Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus, after Hans Holbein the Younger

Erasmus of Rotterdam was the most famous scholar in Europe, and through the 1520s he lived in Basel, where Hans Holbein the Younger painted him more than once. Those portraits, the old man in profile, quietly writing or reading, became the standard picture of the humanist, and admirers and princes across the continent wanted a copy. This small panel is one of them, made after Holbein rather than by him, in tempera and barely the size of a sheet of paper. By 1530, the year it bears, Erasmus had already left the city. The Reformation had swept Basel the year before, and he moved to Catholic Freiburg to stay out of the quarrel, still writing, still corresponding with half of Europe.