26

THE DANCE OF DEATH.

by Holbein, formerly painted on a house at Basil,and of which some drawings are still preserved ;and it is therefore not improbable that he alsodesigned the Dance of Death for these initials.They have apparently been struck off as proofs orpatterns for some bookseller*, and at the bottomof the sheet is the mark EL with the words cc HansLiitzelburger Formschneider, (/. e. block-cut-ter), in Basel/' In this manner has been pre-served the name of a most exquisite artist, whom,from the similarity of style and subject, there isevery reason to suppose the person who executedthe fine cuts of the first Dance of Death. As heworked after the designs of Holbein, it is alsoprobable that the painter might have inventedsome of the seventeen subjects which appeared incontinuation of the original work, and that Liit-zelburger also cut them for the subsequent edi-tions. From the extreme delicacy with which theinitials with the Dance of Death are executed,there is reason to suppose that they were notcut upon blocks of wood, but of metal, as wasprobably the larger work of the same subject;and in support of this conjecture it may be ob-served, that blocks of this kind are still preservedin the cabinets of the curious.

* They were actually used by Cratander, a printer at Basil;and other initial letters, with Dances of Death, are to be seenin books printed at Zurich, Strasburg, and Vienna, in the six-teenth century. All the alphabets are in the possession of thecompiler of this essay, but they have not the monogram.