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The dance of death exhibited in elegant engravings on wood (1833)
The dance of death exhibited in elegant engravings on wood - 1833 Author:Hans Holbein Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. Places where the Dance of Death was sculptured or . depicted.—Usually accompanied by verses describing the several characters.—Other Metrical C... more »ompositions on the Dance. [HE subject immediately before us was very often represented, not only on the walls, but in the windows of many churches, in the cloisters of monasteries, and even on bridges, especially in Germany and Switzerland. It was sometimes painted on church screens, and occasionally sculptured on them, as well as upon the fronts of domestic dwellings. It occurs in many of the manuscript and illuminated service books of the middle ages, and frequent allusions to it are found in other manuscripts, but very rarely in a perfect state, as to the number of subjects. Most of the representations of the Dance of Death were accompanied by descriptive or moral verses in different languages. Those which were added to the paintings of this subject in Germany appear to have differed very materially, and it is not now possible to ascertain which among them is the oldest. Those in the Basle painting are inserted in the editions published and engraved by Mathew Merian, but they had already occurred in the Decennalia humanac peregrinationis of Gaspar Landismann in 1584. Some Latin verses were published by Melchior Goldasti at the end of his edition of the Speculum omnium statuum, a celebrated moral work by Roderic, Bishop of Zamora, 1613,4to. He most probably copied them from one of the early editions ofthe Danse Macabre, but without any comment whatever, the above title page professing that they are added on account of the similarity of the subject. A Provencal poet, called Marcabres or Marcabrus, has been placed among the versifiers, but none of his works bear the least similitude to the subject; and, moreove...« less