you may magnify any of the designs twelve times, and even the fingers will show no disproportion in whole or in part. It is true that there is no anatomical accuracy; no single skeleton is correctly drawn in detail, but the shape of Death, guessed at as a thing unknown, is so expressed that in the earliest days of the work men said that in it “Death seemed to live, and the living to be truly dead.” The correctness, vigor, and economy of line in the drawing of these cuts made them a lesson to later artists like Rubens, merely as an example of powerful and truthful effects perfectly obtained at the least expense of labor. In this respect they were in design a triumph of art, as much as they were in conception a triumph of imagination.
Holbein made the original drawings for the Dance of Death before he left Bâsle in 1526; but, although some copies were printed in that city, the work did not become known until it was published in 1538 by the Trechsels at Lyons, where it appeared without Holbein’s name. This latter circumstance, in connection with a passage in the preface of this edition, led some writers to question Holbein’s title to be considered the designer of the series, although his friend, Nicolas Bourbon de Vandoeuvre, the poet, calls him the author of it in a book published at Lyons in 1538, while Karl van Mander, of Holland, in 1548, and Conrad Gesner, of Zurich, in 1549, ascribe it to him, and their statements were unhesitatingly accepted until doubt was expressed in our own time. The passage in the preface of the first Lyons edition, on which the sceptics rely, mentions the death “of him who has here imaged (imaginé) for us such elegant designs as much in advance of all hitherto issued as the paintings of Apelles or Zeuxis surpass those
