An Allegory of the Old and New Testaments

A tree divides Hans Holbein the Younger’s An Allegory of the Old and New Testaments . On its left, bare branches spread towards a scene of judgement; on its right, dark foliage shelters the promise of life. At the foot of the trunk sits a naked man, caught between two bearded figures who direct his attention across the landscape. His body gives the painting a human centre. The events surrounding him range from the Garden of Eden to Christ’s Resurrection, but the question is immediate: where can a vulnerable person turn?

The answer emerges through pointing hands, paired scenes and Latin words. A skeleton lies in a grave at the lower left. Across the panel, Christ rises above another open tomb. Moses receives the commandments high on one rocky summit, while the Virgin kneels on the opposite height. The landscape gathers different biblical times into a single field of vision.

Painted in the early 1530s, the panel addresses Law and Grace, a theme encouraged by the Reformation. ^[1] Understanding that historical Christian argument helps the details fall into place. Looking closely also reveals how much the argument depends on the painter’s arrangement: the turn of a head, the incline of a hillside and the position of a small cross.

A Landscape Made for Comparison

Begin at the lower edge. The two graves establish a clear pair, yet they do different things. The left-hand grave contains an extended skeleton: the body has become a line of bones within a dark rectangular opening. On the right, Christ’s upright body breaks away from the horizontal tomb. His staff and banner carry the movement higher. Before a viewer has translated any inscription, lying down and rising up have become the painting’s most forceful visual verbs.

Above these foreground scenes, the land rises into two rocky masses. Between them lies a deep valley containing smaller episodes. Distance allows Holbein to accommodate several stories without giving each its own separate frame. Their diminished scale asks the eye to travel, then return to the larger figures below. We read across the panel, but also move between near and far.

The tree holds this arrangement together. Its trunk stands close to the centre, behind the seated man, while the change from bare branches to foliage gives the upper half an uneven weight. The right-hand canopy looks dense and sheltering; the exposed branches on the left have a wiry sharpness against the sky. This is landscape enlisted as argument. It can suggest a passage from barrenness to life without representing two different seasons observed in one place.

The symmetry is deliberately incomplete. The man’s companions lean and gesture; Christ occupies one lower corner, and the skeleton the other. These differences keep the panel from becoming a motionless chart. Its comparisons unfold through figures who appear to speak, listen, point and move.

Humanity Between Two Guides

The seated figure is labelled Homo , meaning man or humanity. His nakedness removes the markers of occupation and rank that give so many of Holbein’s portraits their social precision. He carries no visible badge of office and wears no rich costume. In this setting, his exposed body makes him available as a representative figure: the problem before him concerns human existence itself.

The museum identifies his companions as the prophet Isaiah on the left and Saint John the Baptist on the right. ^[1] They bend towards him from either side. Their long garments and outstretched arms create a sheltering but insistent enclosure around his body. He turns his face upwards, while his hands remain close to his chest. The contrast between their expansive movements and his compressed pose makes instruction visible.

John’s gesture is especially useful for navigating the painting. His raised arm directs attention towards the right-hand scenes, beyond the seated man’s immediate surroundings. Following that direction turns the viewer into another listener. The figures do not merely occupy the foreground; they demonstrate how the rest of the image is to be read.

Isaiah’s presence also complicates an overly rigid division into two hostile halves. An Old Testament prophet stands beside humanity as a guide. Even within this strongly Christian construction, the earlier scriptures supply a witness to the meaning being asserted on the right. The central group therefore binds the sides together while the landscape separates them.

The Left: Commandment, Disobedience and Death

High at the left, Moses kneels before a radiant opening in the clouds and receives the tablets of the Law. Below him, Adam and Eve stand beside the serpent and its tree. Farther forward, the skeleton occupies the open grave. The descent from summit to foreground creates a compressed sequence: divine command, human transgression and mortality.

Genesis 3 supplies the story behind the middle episode. Eve takes the fruit, eats it and gives some to Adam; their recognition of nakedness follows. The chapter ends with exclusion from Eden, while God’s words to Adam describe his eventual return to dust. ^[8] Holbein’s placement lets the viewer connect the living naked bodies beside the tree with the bare bones below them.

The serpent is important, but it should not make us overlook the stillness of the human figures. Adam and Eve do not dominate the whole composition. Their episode is one element in a larger chain of relationships. The seated man at the centre appears larger and nearer, bringing the consequences of the distant story into the viewer’s own space.

A second serpent scene appears deeper in the left-hand landscape. It recalls the bronze serpent raised by Moses in Numbers 21. In that account, people bitten by serpents survive when they look towards the object Moses has placed upon a pole. ^[9] This story introduces a possibility of healing within the very half of the painting associated with danger and death.

That detail prevents the left side from being read as an undifferentiated territory of despair. The lifted serpent can be compared with the cross opposite it. John 3:14–17 explicitly connects Moses raising the serpent with the lifting up of the Son of Man, followed by the promise of eternal life through belief. ^[10] The painting’s crossing points depend on biblical connections as much as on a simple separation into before and after.

The Right: Incarnation, Sacrifice and Resurrection

The Virgin kneels on the upper-right rock, facing a small descending Christ Child who carries a cross. On this scale, the cross is a fine, easily missed detail. It brings the Crucifixion into the image of Christ’s coming into the world: beginning and ending are presented together. The tiny figure is suspended against the brighter sky, while Mary’s body rests firmly on the rocky ledge.

Below, Christ appears on the cross. His outstretched arms answer the pointing arms in the foreground, extending the network of gestures through which the painting communicates. Farther right stands a small group with a lamb. The label Agnus Dei means Lamb of God; in John 1:29 the Baptist uses that designation for Jesus in announcing his removal of the world’s sin. ^[11]

The lamb gives the eye another way to connect the scenes. Christ appears as an infant, a crucified adult and a risen figure, while the animal provides an emblematic representation within the same landscape. The panel makes no attempt to preserve a single historical instant. These related appearances hold the right-hand scenes together.

At the lower right, the risen Christ stands above the grave with a cross-bearing banner. Defeated forms, including skeletal remains, are gathered beneath him. Set against the intact skeleton across the panel, they turn the lower edge into a concentrated comparison of death and its overcoming.

The words Victoria nostra , or our victory, make that triumph collective. A relevant scriptural parallel is 1 Corinthians 15:54–57, which links death, sin and Law before giving thanks for victory through Christ. ^[12] Within the painting’s Christian argument, the risen body supplies the answer to the exposed, uncertain body seated beneath the tree.

Reading the Latin Words

The short labels function like signposts. Lex names Law; gratia names grace. Peccatum means sin, and mors death. Homo , Agnus Dei and Victoria nostra identify humanity, the Lamb of God and our victory. Together they establish the painting’s principal terms. ^[1]

Their economy matters. A viewer can retain a handful of words while moving through an intricate collection of figures. The labels fix broad categories, and the images supply bodies, actions and consequences. Mors can be understood linguistically; the stretched skeleton makes it palpable. Victoria becomes more vivid when Christ rises above the tomb.

Other inscriptions run along the lower part of the composition, close to the foreground figures. They make reading part of the encounter with the painting. Yet it is unnecessary to treat every tiny letter as the key to a hidden puzzle. The main relationships are already carried by scale, direction, pairing and position.

Try looking first without translating anything, then return with the principal terms in mind. The second viewing sharpens what the first has already established: one body lies still, another rises, and a third sits between guides. Words stabilise these relationships, but they do not create them unaided.

Holbein, Cranach and Law and Grace

A useful comparison is Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Law and Grace of 1529 in the National Gallery Prague. Its composition also places a seated naked figure between an Old Testament prophet and John the Baptist. The Cranach Digital Archive identifies the Fall, the bronze serpent, a grave, the Virgin and the risen Christ within its paired landscape. ^[13]

The resemblance is close enough to make comparison rewarding. Both pictures use the central figure as a point of access, with the surrounding biblical episodes becoming the subject of his instruction. A body seated between speakers gives an abstract theological relationship the shape of an encounter.

It is still necessary to distinguish comparison from a documented account of transmission. The two works belong to a related pictorial discussion, but resemblance alone cannot establish who supplied a particular suggestion to whom, or exactly what Holbein had before him. The Prague painting offers a concrete parallel; it does not settle every question about the Scottish panel’s invention.

Jeanne Nuechterlein’s introduction to Translating Nature into Art offers a broader way of approaching such work. She distinguishes Holbein’s highly descriptive portraits from the more visibly invented arrangements used in many of his allegorical and religious images. She also cautions that his work for patrons of different confessions makes personal belief difficult to recover directly from a painting’s subject. ^[14]

Here, the deliberate gathering of distant places and different moments is part of the picture’s eloquence. Holbein makes the arrangement available to inspection. We can see the comparisons being constructed rather than imagine that he witnessed this entire landscape at one time.

What the Painting Can Tell Us

The panel presents a Christian interpretation of scripture shaped by the Reformation theme of Law and Grace. Its hierarchy is explicit: the right-hand events provide the answer to the dangers represented on the left. That argument belongs to the history of Christian belief and religious persuasion. It should not be adopted as a neutral description of Judaism, or taken to mean that Jewish scripture contains only punishment. The bronze serpent episode itself shows how much the image depends on an earlier account of rescue. ^{[9] [10]}

Nor does the subject give us a complete statement of Holbein’s private convictions. The figures communicate a particular religious position with considerable clarity; the circumstances and inner commitments of the painter are another matter. Nuechterlein’s warning about the relationship between patronage and belief is especially helpful here. ^[14]

The early-1530s date remains approximate. ^[1] What survives with greatest force is the painted structure: a person listening beneath a divided tree, surrounded by examples whose meaning must be understood in relation to one another. The image asks for close attention, then uses that attention to carry a theological claim.