The Morgan Library’s new exhibition, Holbein: Capturing Character, is a survey of the work of Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543). Holbein was Henry VIII’s court painter, the best portraitist working in Tudor England, and a crony of Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More to boot. His work is early HD. His crisp, correct likenesses, electric palette, and attention to textiles and jewelry animate the Tudors and their circle. Holbein lived and worked during the hottest days of the Protestant Reformation, painting Tudor luminaries both at the peak and not long before they lost their heads. There’s never been a Holbein exhibition in America. English royalty’s always good for froth and frisson. Then why is the show such a dud?

I’m not saying the exhibition’s not worth seeing if you’re in New York. Simon George, a round portrait from between 1535 and 1540, is lovely. A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling, from the late 1520s, is compellingly odd. The Morgan Library’s divine, and its exhibitions are always designed to perfection. And it’s Holbein, who I don’t think ever had a bad day. Holbein shuttled from painting to book illustration to jewelry design. He’s various, and good at everything. The exhibition is a muddle, and a skimpy one at that. Poor Holbein. It’s his first exhibition in America, done by the Getty and the Morgan Library, both flush with money and talent, and this is what we get?

Holbein was born and raised in Augsburg — his father was an artist — and moved to Basel in Switzerland around 1515. Basel was then a hub for writers and thinkers who studied old Greek and Roman texts for their lessons in individual autonomy and self-awareness, what we call “humanism.” Holbein met Erasmus there. After the show’s introduction, we dive into Holbein and Erasmus. I thought this was daring since it takes us to the hard stuff, not where he learned to paint, juvenilia, and pictures of his wife and kids, but the nettles and ferment of the early Protestant Reformation. “Good for them,” I thought. “Spare the hors d’oeuvres . . . go straight to ye olde roasted elk.”

Erasmus (1466–1536) launched Holbein’s career into the heavens by introducing him to the Tudor court. Holbein, in turn, embellished Erasmus’s fame by painting his portrait, which was mass-produced and put flesh and blood to Erasmus’s scholarship, which, in turn, inasmuch as a brainy, articulate monk could shatter the earth with his words, was earth-shattering. So who is Erasmus? We learn that Erasmus was Europe’s first celebrity scholar and that his books, among them the satirical Praise of Folly, were best sellers.

Erasmus “believed that the written word was superior to the visual image,” but he “used his portraits strategically to extend and deepen his influence,” the Morgan tells us. One phrase is a universal though vague statement — what you read is superior to what we see — while the other is specific and less a strategy than a tactic: “I want people to carry my photograph around in their wallets so no one forgets me.” Why did he believe the written word was superior? We don’t know. We learn that his personal emblem was Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries. Holbein and Quentin Matsys, his Flemish contemporary, “represented Terminus and Erasmus as a pair, so the god’s portrayal as a stern-faced herm (stone pedestal with a head) came to embody the scholar’s formidable character.”

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This is banal. Terminus is the god who protected borders, sanctifying lines in the sand that might have been contested and then decided in war or negotiation but that were, once marked by a herm, stone, or “keep out” sign, protected by the wrath of the heavens. What does Erasmus’s fancy for Terminus say about him, or Holbein, or anything? We don’t know, and it’s pretty much the only thing we learn about Erasmus. Why was he important? Why was he, like Jordan B. Peterson or Ta-Nehisi Coates today, a celebrity? Erasmus introduced Holbein to Thomas More, then an intellectual heavyweight in London. What beliefs did Erasmus and More share? One label mentions Erasmus’s “steadfast character and unwavering faith,” but “character” and “faith” are vague and abstract. A portrait of Erasmus by Holbein “emphasizes his intellectual character through a strong jawline and deep-set eyes.”

This is baby-talk phrenology. Spain’s Charles II had a strong jawline and deep-set eyes, but he was a Hapsburg and an in-bred halfwit. Is this all we have to say about Erasmus, a transformative philosopher of the Northern Renaissance?

Holbein’s Portrait of Thomas More is one of the stars of the exhibition, but it comes from the Frick, so New Yorkers may have seen it many times. I’d argue that More is more consequential in Holbein’s story not only because of this portrait but because More networked Holbein with Henry VIII’s court, More was himself a high-octane intellectual and politician, and Holbein lived in More’s house for two years. “The portrait displays Holbein’s ability to render color and textiles” is as deep as it gets. Lordy, Paul Scofield won an Oscar for portraying More in a Hollywood movie! Is that all we have to say about More and Holbein?

Through More, Holbein landed in the middle of the Tudor court during the divorce of the century, between Henry and Catherine of Aragon, and, later, Henry’s quests for wives three, four, and five. He gussied up his portrait of Anne of Cleves — she was less Betty Grable and more Bess Truman — but Henry VIII didn’t hold it against him. Holbein painted the grandest and definitive portrait of this girthiest of kings as well as the charming portrait of his baby son and heir, Prince Edward. Neither is in the exhibition. The Ambassadors, Holbein’s 1533 double portrait and his masterpiece, isn’t in the show, either. It belongs to the National Gallery in London. It’s one of the greatest portraits of the Renaissance and is seven feet square, so it would take the air out of everything.

Holbein is a painter of pizzazz. His faces are delineated so finely and in such detail that they seem etched in stone. His concern for fabric, hair, and jewelry is exacting. Whether painting faces or embellishments, he’s the master painter of possessions. “Capturing Character,” I thought, is a surprising name for a Holbein show since his portraits, to me, are not concerned with character, psychology, or personality. His faces are distinctive, to be sure, but they’re masks. They’re the characters that the sitters want to play, not who they are.

Holbein’s Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling, from 1526–28, is so enigmatic. We think we know that it depicts Anne Lovell, the wife of one of Henry VIII’s courtiers. Her face is characterful but of a character who isn’t giving anything up. A “Laughing Cavalier” she’s not. She’s stoic to an extreme that seems modern. Her white hat and shawl, set against twigs, a bird, and a teal background make for a striking image.

The exhibition is worth seeing for this portrait alone and for a group of portraits of members of the Hanseatic League, an organization of Northern European businessmen who got special tax treatment in England. We don’t know whether or not these portraits were meant to be seen as a group in a guildhall or were taken back home by the individual traders — an example of the challenges scholars face in tackling Holbein and this period. There’s so much we don’t know. Holbein, unlike Erasmus, who corresponded with hundreds of people throughout Europe, didn’t leave a paper trail. We don’t know who many of his subjects are, so their character is anyone’s guess.

Simon George has movie-star good looks, and his profile portrait is one of the stars of the exhibition, but we know little about him aside from his name and that he’s from Cornwall. He’s holding a red carnation and wears a beret with a clasp depicting Jupiter in the shape of a swan. It’s a gorgeous portrait. I’m not getting to Frankfurt anytime soon, so I’m happy I saw it. Still, aside from having Errol Flynn–quality dash, he doesn’t tell us anything. A drawing of George by Holbein shows him beardless. He’s got a double chin, which bursts the bubble.

There’s a good section in the show dedicated to Holbein’s illustrations for The Dance of Death, a book produced around 1526 showing how a personified Death captured people in different professions. It’s a snapshot like the vignette at the start of every episode of Six Feet Under. Death is, of course, an equal-opportunity recruiter so the small illustrations treat a pope, emperor, and queen as they shuffle off this mortal coil and then down the pecking order to a nun, skipper, child, shopkeeper, and farmer.

Holbein has a sense of humor, and of justice. A judge seems to coddle a rich man and ignore a poor one as Death finds him. He dies by hanging, suggesting he might have sent innocent men to the gallows. Death drags a duchess from her sumptuous bed. Death takes the reins of a poor farmer’s horses, suggesting that the end of life is a relief from toil. It takes a committee of two skeletons and two demons to carry a pope off. A knight is skewered and a king seems to say, “Who, me? You’ve got the wrong guy.”

After being kept in the curatorial dark about Erasmus and Thomas More, I thought it was a treat to get a scrutable bit. The illustrations are tiny, though, and a dozen or so share a single framed mat, so they’re impossible to see.

The exhibition, since it’s a collaboration between the Morgan Library and the Getty, might spring from Holbein’s Allegory of Passion, painted between 1532 and 1536 and now in the Getty’s collection. The central image shows a rider on horseback questing for the heart of his beloved. It’s unique in Holbein’s production. We don’t know who commissioned it. There’s a short essay in the catalogue on the artist’s technique in painting it. It’s a one-off and in the exhibition without context. Neither the portraits nor the Dance of Death illustrations develop it.

I don’t know what happened here. The Omicron variant, what I hope is the Covid catastrophe’s last gasp, might have affected loans coming from Europe. The catalogue is 100 pages long and four or five short essays. There’s a good essay on Holbein’s inscriptions — he was a master calligrapher — but his best work of calligraphy in a portrait is his depiction of the baby Prince Edward, which isn’t in the exhibition. Overall, I think the exhibition is a wasted chance to show Holbein, the early genius in Protestant materialism, to an American audience.

One of Erasmus’s projects is his Adagia, his annotated compilation of thousands of aphorisms from Ancient Greek and Roman literature. Erasmus read everything the ancient poets, playwrights, and historians left for us. He revived such phrases as “to call a spade a spade,” “many hands make light work,” “crying crocodile tears,” “can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” and hundreds of other clichés. I tend to make lemonade from lemons, not one of his reborn aphorisms, so I found an edition online. “There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip” is one of his discoveries, and it suits Holbein: Capturing Character. Seems like a good idea, but the plot got lost along the way.