The Dance of Death,

35

:ely succeeded indy being still pre-scher at his castlet of its destruction>edique among thethe Etrenne Hel-different account• having been onceterwards into greatrail—that this cir-om the occupation2 wall having been»me new buildingsventured, but noti cloister, with itsand that this occa-nong the common;e who had residedenewed attachment

3ecific copies havethat it was engravediburg; but he hasartist on the otherand which will belich contained ther, can on this occa-' reprint of it underitz wie derselbe inSpiegel menslicheriigen farben gemah-zu schen ist. Basel,[echel, 1769* i2mo."1 most skilfully, andtown of Basel, as alooked on without

•ses on the paintingrf which the presentetiv.595. He follows

work contains only ten subjects; namely, the carc'/inal,the abbess, the young woman, the piper, the jew, theheathen man, the heathen woman, the cook, the painter,and the painter's wife. On the abbess there is themark D. R., probably that of the engraver, two cuts bywhom are mentioned in Bartsch's work. 21 On the cutof the young woman there is the mark G S with the gravingknife. They are coarsely executed, and with occasionalvariations of the figures in Merian's plates. The rest of thecuts, thirty-two in number, chiefly belong to the set usuallycalled Holbein's. All the cuts in this miscellaneous volumehave German verses at the top and bottom of each pagewith the subjects. If Jansen, who usually pillages someone else, can be trusted or understood, there was a prioredition of this book in 1606, with cuts having the last-mentioned mark, but which edition he calls the Dance ofDeath at Berne ; 22 a title, considering the mixture of sub-jects, as faulty as that of the present book, of which, or ofsome part of it, there must have been a still earlier editionthan the above-mentioned one of 1606, as on the last cutbut one of this volume there is the date 1576, and theletters G S with the knife. It is most probable that thisartist completed the series of the Basle Dance, and thatsome of the blocks having fallen into the hands of the aboveprinters, they made up and published the present mixedcopy. Jost Amman is said to have engraved 49 plates ofthe Dance of Death in 1587. These are probably from theBasle painting. 23

The completest copies of this painting that are nowperhaps extant, are to be found in a well-known set ofengravings in copper, by Matthew Merian, the elder, themaster of Hollar. There are great doubts as to their firs',appearance in 1621, as mentioned by Fuessh and Hei-necken, but editions are known to exist with the respectivedates of 1649, 1696, 1698, 1725, 1744, 1756, and 17891,Some of these are in German, and the rest are accompaniedwith a French translation by P. Viene. They are all parti-cularly described by Peignot. 24 Merian states in his prefacethat he had copied the paintings several years before, and

21 Peintre graveur, ix. 398. 22 Essaisurl'Orig. de laGravure, 1. 120.Heinecken, Dictionn. des Artistes, i. 222. u Recherche*, &c. p. 71.D 2