AMORY: In this portrait Hans Holbein depicts Erasmus, one of the great humanist scholars of the Renaissance. Erasmus was trained as a theologian.

AINSWORTH: Erasmus wears not a monk’s cowl, but the black robes of a scholar. And that is how he wanted to be known and represented. It is of course an idealized picture, and a very sensitive portrayal of this highly cultivated scholar, which would have been very much intended to be a lasting image of how Erasmus wanted to be remembered by his friends and by his colleagues. Holbein would have started this portrait by making a drawing on paper. He would have recorded the likeness of Erasmus, who as such a busy man, admittedly probably only had a short time to sit for the artist. And then Holbein would take that drawing, and make some amendments or additions to it, and use that in turn for the many versions of the painted portraits. These would have been distributed to the friends of Erasmus or to the other noted humanists of the day. We might think of it in a certain sense as the way we might distribute copies of photographs or family pictures.