Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam

Here Holbein turns the same scholar toward us, hands folded on a book whose painted fore-edge carries a wry Greek-and-Latin inscription, 'the Labors of Hercules,' Erasmus's joke about the toil of his own scholarship, beside a classical pilaster and a shelf of his volumes. More formal and monumental than the writing profile also in this collection, it became the canonical image of the humanist: composed, ironic, wholly absorbed in the life of the mind. Holbein, the supreme portraitist of the Northern Renaissance, makes learning itself look like a form of nobility.