Round Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus

This portrait of Erasmus is barely the width of a palm, a painted roundel about 14 centimeters across. By the time Holbein made it, around 1532, the scholar was in his sixties and no longer living in Basel. The Reformation had split the city, and Erasmus, who wanted no part of the fight, had moved down the Rhine to Freiburg in 1529. A format this small was meant to be held, sent to a friend, or kept close rather than hung on a wall. Holbein had painted him several times over the previous decade and knew the face well, the long nose and lowered eyes and the guarded half-smile of a man long used to being looked at. Erasmus returned to Basel near the end and died there in 1536, which places this among the last likenesses taken from life.