Altar of Passion

Holbein painted these eight scenes of Christ's Passion in Basel in the early 1520s, and the timing turned out to be everything. Basel was then a boomtown of humanist learning, home to Erasmus and to great printing presses, and a young Hans Holbein could make a good living on altarpieces like this one. Within a few years that world ended. The Reformation reached the city, and in 1529 crowds went through the churches smashing religious images as idolatry. Commissions like this dried up almost overnight, and Holbein left for England, where he reinvented himself as the portrait painter of Henry the Eighth's court. Look at how he lights the story. The night scenes, the arrest and the mocking, are lit from within by torches and lanterns, faces flaring out of the dark. The eight panels were once the outer wings of a carved altar, and for a long time afterward they hung in Basel's town hall as one of the sights of the city.