A Premonstratensian Canon

As a young artist in Switzerland, Hans Holbein the Younger is known to have made designs for stained glass. This is the only known surviving stained-glass portrait panel associated with him. It shows a male figure dressed in the habit of a canon (member of a religious order primarily charged with assisting at divine worship). He wears a pleated surplice (loose white garment with wide sleeves) over a cassock (clerical robe with a high buttoned collar), a hooded fir cape (almutium) fastened with a cord around the neck, and a cap. The figure is shown kneeling while holding a book open in his hands, as if participating in a religious service. He kneels on a short arcaded plinth at the foot of an ornate column, all set against a blue damask-patterned background below a gold tablet hanging from a green tasseled cord. The tablet is inscribed in black Gothic lettering, Stift vo Ber(eim[?]), possibly an abbreviation for “Stift von Berkheim” (monastery of Berkheim). This may refer to the Premonstratensian (a Roman Catholic religious order) abbey in Rot an der Rot near the town of Berkheim in Southern Germany, not far from the Swiss border. The curious figures behind the canon show a nude woman riding on the back of a bearded male sea monster with a curling yellow tail fin, who holds a tortoiseshell shield and the jaw bone of an animal. They seem to be derived from a print by Albrecht Dürer, The Sea Monster, of about 1498; their significance in this scene has not been determined. The two small pieces in the lower left corner appear to be fragments from another window, possibly from the same series, that later were incorporated into the current panel.