(piano music playing) Male: We're in the
Gemäldegalerie gallery in Berlin and we're looking at Hans
Holbein's portrait of Georg Gisze, a Hanseatic merchant.
That's a lot of information. So here's what that means. The Hanseatic League
was a group of merchants that about 300 years before
this portrait was made, got together and said, "We
need to work together," "so that we can avoid
pirates. So that we can avoid" "princes who wanted to
take advantage of us.", and this was a group that did
a lot of business in London and Georg Gisze is coming from Danzig, what is now Poland, and
is working in an office in London, England. Female: Hans Holbein painted many of the businessmen of the Hanseatic League. This was likely the first in
a series of those portraits and, perhaps, Holbein
was showing off about what he could do as portraitist, hoping to get more business. Steven: There is something
about the material nature of the objects
and Holbein's ability to render them so exactly. It really speaks to
this culture that is now paying attention to the wealth of objects. We think that this
portrait was intended for his bride-to-be and so
there is this interest in veracity, not only in the
likeness of the figure, but also in the accoutrements of his life that define him as a person in the world. Female: It feels a little bit
like his painting is more about the things in his office
than it is about him. Steven: It's as if his identity is formed by his employee as a merchant. Female: We see all the signs
of how he does business, his letters, his contracts, his
scissors, his pen, his stamps. At the same time, it's
also a reminder that the material world is not all there is. Male: That's right and
we actually see some explicit symbols relating
to the notion of mortality and the passage of time. For instance, you had mentioned
the tools of his business and if we look in the very
front of the painting, what we can see a quill. We can see money in a
small metal container. We can see some of the unused ceiling wax in that little red stick
on the extreme right and then there's a small clock
and the clock, of course, is an expression of a
certain degree of wealth, but also a businessman's
concern with time, but it also has a moral
dimension, as you mentioned, and this is about the passage
of time, the passage of life and that that idea is
made even more strongly if we look at that beautiful
glass Venetian vase, that is so transparent and is so beautifully depicted by Holbein. Female: Those carnations
in the fragile glass vase that they're in, are a
momentum worry, a reminder of death, of the fragility
of life and not only that, but of the insignificance
of these activities, these day-to-day things that
one does to make money and get somewhere in the world. Male: And yet those are the
things that are really being emphasized, so there's an
inherent contradiction here. There's a reminder of the
transience of the things that are here being celebrated
and it is a wonderful kind of contradiction. It's
a wonderful kind of tangle that clearly the artist and
the patron were fully aware of. (piano music playing)