The King’s Painter

The Life of Hans Holbein

By: Franny Moyle

Narrated by: Alison Larkin

From a distinguished art historian, a dramatic reappraisal of Renaissance master Hans Holbein, whose art shaped politics and immortalized the Tudors

Hans Holbein the Younger is chiefly celebrated for his beautiful and precisely realized portraiture, which includes representations of Henry VIII, his advisors Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, his wives Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves, and an array of the Tudor lords and ladies encountered during the course of two sojourns in England. But beyond these familiar images, which have come to define our perception of the age, Holbein was a multifaceted genius: a humanist, satirist, and political propagandist, and a deft man whose work was rich in layers of symbolism and allusion.

In The King’s Painter, biographer Franny Moyle traces and analyzes the life and work of an extraordinary artist against the backdrop of an era of political turbulence and cultural transformation, to which his art offers a subtle and endlessly refracting mirror. It is a work of serious scholarship written for a wide audience.

©2021 Franny Moyle. Published in 2021 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS, New York. All rights reserved. (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

What’s Missing?

The reading of this book is extremely well performed. And the author’s detailed description of Holbein’s works, and the turbulent times he lived in, are equally engaging. However, there is one omission (a very significant omission for a book about a visual artist and his work.) The image plates in the printed edition of this title are missing from the Audible edition! As the oral descriptions of Holbein’s works makes clear, his paintings were filled with symbols and “conceits.” But the listener can only guess as to their level of sophistication without an image to actually study. At the very least this edition should have been accompanied by a list of the images described in the book so that the listener could search out reproductions online to study and enjoy as the reading progressed.