The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Dance of Death, by Hans Holbein

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Title: The Dance of Death

Author: Hans Holbein

Commentator: Austin Dobson

Release Date: June 10, 2007 [EBook #21790]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Dance of Death

by Hans Holbein, with an

introductory note by

Austin Dobson

New York
SCOTT-THAW COMPANY
mcmiii

Copyright, 1903, by
SCOTT-THAW COMPANY

_The Heintzemann Press, Boston_

THE DANCE OF DEATH

=The Book=

"_Les Simulachres & Historiees Faces de la Mort avtant elegamtment
pourtraictes, que artificiellement imaginees._" This may be Englished
as follows: _The Images and Storied Aspects of Death, as elegantly
delineated as [they are] ingeniously imagined._ Such is the literal
title of the earliest edition of the famous book now familiarly known
as "_Holbein's Dance of Death._" It is a small _quarto_, bearing on
its title-page, below the French words above quoted, a nondescript
emblem with the legend _Vsus me Genuit_, and on an open book, _Gnothe
seauton_. Below this comes again, "_A Lyon, Soubz l'escu de Coloigne_:
M. D. XXXVIII," while at the end of the volume is the imprint
"_Excvdebant Lvgdvni Melchoir et Gaspar Trechsel fratres: 1538_,"--the
Trechsels being printers of German origin, who had long been established
at Lyons. There is a verbose "Epistre" or Preface in French to the
"_moult reuerende Abbesse du religieux conuent S. Pierre de Lyon,
Madame Iehanne de Touszele_," otherwise the Abbess of Saint Pierre les
Nonnains, a religious house containing many noble and wealthy ladies,
and the words, "_Salut d'un vray Zele_," which conclude the dedicatory
heading, are supposed to reveal indirectly the author of the "Epistre"
itself, namely, Jean de Vauzelles, Pastor of St. Romain and Prior of
Monrottier, one of three famous literary brothers in the city on the
Rhone, whose motto was "_D'un vray Zelle_." After the Preface comes
"_Diuerses Tables de Mort, non paincte