THE DANCE OF DEATH ALPHABET
From proof in the Royal Print Cabinet, Dresden
THE “DANCE OF DEATH” ALPHABET
Holbein’s Alphabet of Death (Pl. [68]),[[484]] also engraved by Lützelburger, displays all the inventive power and dramatic feeling of the larger Dance. These diminutive inch-square letters show the engraver’s wonderful delicacy of cutting, and his power of reproducing the artist’s designs in almost their full beauty and force. Much of the space in each one of them is occupied by the plain Roman letter itself, behind which the subject is arranged, and Holbein has succeeded in placing his minute figures so ingeniously that the action is not concealed by the letters to an extent detrimental to the clearness of the story. Isolated examples of the use of these letters in printed books occur as early as 1524, the letter N appearing in the Greek New Testament issued by Bebelius in that year, and a number of them are to be found in the publications of several Basel printers from 1525 onwards. This proves that the Alphabet was designed at about the same time, if not before, the Dance. The subjects of the twenty-four letters (J and U are not included) are, with few exceptions, the same as in the larger woodcuts, although in most cases they are treated differently. It is possible that Holbein, in drawing these letters on the blocks, became so fascinated with his theme, and delighted with the skill of his engraver, that he determined to carry it still further, and on a more important scale, in which the play of his poetic and ironic fancy could find even wider scope, without the hampering presence of the letters themselves. The backgrounds of the Alphabet are plain, but in the more than quadrupled space which the size of the Dance woodcuts permitted, he was able to add many details which helped to point his moral and tell his tale more vividly, and also those wonderful backgrounds, landscapes, street scenes, the interiors of palaces, offices, and hovels, which form so charming and characteristic a part of each little picture.
The smaller series begins, like the Dance, with the concourse of skeletons playing weird music for the dancers who follow, from the Pope in the letter B down to the Young Child in the letter Y. In certain instances, such as the Bishop (H), the Monk (O), the Soldier (P), the Fool (R), and the Gamblers (X), the action has a close resemblance to that in the cuts dealing with the same characters in the Dance, though differing in slight details. Thus the Fool in the Alphabet wears cap and bells, and Death, instead of dancing with him and playing the pipes, is seizing him violently by the shoulder. In a number of the letters two skeletons are shown, and they are occasionally aided by a small devil. The little child is torn from the cradle in the sight of its agonised mother, the Queen is dragged away by a rope round her neck, the Nun is led off gently by the hand, with head downcast, and the Drunkard, prone on the ground, has his last draught poured roughly down his throat, while the second skeleton seizes him by the leg as though to pull him up. Three new subjects are introduced into the series: the Courtesan, whom Death, wearing the high hat of a gallant, closely embraces, while his companion crawls away on his hands and knees, the hour-glass balanced grotesquely on his back; the Hermit, who is led gently from his cell, and the Horseman, behind whose back Death has sprung. The letter Z contains a reproduction of the Last Judgment conceived in a similar fashion to the woodcut of the Dance. The inclusion in this Alphabet of the Fool, the Soldier, and the Gamblers, who appear for the first time in the 1545 edition of the Dance, after the death of both artist and engraver, and the similarity of the conception in both series, afford further proof that the new subjects added to the Dance seven years after it was first published were drawn by Holbein on the blocks, although portions of the cutting of them were probably the work of some other hand than Lützelburger’s.
EARLY EDITIONS OF THE WOODCUTS
The third great work in which these two masters collaborated was the series of woodcut illustrations to the Old Testament,[[485]] first published, like the Dance of Death, at Lyon by the brothers Trechsel, and in the same year, 1538. The total number of these woodcuts is ninety-one, but the whole of them are not included in the earlier editions. The first issue (1538) contains eighty-eight of them, the rare “Fall” (1), “Nathan rebuking David” (40), and “Isaiah lamenting over Jerusalem” (72) being absent. In the second edition (1539) only the first of the series, “The Fall” is missing. In addition to these illustrations, the first four woodcuts of the “Dance of Death”—the Creation, the Temptation, the Expulsion, and Adam tilling the Ground—were borrowed from that publication, and placed at the beginning of the new one. The Bible cuts, which vary slightly in their dimensions, are of different form, being oblong and almost double the size of those of the Dance. They were issued as a small quarto picture-book, instead of being included, as was probably the artist’s or the engraver’s original intention, as illustrations to an edition of the Bible. In the same year, however, as the first issue of the book, they were used for the latter purpose, the complete set of ninety-one appearing in a Latin edition of the Bible produced by another Lyon printer, Hugo a Porta, though with the imprint of the Trechsels. The title of the first edition is as follows: “Historiarum veteris Instrumenti Icones ad vivum expressæ. Una cum brevi sed quoad fieri potuit, dilucida earundem expositione. Lugduni, sub scuto Coloniensi. M.D.XXXVIII.” The title-page contains an emblematic cut almost exactly similar to the one in the Dance, and with the same motto, “Usus me genuit.” The imprint at the end is also the same, with the names of Melchior and Gaspar Trechsel, and the date. The address to the reader is signed “Franciscus Frellæus” in the first two editions, but in subsequent issues the surname was given as “Frellonius.” This seems to indicate that the Frellons were already associated with the Trechsels in the business, of which they shortly afterwards obtained full control, the third edition (1543) of the Old Testament illustrations being published in their name, “apud Joannem et Franciscum Frellonios fratres,” and from the same address, “sub scuto Coloniensi.” Chatto[[486]] suggests that they were the actual publishers of the first editions of both the Bible cuts and the Dance, but for reasons of policy, connected with the satirical nature of the subject-matter of the designs, their names were withheld until the success of the two publications was assured. There is no mention of Holbein’s name in the first edition, but a year later, in the second, the publisher’s address is followed by a set of Latin verses by Holbein’s friend, Nicolas Bourbon, the French poet, in which the artist’s name, as the author of these designs, is coupled with Apelles, Zeuxis, and other famous painters of classical times, whom he is said in all ways to eclipse. Other verses in French were added, from the pen of Gilles Corrozet, which form more or less a rhyming paraphrase of Frellon’s address, in which the reader is exhorted to avoid seductive paintings of Venus, Diana, Helen, Dido, and other ladies celebrated in fable and poetry, and to turn instead to those sacred pictures taken from the Holy Scriptures, from the study of which far greater profit is to be obtained. Corrozet, no doubt, was also responsible for the French explanatory verse which, together with the appropriate Latin text, accompanied each woodcut, just as he was the author of the “descriptions severement rithmées” of the Dance of Death. There is no need to give a list of the later editions, which are almost as numerous as those of the Dance. An English edition was published in 1549, with the title—“The Images of the old Testament, lately expressed, set forthe in Ynglishe and Frenche with a playn and brief exposition. Printed at Lyons by Johin Frellon, the yere of our Lord God, 1549.”
These illustrations were drawn on the blocks by Holbein at about the same date as the Dance of Death pictures. This is proved not only from the fact that a number of them were engraved by Lützelburger, and that in style and composition they closely resemble the “Todtentanz” and other Basel designs by Holbein before his departure for England in 1526, but also because copies of more than half of them are to be found in the Bible published by Froschover in Zürich in 1531, showing that at least proofs of them were well known among Swiss publishers long before they were issued in book form in Lyon. There is a proof impression of the whole series in the Basel Gallery, on sheets printed only on one side, which was probably struck off immediately after the blocks were completed. It begins with the very rare “Fall,” which otherwise only appears in Hugo a Porta’s Bible of 1538, being missing in all editions in which the pictures appear alone, its place being taken in the latter by the four introductory sheets borrowed from the Dance of Death. The two other woodcuts already noted as missing from the first edition (Nos. 40 and 72), and absent, too, from the Latin Bible, are also to be found among the Basel proof impressions. In one instance, the “David and Uriah” (No. 39) there are two versions among these proofs, in one of which a background of wall, window, and curtain is introduced, but so badly engraved that it was evidently decided to abandon or alter the block in favour of the second version, in which the two figures are shown against a plain, white surface.