Reproductie van een schilderij van een portret van Desiderius Erasmus door Hans Holbein II before 1877

This is a reproduction by Joseph Maes of Hans Holbein the Younger's portrait of Desiderius Erasmus. We are looking at an image within a book, made in the late 19th or early 20th century. Erasmus, the great humanist scholar, lived two centuries before the book was made, and Holbein even earlier. So why reproduce this image? What is the public role of this image? Well, in nineteenth-century Europe, the creation of printed images allowed a much wider public to see and learn about historical figures. This allowed certain types of people - Erasmus, for example - to become cultural heroes. Erasmus’s intellectual achievements could be used to inspire new generations of European scholars. Looking at the wider context in which images are produced, distributed, and consumed allows us to better understand the social and cultural history that shaped them. We can consult printed sources such as books, journals, and newspapers to better understand the meaning that viewers attached to them.