Holbein’s Wit
Pictorial Ingenuity in Renaissance Art
Hardback (Published)
(July 2026)
ISBN: 9781915487520
8.9 x 11.81 inches
Price: $219.00
In stock
Spanning Holbein’s career in Basel and London and embracing his portraits, altarpieces, prints, and designs for the decorative arts, this book charts the artist’s profound engagement with ingenuity as a kind of innate talent, mental acuity, generative capacity, and character.
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543) is renowned as an outstandingly realistic painter—the acme of Renaissance naturalism. In fact, he was a purveyor of cunning ambiguity. Holbein’s Wit: Pictorial Ingenuity in Renaissance Art reveals the artist at play, juggling the uncertainties and paradoxes that arise in the enterprise of imitation. Spanning Holbein’s career in Basel and London, and encompassing his portraits, devotional paintings, and designs for prints and the decorative arts, the book explores this celebrated artist’s subtle pictorial wiles. Holbein was immersed in the multi-faceted world of Renaissance ingenium or ‘wit’, which could mean innate talent, mental acuity, generative capacity, and a person’s unique nature. In dialogue with witty patrons such as Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More, Holbein advanced an ingenious kind of artmaking characterised by visual jokes, puns, and internal contradictions. Responding to humanism’s literary conceits with an inventive visual language, he upended conventional assumptions about naturalism and the status of painting to assert the worth of an autonomous artistic intelligence.
Other Titles in this Series
Painting Architecture in Early Renaissance Italy
Innovation and Persuasion at the Intersection of Artistic and Architectural Practice
Volume 12
The Villa Barbaro at Maser
Science, Philosophy, and the Family in Venetian Renaissance Art
Volume 11
Similar Books
Balthasar Caymox of Nuremberg
Early Modern German Print Publishers: Popular Prints of the Seventeenth Century
Legal Visuality
Exegesis, Ambiguity, and Dissimulation of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period
Naples as Laboratory / Laboratorium Neapel
Style Options, Artistic Rivalry and Self Fashioning in Neapolitan Baroque Painting / Plurale Stilbildung, Kunstlerkonkurrenz und Self Fashioning in der neapolitanischen Barockmalerei
Nurturing the Elite
Representations of Drinking, Eating, and Religious Vessels in Palmyrene Funerary Iconography
Volume 13
Portraying the Individual in the Roman East
Local–Imperial Entanglements in Sculpture, Mosaics, and Paintings (First–Fourth Centuries AD)
Volume 18
Technical Studies of Asian Art
Proceedings of the Seventh Forbes Symposium at the Freer Gallery of Art
Die Handschriften aus St. Emmeram in Regensburg. Pars 2,6: Clm 14691–14850
Neu beschrieben von Anja Freckmann, Friedrich Helmer, Hardo Hilg, Julia Knödler, Carolin Schreiber, Juliane Trede und Elisabeth Wunderle
JOSEPH BEUYS — Sympoiese von Mensch und Welt im 21. Jahrhundert
Eine systemisch-hermeneutische Analyse in bildungspraktischer Absicht
Art and Mysticism in Silesia in the Baroque Period
Angelus Silesius, Bernhard Rosa, and Michael Willmann
Beiträge zur Islamischen Kunst und Archäologie
The Arts and Archaeology of Funerary Cultures in Islam
Volume 10.0
