PREFACE.
The Work here presented to the Reader is a Copy, with a small Variation noticed hereafter, as to the Cuts, and a Translation, as to the Letter Press, of one well known to the Curious by the Title of Imagines Mortis, or The Images of Death; which is reported to be in reality indebted for its Existence to an Event that Boccace did but feign as the Occasion of writing his Decameron; I mean the Calamity of a Plague: And its History is as follows.
Pope Eugenius IV. having summoned a Council to meet at the City of Basle, or, as it is more usually called, Basil, in Switzerland; it accordingly met there in the Year 1431, and continued to sit for Seventeen Years, Nine Months, and Twenty-Seven Days, or, according to Mr. Walpole[1], but Fifteen Years in the whole; and at this Council the Pope himself, and after his Death his Successor Felix V. Sigismond Emperor of Germany, Albert II. then King of the Romans, and many other Princes and Persons of distinguished Rank were present. During the Sitting of this Council, viz. in the Year 1439, the City of Basil was visited with a Plague, which raged for some Time with extreme Violence, and carried off many of the Nobility, and several Cardinals and Prelates who attended that Council, some of whom were interred in the very Cemetery where the Painting, of which we are about to speak, now is; and, on the Cessation of the Distemper, the surviving Members of the Council, with a View to perpetuate the Memory of this Event, and of their providential Deliverance from its Effects, caused to be painted in Oil on the Walls of the Cemetery, near the Convent of the Dominicans, a Dance of Death, representing all Ranks of Persons, from the Pope to the Peasant, as individually seized by Death; adding also to each Figure eight Lines in German, four of them containing an Address from Death to them severally, the other four their Reply. The Name of the Painter employed on this Occasion has not been transmitted down to us with Certainty; but some Persons have imagined that this Painting was the Work of Hans Holbein: Whether it were done by him or another, shall be hereafter considered; but, in the mean Time, we shall here proceed to relate the subsequent History of the Painting itself.
It is, however, to be observed, that Matthew Merian, who, in 1649, published in German, at Franckfort, in small Quarto, a Book entitled Todten Tanz, or Death’s Dance, containing Engravings from the above-mentioned Painting[2], and from the Preface to whose Work, as translated into French, in an Edition printed at Basil in 1744, most of the foregoing Facts are extracted, does not speak in positive Terms as to the precise Time when the original Figures were painted, but only says, that they are believed, and with great Probability, to be of that Time in which he had placed them; in further Confirmation of which he has noticed, that Sigismond was himself a Lover and extraordinary Patron of the Arts, and had always about him a Number of Artists; and that John ab Eyck, the Inventor of Oil Painting, flourished in his Reign; but Mr. Warton[3] has related (though it does not appear on what Authority) not only that Holbein was the Painter, but that the Subject in Question was painted in 1543; in which I conceive him misinformed: For Merian was, as he himself tells us, a Native of Basil, and possibly might have had his Account by Tradition; and, had the Painting been of no earlier a Date than 1543, it is hardly probable (considering too that it is in Oil) that it should have been so much injured by Time as to stand in Need, as we find it did, of an almost total Repair in 1568: To all which I add, that Merian seems so well satisfied of the Truth of his Account, that he tells us further that the Figures were drawn from Nature, and are dressed each in the Habit of the Time; and that those of the Pope, Emperor, and King, are respectively Portraits of Felix V. who succeeded Eugenius IV., Sigismond Emperor of Germany, and Albert II., King of the Romans; all of whom, as we have before remarked, were present at the Council.
Mr. Walpole[4] mentions that this Painting was repaired in 1529; but in this he seems to have been misled (accidentally taking one Date instead of another) by a Passage in the Preface to Merian’s Book before cited. Merian informs us, that the Painting in Question having been much injured by Time, John Hugh Klauber, a Painter, and Citizen of Basil, was, in 1568, employed to repair it; and that, finding a Vacancy on the Wall sufficient for his Purpose, he added at the Head of the Painting a Portrait of Johannes Oecolompadius, in Memory of the Reformation in 1529, to which his preaching the Gospel to all Ranks, as he did, might be supposed in some small Degree to contribute; and, at the End of the Painting, on another Part of the Wall, he added the Portraits of himself, his Wife, and his Children: And this Repair by Klauber, Merian tells us further, was commemorated in a Latin Tablet, which in his Time hung near the Painting. Some Time after, it was again repaired, and so, without any further Repair, it continued till Merian’s Time; but Keysler, who visited it in 1729, in his Travels, Vol. I. P. 171, Edit. 8vo. 1760, relates, that the original Colours were then totally effaced, that only the Outlines of the Figures were left, and that it had then been lately repaired.
The Thought of this allegorical Representation of Death, though in the present Instance immediately suggested by the Event above related, was not in itself original, but borrowed in some Measure from a Kind of Masquerade, which Mr. Warton[5] observes was anciently celebrated in the Churches abroad, particularly those of France (and, among others, it seems to have been performed in St. Innocent’s Church at Paris) and in which all Ranks and Degrees of Persons were personated by the Ecclesiastics of those Churches, who all danced together, and then disappeared; and it is certain that before the Calamity above-mentioned happened at Basil, and consequently before this Painting there was begun, Allusions to a Dance of Death occurred in the Writings of the Authors of the Time, in Reference, no Doubt, to that Kind of Masquerade. It were needless to introduce a Number of Quotations to support this Assertion; but as some Proof may, perhaps, be expected, I here insert from The Vision of Piers Plowman, written about 1350, the following Passage, with which Mr. Warton’s Hist. of Poetry, Vol. II. P. 54, has furnished me:
“Death came driving after, and all to Dust pash’d