Portrait of Johann Froben

The man here ran the most important press in Basel. Johann Froben printed books that scholars across Europe waited for, above all the writings of Erasmus, whose new edition of the Greek New Testament came off Froben's press in 1516. Holbein knew him first as an employer. Before any of the English portraits, the young painter earned his keep in Basel designing title pages, woodcut borders and the printer's device with Hermes' staff that Froben used from 1523. A painted portrait of a printer was itself a fairly new idea in the 1520s, when the genre still mostly meant princes and churchmen. Froben died in 1527, and several versions of his face survive, so specialists still debate which panel is from Holbein's own hand and which are early copies made around it.