,’ Meg was saying now, speaking slowly and carefully for his benefit, pushing back the messy wisps of black hair that were escaping from her headdress without really noticing them, and looking earnest (she didn’t make much of herself, though he could see she’d be pretty if she only tried a bit harder), ‘that it’s – vain – to have your portrait painted?’

      Practically the first thing Nicholas Kratzer, the astronomer here, had told him in German, in a whisper of warning during dinner, was ‘They’ll all try and get you to talk philosophy with them. But don’t, for God’s sake, talk about anything serious until the two of us have had a proper talk and I’ve explained how things here are – because nothing is quite the way it seems. And loose talk could get you into trouble.’ Which sounded worrying. But Hans Holbein was so disarmed by the gravity in Meg Giggs’s face and voice as she asked her un-girlish question that he stopped worrying. He just burst out laughing.

      ‘I meant it seriously,’ she said, looking nettled, though with a flush coming into her cheeks that she probably didn’t realise softened her face into prettiness. ‘It wasn’t a silly question.’ She was talking faster, going pinker, and getting cleverer by the second. ‘It’s what Thomas à Kempis wrote, isn’t it – that you should renounce the world and not be proud of your beauty or accomplishments?’ And then she began quoting: ‘“Let this be thy whole endeavour, this thy prayer, this thy desire: that thou mayest be stripped of all selfishness, and with entire simplicity follow Jesus only; mayest die to thyself, and live eternally to me. Then shalt thou be rid of all vain fancies, causeless perturbations and superfluous cares.” … That’s what I mean. If you think that way, then you’d think a portrait was a vanity bordering on blasphemy, wouldn’t you?’

      She stopped, a bit breathless, and looked provocatively at him. Hans Holbein had never seen a woman looking provocative in this completely unflirtatious way, any more than he’d ever come across a woman who had read the Imitation of Christ. She was challenging his mind instead of his body. But Erasmus had told him about More’s family school. This must be what happened to women when you taught them Latin and Greek and the skills of argument. He’d stopped laughing a while back; now he put down his silverpoint pencil, and nodded more respectfully. But there was still a smile on his lips. ‘You look like an elegant young gentlewoman,’ he said, liking the challenge, feeling as though he was home again and about to get caught up in one of the involved conversations at Froben’s print house that he now missed so much; ‘but I see you have the mind of a theologian.’

      She tossed her head, more impatiently than in acknowledgement of his compliment. ‘But what do you think?’ she insisted.

      Surprised by himself, Hans Holbein paused to think. He was remembering the hundreds of sketches of faces and bodies he and Prosy had done in their father’s studio; not a money-making venture, just a technical exercise, back in the days when capturing a likeness was still considered not as an art form in itself but just a lowly artisan’s trick. And he was remembering glamorous Uncle Hans, coming back from his years in Venice full of the new humanist learning and new ideas about painting faces so realistically that you saw the inner truth in them – God in every human feature. Uncle Hans brought the southern ways home and made his fortune making portraits of the great and good from the Pope to Jakob Fugger, Ausburg’s richest merchant. He’d been the young Hans Holbein’s biggest hero. But the younger artist was also remembering the new reasons for denouncing painting. He was remembering how Prosy had stopped painting altogether a few years back, because – as he liked to say, in his irritatingly dogmatic way, thumping his fist on the tavern table – he wouldn’t provide any more ‘idolatrous’ images of the saints’ faces for the churches. What tipped Prosy over the edge was being jailed after he’d publicly abused the clergy for mass superstition, and being forced to apologise to them. Prosy wasn’t the only one to react so violently and self-destructively; artists everywhere were giving up their paintbrushes to purify the Church. That was what they kept telling people, anyway. But Hans had no time for this sort of thinking. Prosy shouldn’t have gone out on the rampage after too many hours in the tavern. He certainly shouldn’t have gone yelling at priests with his red face and his uncouth voice and his unemployed layabout friends. Prosy, who didn’t quite have the talent to get the commissions, who’d always struggled with money, and who’d always resented their father for pushing him, as the smarter younger brother, was just the type to fall back on the ‘art is idolatry’ argument now. In Hans’s opinion, all those ex-artists now denouncing art in the name of religious purity were just losers who couldn’t get commissions any more and needed excuses to explain their failure.

      ‘I think,’ he said slowly, searching for words, becoming fully serious as he engaged with the odd English girl’s question. ‘I think that Erasmus was right to start having his portraits painted, and engraved, and sold. I felt honoured to make likenesses of him. I don’t believe it is right to renounce the world when God has put us in it and our presence here is part of His holy design. You can see God in a human face. And, if God delights in His creation, and in the beauty and talents of the people He put on this earth, why shouldn’t we?’

      He was a little embarrassed by his own unexpected eloquence. But he was strangely pleased, too, to see it rewarded when she nodded, slowly and approvingly, and thought over what he said. So he told her about getting to know Erasmus while painting his portrait. Three times in the last ten years. ‘If I look that good perhaps I should take a