Episode Details

The towering, wide-stanced portrait of Henry VIII that defines Tudor power was painted by a German immigrant who spent his life dodging religious riots and political purges. This episode follows Hans Holbein the Younger from his father's workshop in Augsburg to Basel, the printing capital of Europe, where his witty sketches in the margins of Erasmus's The Praise of Folly opened the door to the humanist elite and, eventually, to England.

We trace his revolutionary group portrait of Sir Thomas More's family, his forced return to a Basel gripped by iconoclasm, and his pragmatic pivot to Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell after More's execution. Along the way we decode the anamorphic skull hidden in The Ambassadors, the lost Whitehall mural, the disastrous Anne of Cleves portrait that got Cromwell executed while Holbein survived, and the portrait miniatures and Hanseatic merchant commissions of his final years.

• How woodcut design trained Holbein's eye for microscopic detail
• Why a two-year leave of absence and Basel citizenship pulled him away from London in 1528
• The Dance of Death series and the mystery of Holbein's own religious beliefs
• Glazing, oil paint and the Northern Renaissance pursuit of unsparing realism
• Sudden death in 1543, a hastily drafted will, and an unmarked London grave