Hans Holbein's famous painting of Thomas More and his family hangs in the entrance to More's home in Chelsea or – as it is mockingly termed in Wolf Hall, Utopia. At least, this is where Hilary Mantel hangs it in her novel and it catches the eye of Thomas Cromwell who has been invited to dine with the More household. “You see them painted life-size before you meet them in the flesh,” thinks Cromwell. “The painter has grouped them so skilfully that there's no space between the figures for anyone new. The outsider can only soak himself into the scene, as an unintended blot or stain” (Mantel, Wolf Hall 227).

Holbein's painting proves illusory, for More's family gathering is anything but harmonious, the great man insulting his wife and wards before his fool pelts the guests with stale bread crusts. Mantel's delivery of Tudor life, in all its eccentricity and excess, functions in sharp contrast to the sober, immutable world of the painting. This is a moment at which times run in parallel – solidified in the portrait, free and anarchic in More's Great Hall, as if, Cromwell concludes, “time has performed some loop or snared itself in a noose; he has seen them on the wall as Hans froze them, and here they enact themselves …” (230).

For the reader, the presence of Holbein's painting carries still further resonance. If that rendition of peaceful order is to be believed, in any case it will be shattered by More's trial and execution. Our sense of historical perspective imbues the painting with meaning, even as we view it through Cromwell's eyes. This is time as subjectivity – our own, Mantel’s, Holbein’s, and that of the character of Thomas Cromwell as we encounter him in Wolf Hall. Yet, hovering, phantom-like behind so many varied and conflicting perspectives lies the past itself – a distant other, with which we might mediate or negotiate, but which we will never access in its entirety.

It is this fracturing of subjectivity which has led Hamish Dalley to suggest that historical fiction be read as textual terrain in which time may be collapsed, distorted or extended.