A Brill Calendar: July 11

Few portraits of celebrities from earlier ages compare to the face of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, particularly when it comes to verisimilitude.

While he lived – during the six decades around the turn of the 15th century – a few princes had their portraits made perhaps as frequently, but Erasmus enjoyed greater fame and notoriety. His translation of the New Testament into Latin in an annotated edition – 1516, the first typographical book with printed page numbers – was a sensation throughout Christianity; and the market for life-like depictions of the face of this cultural hero was insatiable until the very end of his life, July 11 1536.

It is seldom that the fascination of artists to draw a lifelike portrait of this editor of the ‘Opera Omnia’ of Saint Jerome and the author of best-selling books like the ‘Praise of Folly’ and the ‘Adages’ is so powerfully expressed as in the portrait which Hans Baldung Grien (1484 – 1545) made of the great man on his death-bed, in the house of Erasmus’ preferred printer and publisher, his life-long friend Johannes Froben (1460 – 1527) at Basle. Hans Holbein and Albrecht Dürer eternalized the most famous scholar of the 16th century earlier in his demure and elegant glory; Holbein, the courtier, leaving out the imperfection of Erasmus’s (crooked) nose.

Now that the moment of ultimate truth has come and he must meet his Maker, time to idealize and propagate has ran out: the face is worn out by months of pain, the thin-lipped mouth is almost toothless; his eyes – half open – hardly focus; wafts of remaining hair lack the scholar’s cap the world expects from the man with the personal motto ‘Cedo Nulli’: ‘I give way to none’. This ‘vanitas’ remains where it should be: at Basle, Kupferstichkabinett.