CHAPTER XVIII.
Errors of various writers who have introduced the subject of the Dance of Death.
o enumerate even a moiety of these mistakes would almost occupy a separate volume, but it may be as well to notice some of them which are to be found in works of common occurrence.
Travellers.—The erroneous remarks of Bishop Burnet and Mr. Coxe have been already adverted to. See pp. [79], [134], and [138].
Misson seems to regard the old Danse Macabre as the work of Holbein.
The Rev. Robert Gray, in “Letters during the course of a tour through Germany and Switzerland in the year 1791 and 1792,” has stated that Mechel has engraved Rubens’s designs from the Dance of Death, now perishing on the walls of the church-yard of the Predicant convent, where it was sketched in 1431.
Mr. Wood, in his “View of the History of Switzerland,” as quoted in the Monthly Review, Nov. 1799, p. 290, states, that “the Dance of Death in the church-yard of the Predicants has been falsely ascribed to Holbein, as it is proved that it was painted long after the death of that artist, and not before he was born, as the honourable Horace Walpole supposes.” Here the corrector stands in need himself of correction, unless it be possible that he is not fairly quoted by the reviewer.
Miss Williams, in her Swiss tour, 1798, when speaking of the Basle Dance of Death, says it was painted by Kleber, a pupil of Holbein.