Erasmus of Rotterdam

The great humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam gazes out from this small, intense portrait with the steady calm of a man who has seen the world. Hans Holbein the Younger painted it around 1532, near the end of Erasmus’s life, capturing the scholar’s fine features, fur-trimmed gown and quiet authority in the precise, unsparing manner of the Northern Renaissance. One of the most celebrated likenesses of an intellectual in all of Western art, it makes genius look like patience.