A History of Wood-Engraving

by George Edward Woodberry

This work is, in the first edition (1538), a series of forty-one small cuts, in each of which is depicted the triumph of Death over some person who is typical of a whole class. Each design represents with intense dramatic power some scene from daily life; Death lays his summons upon all in the midst of their habitual occupations: the trader has escaped shipwreck, and “on the beach undoes his corded bales;” Death plucks him by the cloak; the weary, pack-laden peddler, plodding on in his unfinished journey, turns questioningly to the delaying hand upon his shoulder; the priest goes to the burial of the poor, Death carries the candle in a lantern before him, and rings the warning bell; the drunkard gulps his liquor, the judge takes his bribe, the miser counts his gold—Death interrupts them with a sneer. What poetic feeling, what dramatic force, there is in the picture of the Nun! (Fig. 51.) She kneels with head averted from the altar of her devotions toward the youth who sits upon the bed playing the lute to her sleeping soul, and at the moment Death stands there to put out the light of the taper which shall leave her in darkness forever. What sharp satire there is in the representation of the Preacher (Fig. 52), dilating, perhaps, in his accustomed, half-mechanical way, upon the terrors of that very Death already at his elbow! What justness of sight, what grimness of reality, there is in the representation of the Ploughman (Fig. 53); how directly does Holbein bring us face to face with the human curse—in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt earn death! George Sand, looking out on the spring fields of her remote province and seeing the French peasants ploughing up the soft and smoking soil, remembered this type of peasant life as Holbein saw it, and described this cut in words that vivify the concentrated meaning of the whole series. “The engraving,” she says, “represents a farmer guiding the plough in the middle of a field. A vast plain extends into the distance, where there are some poor huts; the sun is setting behind a hill. It is the close of a hard day’s work. The peasant is old, thickset, and in tatters; the team which he drives before him is lean, worn out by fatigue and scanty food; the ploughshare is buried in a rugged and stubborn soil. In this scene of sweat and habitual toil there is only one being in good spirits and light of foot, a fantastic character, a skeleton with a whip, that runs in the furrow beside the startled horses and beats them—as it were, a farmer’s boy. It is Death.” She takes up the story again, after a while. “Is there much consolation,” she asks, “in this stoicism, and do devout souls find their account therein? The ambitious, the knave, the tyrant, the sensualist, all the proud sinners who abuse life, and whom Death drags away by the hair, are on their way to a reckoning, no doubt; but the blind, the beggar, the fool, the poor peasant, is there any amends for their long wretchedness in the single reflection that death is not an evil for them? No! an inexorable melancholy, a dismaying fatality, weighs upon the artist’s work. It is like a bitter curse launched on the universal human lot.”[40]

Certainly the artist’s work is a bold and naked statement of man’s mortality, of the close of life contrasted with the worth of its career; but the melancholy of his work is not more inexorable, its fatality is not more dismaying, than the reality he saw. He did not choose for his pencil what was unusual, extraordinary, or abnormal in life; he depicted its accustomed course and its fixed conclusion in fear, folly, or dignity. He took almost every character among men, almost every passion or vice of the race, almost every toil or pursuit in which his contemporaries engaged, and confronted them with their fate. The king is at his feast, Death pours the wine; the poor mother is cooking her humble meal at the hearth, Death steals her child; the bridal pair walk on absorbed, while Death beats their wedding-march with glee. Throughout the series there is the same dramatic insight, the same unadorned reality, the same humanity. Here and there the spirit of the Reformer reveals itself: the Pope in the exercise of his utmost worldly power crowns the emperor, but behind is Death; a devil lurks in the shadow, and over the heads of the cardinals are other devils; the monk, abbot, and prioress—how they resist and are panic-stricken! There can be no doubt at what Holbein reckoned these men and their trade. Holbein showed here, too, his sympathy with the humbler classes in those days of peasant wars, of the German Bible, and of books in the vulgar tongue—the days when the people began to be a self-conscious body, with a knowledge of the opportunities of life and the power to make good their claim to share in them; as Holbein saw life, it was only the humble to whom Death was not full of scorn and jesting, they alone stood dignified in his presence. Beneath this sympathy with the Reformers and the people need we look farther, as Ruskin does, to find scepticism hidden in the shadows of Holbein’s heart? Holbein saw the Church as Avarice, trading in the sins of its children; as Cruelty, rejoicing in the blood of its enemies; as Ignorance, putting out the light of the mind. There was no faltering in his resolute, indignant denial of that Church. Did he find any refuge elsewhere in such hope and faith as remain to man in the suggestions of his own spirit? He saw Death’s triumph, and he made men see it with his eyes; if he saw more than that, he kept silence concerning it. He did not menace the guilty with any peril save the peril of Death’s mockery; he spoke no word of consolation for the good; for the inevitable sorrow of the child’s loss there is no cure, for the ploughman’s faithful labor there is no reward except in final repose by the shadow of the distant spire. He did not open the heavens to let through one gleam of immortal life upon the human lot, unless it be in the Judgment, where only the saved have risen; nevertheless, the purport of that scene, even if it be interpreted with the most Christian realism, cannot destroy the spirit of all others. “Inexorable melancholy, dismaying fatality”—these, truly, are the burden of his work.

The series holds high rank, too, merely as a product of artistic skill. It shows throughout the designer’s ease, simplicity, and economy in methods of work, his complete control of his resources, and his unerring correctness in choosing the means proper to fulfil his ends; few lines are employed, as in the Italian manner, and there is little cross-hatching; but, as in all great art, every line has its work to do, its meaning, which it expresses perfectly, with no waste of labor and no ineffectual effort. In sureness of stroke and accuracy of proportion the drawing is unsurpassed; you may magnify any of the designs twelve times, and even the fingers will show no disproportion in whole or in part. It is true that there is no anatomical accuracy; no single skeleton is correctly drawn in detail, but the shape of Death, guessed at as a thing unknown, is so expressed that in the earliest days of the work men said that in it “Death seemed to live, and the living to be truly dead.” The correctness, vigor, and economy of line in the drawing of these cuts made them a lesson to later artists like Rubens, merely as an example of powerful and truthful effects perfectly obtained at the least expense of labor. In this respect they were in design a triumph of art, as much as they were in conception a triumph of imagination.

Holbein made the original drawings for the Dance of Death before he left Bâsle in 1526; but, although some copies were printed in that city, the work did not become known until it was published in 1538 by the Trechsels at Lyons, where it appeared without Holbein’s name. This latter circumstance, in connection with a passage in the preface of this edition, led some writers to question Holbein’s title to be considered the designer of the series, although his friend, Nicolas Bourbon de Vandoeuvre, the poet, calls him the author of it in a book published at Lyons in 1538, while Karl van Mander, of Holland, in 1548, and Conrad Gesner, of Zurich, in 1549, ascribe it to him, and their statements were unhesitatingly accepted until doubt was expressed in our own time. The passage in the preface of the first Lyons edition, on which the sceptics rely, mentions the death “of him who has here imaged (imaginé) for us such elegant designs as much in advance of all hitherto issued as the paintings of Apelles or Zeuxis surpass those of the moderns;” but this is generally considered to refer to the engraver, Hans Lützelburger, who cut the designs in wood after Holbein’s drawing, and deserves all the praise for their extraordinarily skilful technical execution. This is the most satisfactory explanation which can be framed; but, if it is not accepted, the balance of evidence in favor of Holbein is so great as to be conclusive. The original drawings, made with a pen and touched with bistre, are in the cabinet of the Czar, and show the excellence of the draughtsmanship more clearly than the woodcuts; the engraver omitted some striking details, but in general his fidelity and correctness of rendering were remarkable. The first edition at Lyons contained only forty-one of the original designs, of which there are forty-six at St. Petersburg; the later editions, published by Frellon, increased the number to fifty-three in 1547, and fifty-eight in 1562, including some beautiful cuts of children at the end of the volume. The popularity of the work was very great; the text was printed in French, Latin, and Italian, and thirteen editions from the original blocks were issued before 1563. Since that time it has been published many times; but the engravings in the later editions, which were copied from the originals by workmen much inferior to Lützelburger, have little comparative value. Between forty and fifty editions have been printed from wood-blocks, and as many more from copperplate.

The Figures of the Bible, which made a series of ninety-two illustrations of the Old Testament, showed the same qualities of Holbein’s genius as did the Dance of Death, but generally in less perfection. In designing many of these cuts Holbein accepted the types of the previous artists, just as nearly all the great painters frequently took their conceptions of scriptural scenes from their predecessors; hence these Bible Figures show a marked resemblance in their general composition to the earlier woodcuts in illustration of the Scriptures. But while Holbein followed the earlier custom in representing two or three associated actions in one scene, and kept the same relative arrangement of the parts, he essentially modified the total effect by omitting some elements, subordinating others, giving prominence to the principal group, and informing the whole picture with a far more vigorous, thoughtful, and expressive spirit. In artistic merit some of these designs are among the best of Holbein’s work; but the technical skill of the wood-engraver who cut them is inferior to that shown in the Dance of Death. The scene in which Nathan is represented rebuking David (Fig. 54) is especially noble in conception: the prophet does not clothe himself in any superior human dignity as a divine messenger; but, mindful only of the supreme law which is over all men equally, kneels loyally and obediently before his king, and calls on him to humiliate himself, not before man, but in the solitary presence of God. The power of the universal law, independent alike of the majesty of the criminal or the lowliness of its servant, has never been pictured with greater subtlety and force than is here done. There are others among these designs of equal excellence, both in imagination and art, but in all the best of them there is some human interest in the scene which attracted Holbein’s heart; in others, such as the illustrations to the books of the Prophets, he falls into a feebleness of conception and baldness of allegorical statement which shows clearly how little he cared for what was merely supernatural. The series, nevertheless, is, as a whole, the best which was made in that century, and was reprinted several times to satisfy the popular demand for it; it first appeared, contemporaneously with the Dance of Death, in 1538, at Lyons; the text was afterward published in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and English, but the work never obtained the extraordinary popularity of the Dance of Death. It is noteworthy that no edition of either work was printed in German—so far had Holbein outstripped his countrymen in the purity of art.

When these two works appeared at Lyons, Holbein had been for many years a resident at the English court, where he painted that series of portraits which remains unsurpassed as a gallery of typical English men and women represented by an artist capable of revealing character as well as of portraying looks. In these later years of his life he busied himself but little with designing for woodcuts, but he did not entirely neglect the art, and was, without doubt, of great service in spreading a taste for it in England, and in improving its practice there. The English printers imported their best woodcuts, and probably wood-engraving was hardly a recognized English art before Holbein’s day. The great titlepage which he designed for Coverdale’s Bible in 1535 was apparently cut by some Swiss engraver, as were some other similar works; but a few designs, which Holbein seems to have drawn so as to require the least possible skill in the engraver to reproduce them, were apparently executed in England. They were produced when England was separating from Rome, in the time of Cromwell’s power, and are marked by the same satirical spirit as Holbein’s earlier work at Bâsle; the self-righteous Pharisee wears a cowl, the lawyers, who are offended when Christ casts out the devil from the possessed one, have bishops’ mitres; the unfaithful shepherd who flees when the wolf comes is a monk. These cuts, in which Holbein last used his art as a weapon of civilization, mark the close of his practice of it.