One of two 1547 Latin editions, with woodcuts by Hans Lützelburger after Holbein, depicting Death in numerous entertaining scenes of contemporary life. Of the 53 woodcuts included in this edition, 41 are from the previous 1538 edition; one, the beggar, was added for the 1545 edition, and eleven are new subjects: Soldier, Gamblers, Drunkards, Fool, Robber, Blind man, Carter, and four woodcuts of children. The King, who is taken by death as he banquets, is here depicted as François I.
“[R]emarkable work with its most fascinating designs of exquisite finish" (Fairfax Murray).
Holbein's images present a “sharpening of the humor and satire and a heightening of the drama, [and become] a series of fully realized scenes” (Mortimer).
“Of all his subtle inventions, Hans Holbein´s Pictures of Death is in many ways the most lucid and articulate. It is therefore striking, indeed seemingly paradoxical, that from the Renaissance onward this remarkable series of woodcuts would also prove to be the most variously interpreted… Holbein´s intellectual and artistic milieu was fraught with uncertainty. The artist matured in a political and religious climate that by 1525, when the designs for the Pictures of Death were probably completed, lay on the threshold of what the historian Donald Kelley has termed ´the beginning of ideology´” (PARSHALL, PETER. “Hans Holbein’s ‘Pictures of Death.’” Studies in the History of Art 60 (2001): 82–95).
Of a piquant originality, these figures where the skeleton takes original poses which influenced many artists and fixed, for a prolonged period of time, the iconography of the dances of death. Here, humor, satire and drama prevail over the moralizing discourse that emerged from previous cycles. The introductory epistle, as well as the text, are by Jean de Vauzelles.
Provenance: Nicolas Yemeniz (1783-1871), of Lyon, sale, Bachelin-Deflorenne, Paris, 9 May 1867 onwards, lot 3773, 360 francs; Horatio William Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1813-1894), sale, Sotheby's, 14 March 1902, lot 64 — Gaspard Ernest Stroehlin (1844-1907), bookplate, sale, Paris 12-16 February 1912, lot 844 — Alexis Bonzon, bookplate. acquisition: Purchased in 1990 from W.H. Schab, New York.
Mortimer, Harvard French, 287.
