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The Dance of Death

Dover Publications, Inc.

TO THE DOVER EDITION

Hans Holbein the Younger was born in Augsburg sometime during the winter of 1497–8. He died in London in 1543. During his short life, spent mostly in Basel and London, he came to be recognized as one of the greatest and most productive artists of Northern Europe. Today he is perhaps best known for his portrait paintings and drawings of humanists, reformers and courtiers, both on the continent and in England. As court painter to Henry VIII, he is almost singlehandedly responsible for our sense of the physical characteristics of the important men of Henrician England, and for many of our intuitions about their personalities. But in his own time, Holbein's reputation depended less on his elegant and insightful portraits than on his graphic works. Although he was born too late to be one of the first artists to exploit the possibilities of the illustrated printed book, he certainly understood and made full use of them. Of his varied and extensive graphic work—including numerous frontispieces, alphabets, decorative initials, biblical illustrations, etchings and woodcuts on diverse subjects—the most celebrated examples of all are the woodcuts illustrating the traditional "Dance of Death" theme.

Indeed, Holbein's treatment of this subject matter has always been considered its most intellectually interesting and aesthetically distinguished example, as well as an authentic masterpiece within his own work. His forty-one "Dance of Death" woodcuts first appeared in book form at Lyons in 1538; it is this first edition which is reproduced here. Shortly after the artist's death, five years later, it became a popular and successful book. The Lyons firms of Trechsel and Frellon together published eleven editions before 1562, and in the course of the sixteenth century there may have been as many as a hundred unauthorized editions and imitations elsewhere. It is evident, then, that in these woodcuts Holbein had designed a work of enduring significance and appeal, an achievement that (like his portraits) spoke not only to his own time but also to subsequent generations, and that (unlike his portraits) was very broadly diffused. The reasons for this success are to be found both in the theme itself, and in the artist's way of dealing with it.

The Dance of Death motif (French: danse macabre; German: Totentanz) originated no later than the early fifteenth century, and seems to have appeared first in France, before spreading to Germany, Italy, the Swiss cantons and even Spain. In its original form it was an elongated mural painting, either in a church or on the walls of a churchyard or burial ground. It depicted a series of figures, both living and dead, in procession. The living figures are generally presented in the order of their social precedence on earth, and there is usually an alternating series of living forms and cadavers or skeletons. It has been suggested that the subject is really a dance of the dead, rather than a dance of death, which seems to be a valid distinction.

By the same token, Holbein's woodcuts, though heavily indebted to this pictorial tradition, constitute neither a pure Dance of Death nor a Dance of the Dead. His work also draws on another mode of depicting scenes of human mortality, known as "Memento mori" (Latin for remember that you will die"). In such works, a single individual appears in the company of a skeleton, or sometimes a skull or some other symbol of mortality. One might say that Holbein's work synthesized these two strands of representation, placing the familiar social types of the Dance of the Dead into individual vignettes of the "Memento mori" type.

Holbein made the drawings for these woodcuts between the years 1523 and 1526, when he was working at Basel, where there were two important Dance of the Dead mural cycles. His designs were made into woodblocks by an accomplished collaborator, Hans Lützelburger, who subsequently sold them to the Trechsel printing firm. Some proofs with German titles had been made in the late 1520's, but the series did not achieve wide diffusion until its publication in the form of a book (reprinted here), which bore the title Les simulachres & historiees faces de la mort, autant elegammet pourtraictes, que artificiellement imaginées, which means "Images and illustrated facets of death, as elegantly depicted as they are artfully conceived." In his preface addressed to Jehanne de Tourzelle, the Abbess of the Convent of St. Peter at Lyons, Jean de Vauzèle, the Prior of Montrosier, explains the use of the word "simulachre." He says that since no one has ever seen death, which is a disembodied thing, the artist is merely presenting an image of it, a concrete embodiment of what is really an abstraction. The "historiees faces," therefore, are the particular exemplifications of the way death works, the individual scenes in which the lessons of mortality are brought home to people of every station. Vauzèle underlines the lessons of humility, submission to divine judgment and the need always to be ready to meet one's maker. But the woodcuts themselves, while certainly sustaining such an interpretation, have other "illustrated facets" that are also worth mentioning.

For example, there is the overriding idea of the omnipresence and universality of death. All men, regardless of their earthly status, are equal before it. It strikes capriciously and unexpectedly, seizing the king at his table, the merchant at his warehouse, the baby at his mother's breast, the nun at her prayers. Nobody is immune, and no protest can affect its final, ghastly leer. Differences in age, sex or rank become insignificant in death. This reminder of mortality was taken with special seriousness in the sixteenth century, when it was almost universally believed that the human soul was immortal, and would be judged at the Last Judgment. It served less as a reminder to live life to the fullest, though that may have been an element in its popularity, than as an exhortation to maintain a state of readiness—readiness to die gracefully (in both the theological and social senses), to face the judgment of God, to be snatched away from all one has ever known.

Each of the woodcuts illustrating this theme uses the same symbolic device. A stylized skeleton interrupts the activity of the person marked for death, and tugs him away. There is often an hourglass about to run out, and the "simulachre" also uses other props, such as drapery, musical instruments or the tools of the victim's trade. The original group of forty-one woodcuts (other figures were added in later editions, and probably by another hand) is as follows:

(1) The Creation of all things; (2) Adam and Eve in Paradise; (3) Expulsion of Adam and Eve; (4) Adam tills the soil; (5) Bones of all men; (6) Pope; (7) Emperor; (8) King [clearly a portrait of Francis I]; (9) Cardinal; (10) Empress; (11) Queen; (12) Bishop; (13) Duke; (14) Abbot; (15) Abbess; (16) Nobleman; (17) Canon; (18) Judge; (19) Advocate; (20) Senator; (21) Preacher; (22) Parish Priest; (23) Monk; (24) Nun; (25) Old woman; (26) Physician; (27) Astrologer; (28) Rich man; (29) Merchant; (30) Seaman; (31) Knight; (32) Count; (33) Old man; (34) Countess; (35) Lady; (36) Duchess; (37) Pedlar; (38) Ploughman; (39) Child; (40) Last Judgment; (41) Escutcheon of Death.

In almost all of these scenes, the skeleton mocks the living person, while summoning him to die. Yet Holbein's inventiveness has avoided any shadow of monotony. The variety of landscapes, backgrounds, human types, emotional expressions, physical positions and styles of dress and architecture used in the series give it astonishing variety, and contribute to its value to the social historian as well as the art historian. The artist has turned the thematic limitations of his subject into an asset by making it a vehicle for his own immense pictorial range. Even the skeletons, which incidentally are not drawn with anatomical precision, manage to convey a wide range of feelings, including glee (p. 18), furtiveness (21), insolence (22), determination (28), haste (30), companionship (32), hostility (38), concentration (43) and even a sort of solicitude (48).

Without belaboring the obvious, it is worth recalling that death was a much more pervasive aspect of daily life in Holbein's time than it is in modern industrialized countries. The normal life span of a man was about fifty years. The mortality rate was high, and the infant mortality rate was such that a family might well confer the same Christian name on several successive children. Funerals were frequent and public, and people died in their homes rather than in hospitals, and were buried out of their homes rather than from funeral parlors. Executions were performed in public places. Many people now reach adulthood without ever having seen a dead person at first hand. That would not have been possible in the sixteenth century. From this point of view, the fascination with death that produced the danse macabre tradition becomes more understandable. In an age of plagues, wars and famines it represented a way of realizing graphically, and thereby perhaps of somewhat domesticating, the dreadful fatality that hovered over even the most sheltered lives. No artist communicated this sense as effectively as did Holbein in his "Images and Illustrated Facets of Death."

Werner L. Gundersheimer

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Excerpted from The Dance of Death by HANS HOLBEIN. Copyright © 1971 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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