For the mansion he built on Fifth Avenue, the industrialist Henry Clay Frick acquired a portrait of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger, in 1912, and three years later he bought the same artist's Thomas Cromwell. They can be viewed today where Frick originally hung them on either side of the fireplace in the sumptuous Living Hall of his house, now world-famous as the Frick Collection. Holbein's “Sir Thomas More” is an elegant, lavishly illustrated volume that launches the Frick Diptych Series, in which an essay by Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick Collection's chief curator, is paired with one by the celebrated historical novelist Hilary Mantel.

In his discerning essay, Salomon records that despite his pressing legal business, More sat for Holbein more than once in 1527, when both men were still rising in their careers. Holbein's has been one of the best documented for any Northern European artist of the sixteenth century, not least for his creation of indelible images for Erasmus and Henry VIII, but Salomon provides fresh contextualization for his artistry when he discusses the portraits Holbein painted in Basel, in 1516, of the mayor and his wife, who appeared ten years later as the donors in his great masterpiece, formerly known as the Darmstadt Madonna.

More's portrait belongs to Holbein's first visit to England, in 1526–28, necessitated in part by the iconoclasm that had begun in Switzerland as a result not of Martin Luther's emergence, as Salomon suggests, but rather of the influence of Basel's Huldrych Zwingli, whose early career was built on his friendship with Erasmus. Holbein took up residence in More's new home in Chelsea, where he executed portraits in chalk of the members of his household, as a preliminary to the large canvas he painted that portrayed More's family, which was lost in a fire in 1752. Salomon notes that the large family portrait was entirely exceptional, and nothing on this scale had been made previously for nonroyal families north of the Alps. The purpose for which the paintings were made is unknown. The portrait Frick purchased for a stupendous ₤55,000 is on an oak panel and might be independent of the larger work.

G. R. Elton, the renowned scholar of Tudor England, recorded that on a visit to the Frick Collection he stood before the splendid fireplace “above which Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More forever stare past one another.” Elton was writing in 1980, in the long aftermath of Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, which established More as the heroic martyr, a characterization Elton wished to challenge in his essay “The Real Thomas More?,” which he placed in Reformation Principle and Practice, the festschrift for his friend and rival, Arthur Geoffrey Dickens. Sir Geoffrey concluded that he thought he understood Cromwell as a “plain, solid, straightforward man,” but that More remained elusive, with his “subtle Machiavellian smile.” Elton was left with a sense of More's “unplumbable ambiguity” (24).

His ambiguity is at the heart of Mantel's essay, “A Letter to Thomas More, Knight,” which begins Holbein's “Sir Thomas More”—an artful address to More as if he were still alive to read it. Her “Letter” also appeared early in 2018 in the Telegraph. She describes the portrait as displaying a “sad, distinguished, aging, fiercely clever man,” which permits the viewer to accept his “flawed humanity” (11). In contrast, Holbein painted Cromwell as “a thickset plebian” with all of the “intellectual curiosity of a boiled pudding.” Too late, More learned “the lethal speed at which that man can move” (13–14). Although Mantel has been criticized for her unflattering characterization of More in her books Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, she has extended Elton's work into the popular realm with her tour de force narratives that marry fact with imagination. Elton had not wanted to explore in his festschrift essay the cause for which More died. Mantel does. More did not die for freedom of conscience, she argues: we tell that pious lie so that we can like him. Rather, More died in defense of the authority of “the man in Rome” and his church, traditions, and practices. They are “the consensus that holds Christian souls together” (14–15).

Although Holbein's “Sir Thomas More” is a beautiful little book, it is not readily apparent who its intended readers are. The two essays sit uneasily together, a little like the two portraits, gazing past each other on either side of Frick's fireplace.