BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS AND ORNAMENTAL WOODCUTS.
Holbein’s versatility as an artist is nowhere shown more convincingly than in the illustrations he made for printed books, and the series of woodcuts which were published from his designs during the last decade of his life. His title-pages, initial letters, chapter headings, and ornamental borders, for Froben and other printers, display a rich invention, greatly in advance of most similar work of that period. In some of them the artist’s sureness of hand and firmness of drawing have been sadly blunted by the incapacity of the woodcutter. In others, however, he was very happily associated with a cutter of real genius, Hans Lützelburger, who had both the skill and intuition to carry out the master’s intentions with marvellous and sympathetic accuracy. One of the most celebrated of his title-pages is that known as The Table of Cebes, representing, by means of countless little figures, the soul’s journey through life.
But Holbein’s fame as a designer of woodcuts, which had spread throughout Europe before the end of the sixteenth century, was based
upon two celebrated series of designs, The Dance of Death and his Old Testament Illustrations, in which his gifts as an illustrator are most clearly shown. The Dance of Death, with its forty little pictures, at once became popular, and editions followed one after the other, with additional illustrations. The subject was a very favourite one throughout mediæval Europe, and in Holbein it reaches its highest development. It is a series of short pictorial sermons, in which the artist points out to the reader how slight and how uncertain is his hold upon life, and how in the presence of death both Prince and peasant are equal. In the satire with which Holbein has treated clerics of all degrees we learn something of the way in which the Reformation influenced him. Each little picture is a masterpiece of art, in which is depicted, with grim humour, death’s unexpected approach, sparing neither King nor Pontiff, Queen nor courtesan, knight nor beggar, old age nor childhood. In each one the feeling for fine dramatic situation is admirable, the whole being indicated in a few sure lines of masterly draughtsmanship. Detailed accounts of each of the subjects will be found in Dr. Woltmann’s “Holbein and His Time,” and in Chatto and Jackson’s “History of Wood Engraving,” while Ruskin’s “Ariadne Florentina” should be read for a very sympathetic and beautiful analysis of their intellectual side, their spiritual meaning, and Holbein’s marvellous power of design for such work.
In the same year, 1538, his illustrations to the Old Testament, ninety-one in all, were also published by the brothers Trechsel. They did not accompany an edition of the Bible, but were issued as a book of pictures, with appropriate letter-press. They are less known than The Dance of Death woodcuts, and in them the artist has put a curb on his fertile imagination, and confines himself to telling the sacred stories with great simplicity and directness, while nothing essential to the full understanding of the story is omitted.
In addition to these more important woodcuts, Holbein also designed several series of ornamental alphabets, one of them a dance of death, another with peasants at their merrymakings, and a third with children at their games.