Holbein’s Wit
Pictorial Ingenuity in Renaissance Art
By (author) Alexander Marr
Hardback (Published)
(July 2026)
ISBN: 9781915487520
8.86 x 11.81 inches
Price: $219.00
On back order
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.
Prologue: Holbein’s Angels
Introduction
Chapter 1: Verbal and Visual Wit
Chapter 2: A Father’s Figures
Chapter 3: Hans the Jester
Chapter 4: Ludic Illusionism
Chapter 5: Death ad vivum
Chapter 6: Mimics and Critics
Chapter 7: More or Less a Smile
Chapter 8: The Mindful Hand
Chapter 9: Inherent Ingenuity
Epilogue: The Ambassadors’ Policy
- By (author) Alexander Marr
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
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