A series of articles for the older girls and boys who read “St. Nicholas.”
Third Paper
Comparing Titan with Hans Holbein the Younger
and Correggio with Michelangelo.
I.
It is because of the difference between these two wonderful portraits—Titian’s “Man with the Glove” and the “Portrait of Georg Gyze” by Hans Holbein the Younger—that it is interesting to compare them.
If we should try to sum up in one word the impression produced by each, might we not say: “How noble the Titian is; the Holbein how intimate”? Both persons portrayed are young men: Titian’s unmistakably an aristocrat, but with no clue given as to who or what he was; Holbein’s a German merchant resident in London, whose name is recorded in the address of the letter in his hand, and who is surrounded by the accompaniments of his daily occupation. Presently we shall find out something about the nature of his occupations; meanwhile we may surprised him in the privacy of his office, and are already interested in him as an actual man who lived and worked nearly four hundred years ago. And we are interested, too, in the objects that surround him. We note already that the flowers in the vase are just like the carnations of our own day, and that he evidently is a prosperous man. But compare the fewness of his letters with the packet which one morning’s mail would bring to a modern merchant. Each is fastened with a band of paper held in place by a seal; he has just broken the band of the newly arrived letter; his own seal is among the objects that lie on the table. Do we not feel already that we are growing intimate with the man?
Can we feel the same toward “The Man with the Glove”? I admit that when we have once possessed ourselves of the appearance of this man’s face, we shall not forget it. But that is a very different thing from knowing the man as a man. There is something, indeed, in the grave, almost sad, expression of the face which forbids, rather than invites, intimacy. He too seems to have been surprised in his privacy, but he is occupied, not with his affairs, as Georg Gyze is, but with his thoughts. It is not the man in his every-day character that we see; indeed, it is not the man himself that holds our attention, but rather some mood of a man—or, rather, some reflection in him of the artist’s mood at the time he painted him.
Titian found in the original of this portrait a suggestion to himself of something stately and aloof from common things; he made his picture interpret this mood of feeling; we may suspect that he was more interested in this than in preserving a likeness of the man; we may even doubt whether the man was actually like this. Certainly, this could not have been his every-day look; it is a very unusual aspect, in which everything is made to contribute to the wonder-210
