powerful and sometimes morbid attraction for the artistic imagination
and for popular reflection. It was peculiarly the product of mediæval
Christian life, and survives as a representative of the great mediæval
ideas. That age first surrounded death with terrors, fastened the
attention of man continually upon his doom, and affrighted his spirit
with the dread of that unknown hour of his dissolution which should put
him in danger of the second death of immortal agony. In Greece death had
been the breaking of the chrysalis by the winged butterfly, or, at
least, only the extinction of the torch; here it was the gaunt and
grinning skeleton always jostling the flesh of the living, however
beautiful or joyous they might be. In the churches of the thirteenth
century there swung a banner emblazoned upon one side with the figures
of a youth and maiden before a mirror of their loveliness, and, upon the
reverse, with Death holding his spade beside the worm-pierced corpse; it
was the type of mediæval Christian teaching. The fear of death was the
recurring burden of the pulpit; it made the heart of every bowed
worshipper tremble, and was taught with fearful distinctness by the
pestilence that again and again suddenly struck the populations of
Europe. The chord of feeling was overstrained; the elastic force of life
asserted itself, and, by a strange transformation, men made a jest of
their terror, and played with death as they have never since done; they
acted the ravages of death in pantomime, made the tragedy comic, put the
figure of Death into their carnivals, and changed the object of their
alarm into the theme of their sport. In the spirit of that democracy
which, in spite of the aristocratic structure of mediæval society, was
imbedded in the heart of the Christian system, where every soul was of
equal value before God, the people turned the universal moral lesson of
death into a satire against the great; Death was not only the common
executioner, he arrested the prelates and the nobles, stripped them of
their robes and their possessions, and tried them whether they were of
God or Mammon. In these many-varied forms of terror, sport, and irony
Death filled the imagination and reflection of the age; the shrouded
figure or the naked skeleton was seen on the stage of the theatre, amid
the games of the people, on the walls of the churches and the
monasteries, throughout the whole range of art and literature. Holbein
had looked on many representations of this idea: where, as in Dürer’s
work, Death attends knight and beggar; or where, as in the Nuremberg
Chronicle, the skeletons dance by the open grave; or where, as in the
famous series at Bâsle, Death humbles every rank of life in turn. But
Holbein did not look on these scenes as his predecessors had done; he
was free from their spirit. He took the mediæval idea and re-moulded it,
as Shakspeare re-moulded the tradition of Denmark and Italy, into a work
for all times and generations. He represented Death, but with an
artistic power, an imaginative fervor, a perception of the constant
element in its interest for mankind, which lifted his work out of
mediævalism into universal truth; and in doing this he not only showed
the high power of his art, but he unlocked the secrets of his character.
[Illustration: FIG. 51.--The Nun. From Holbein’s “Images de la Mort.”
Lyons, 1547.]
[Illustration: FIG. 52.--The Preacher. From Holbein’s “Images de la
Mort.” Lyons, 1547.]
This work is, in the first edition (1538), a series of forty-one small
cuts, in each of which is depicted the triumph of Death over some person
who is typical of a whole class. Each design represents with intense
dramatic power some scene from daily life; Death lays his summons upon
all in the midst of their habitual occupations: the trader has escaped
shipwreck, and “on the beach undoes his corded bales;” Death plucks him
by the cloak; the weary, pack-laden peddler, plodding on in his
unfinished journey, turns questioningly to the delaying hand upon his
shoulder; the priest goes to the burial of the poor, Death carries the
candle in a lantern before him, and rings the warning bell; the
drunkard gulps his liquor, the judge takes his bribe, the miser counts
his gold--Death interrupts them with a sneer. What poetic feeling, what
dramatic force, there is in the picture of the Nun! (Fig. 51.) She
kneels with head averted from the altar of her devotions toward the
youth who sits upon the bed playing the lute to her sleeping soul, and
at the moment Death stands there to put out the light of the taper which
shall leave her in darkness forever. What sharp satire there is in the
representation of the Preacher (Fig. 52), dilating, perhaps, in his
accustomed, half-mechanical way, upon the terrors of that very Death
already at his elbow! What justness of sight, what grimness of reality,
there is in the representation of the Ploughman (Fig. 53); how directly
does Holbein bring us face to face with the human curse--in the sweat of
thy brow thou shalt earn death! George Sand, looking out on the spring
fields of her remote province and seeing the French peasants ploughing
up the soft and smoking soil, remembered this type of peasant life as
Holbein saw it, and described this cut in words that vivify the
concentrated meaning of the whole series. “The engraving,” she says,
“represents a farmer guiding the plough in the middle of a field. A vast
plain extends into the distance, where there are some poor huts; the
sun is setting behind a hill. It is the close of a hard day’s work. The
peasant is old, thickset, and in tatters; the team which he drives
before him is lean, worn out by fatigue and scanty food; the ploughshare
is buried in a rugged and stubborn soil. In this scene of sweat and
habitual toil there is only one being in good spirits and light of foot,
a fantastic character, a skeleton with a whip, that runs in the furrow
beside the startled horses and beats them--as it were, a farmer’s boy.
It is Death.” She takes up the story again, after a while. “Is there
much consolation,” she asks, “in this stoicism, and do devout souls find
their account therein? The ambitious, the knave, the tyrant, the
sensualist, all the proud sinners who abuse life, and whom Death drags
away by the hair, are on their way to a reckoning, no doubt; but the
blind, the beggar, the fool, the poor peasant, is there any amends for
their long wretchedness in the single reflection that death is not an
evil for them? No! an inexorable melancholy, a dismaying fatality,
weighs upon the artist’s work. It is like a bitter curse launched on the
universal human lot.”[40]
[Illustration: FIG. 53.--The Ploughman. From Holbein’s “Images de la
Mort.” Lyons, 1547.]
Certainly the artist’s work is a bold and naked statement of man’s
mortality, of the close of life contrasted with the worth of its career;
but the melancholy of his work is not more inexorable, its fatality is
not more dismaying, than the reality he saw. He did not choose for his
pencil what was unusual, extraordinary, or abnormal in life; he depicted
its accustomed course and its fixed conclusion in fear, folly, or
dignity. He took almost every character among men, almost every passion
or vice of the race, almost every toil or pursuit in which his
contemporaries engaged, and confronted them with their fate. The king is
at his feast, Death pours the wine; the poor mother is cooking her
humble meal at the hearth, Death steals her child; the bridal pair walk
on absorbed, while Death beats their wedding-march with glee. Throughout
the series there is the same dramatic insight, the same unadorned
reality, the same humanity. Here and there the spirit of the Reformer
reveals itself: the Pope in the exercise of his utmost worldly power
crowns the emperor, but behind is Death; a devil lurks in the shadow,
and over the heads of the cardinals are other devils; the monk, abbot,
and prioress--how they resist and are panic-stricken! There can be no
doubt at what Holbein reckoned these men and their trade. Holbein showed
here, too, his sympathy with the humbler classes in those days of
peasant wars, of the German Bible, and of books in the vulgar
tongue--the days when the people began to be a self-conscious body, with
a knowledge of the opportunities of life and the power to make good
their claim to share in them; as Holbein saw life, it was only the
humble to whom Death was not full of scorn and jesting, they alone stood
dignified in his presence. Beneath this sympathy with the Reformers and
the people need we look farther, as Ruskin does, to find scepticism
hidden in the shadows of Holbein’s heart? Holbein saw the Church as
Avarice, trading in the sins of its children; as Cruelty, rejoicing in
the blood of its enemies; as Ignorance, putting out the light of the
mind. There was no faltering in his resolute, indignant denial of that
Church. Did he find any refuge elsewhere in such hope and faith as
remain to man in the suggestions of his own spirit? He saw Death’s
triumph, and he made men see it with his eyes; if he saw more than that,
he kept silence concerning it. He did not menace the guilty with any
peril save the peril of Death’s mockery; he spoke no word of consolation
for the good; for the inevitable sorrow of the child’s loss there is no
cure, for the ploughman’s faithful labor there is no reward except in
final repose by the shadow of the distant spire. He did not open the
heavens to let through one gleam of immortal life upon the human lot,
unless it be in the Judgment, where only the saved have risen;
nevertheless, the purport of that scene, even if it be interpreted with
the most Christian realism, cannot destroy the spirit of all others.
“Inexorable melancholy, dismaying fatality”--these, truly, are the
burden of his work.
The series holds high rank, too, merely as a product of artistic skill.
It shows throughout the designer’s ease, simplicity, and economy in
methods of work, his complete control of his resources, and his unerring
correctness in choosing the means proper to fulfil his ends; few lines
are employed, as in the Italian manner, and there is little
cross-hatching; but, as in all great art, every line has its work to do,
its meaning, which it expresses perfectly, with no waste of labor and no
ineffectual effort. In sureness of stroke and accuracy of proportion the
drawing is unsurpassed; 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 of the moderns;” but this
is generally considered to refer to the engraver, Hans Lützelburger, who
cut the designs in wood after Holbein’s drawing, and deserves all the
praise for their extraordinarily skilful technical execution. This is
the most satisfactory explanation which can be framed; but, if it is not
accepted, the balance of evidence in favor of Holbein is so great as to
be conclusive. The original drawings, made with a pen and touched with
bistre, are in the cabinet of the Czar, and show the excellence of the
draughtsmanship more clearly than the woodcuts; the engraver omitted
some striking details, but in general his fidelity and correctness of
rendering were remarkable. The first edition at Lyons contained only
forty-one of the original designs, of which there are forty-six at St.
Petersburg; the later editions, published by Frellon, increased the
number to fifty-three in 1547, and fifty-eight in 1562, including some
beautiful cuts of children at the end of the volume. The popularity of
the work was very great; the text was printed in French, Latin, and
Italian, and thirteen editions from the original blocks were issued
before 1563. Since that time it has been published many times; but the
engravings in the later editions, which were copied from the originals
by workmen much inferior to Lützelburger, have little comparative value.
Between forty and fifty editions have been printed from wood-blocks, and
as many more from copperplate.
[Illustration: FIG. 54.--Nathan Rebuking David. From Holbein’s “Icones
Historiarum Veteris Testamenti.” Lyons, 1547.]
The Figures of the Bible, which made a series of ninety-two
illustrations of the Old Testament, showed the same qualities of
Holbein’s genius as did the Dance of Death, but generally in less
perfection. In designing many of these cuts Holbein accepted the types
of the previous artists, just as nearly all the great painters
frequently took their conceptions of scriptural scenes from their
predecessors; hence these Bible Figures show a marked resemblance in
their general composition to the earlier woodcuts in illustration of the
Scriptures. But while Holbein followed the earlier custom in
representing two or three associated actions in one scene, and kept the
same relative arrangement of the parts, he essentially modified the
total effect by omitting some elements, subordinating others, giving
prominence to the principal group, and informing the whole picture with
a far more vigorous, thoughtful, and expressive spirit. In artistic
merit some of these designs are among the best of Holbein’s work; but
the technical skill of the wood-engraver who cut them is inferior to
that shown in the Dance of Death. The scene in which Nathan is
represented rebuking David (Fig. 54) is especially noble in conception:
the prophet does not clothe himself in any superior human dignity as a
divine messenger; but, mindful only of the supreme law which is over all
men equally, kneels loyally and obediently before his king, and calls on
him to humiliate himself, not before man, but in the solitary presence
of God. The power of the universal law, independent alike of the majesty
of the criminal or the lowliness of its servant, has never been pictured
with greater subtlety and force than is here done. There are others
among these designs of equal excellence, both in imagination and art,
but in all the best of them there is some human interest in the scene
which attracted Holbein’s heart; in others, such as the illustrations to
the books of the Prophets, he falls into a feebleness of conception and
baldness of allegorical statement which shows clearly how little he
cared for what was merely supernatural. The series, nevertheless, is, as
a whole, the best which was made in that century, and was reprinted
several times to satisfy the popular demand for it; it first appeared,
contemporaneously with the Dance of Death, in 1538, at Lyons; the text
was afterward published in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and English,
but the work never obtained the extraordinary popularity of the Dance of
Death. It is noteworthy that no edition of either work was printed in
German--so far had Holbein outstripped his countrymen in the purity of
art.
When these two works appeared at Lyons, Holbein had been for many years
a resident at the English court, where he painted that series of
portraits which remains unsurpassed as a gallery of typical English men
and women represented by an artist capable of revealing character as
well as of portraying looks. In these later years of his life he busied
himself but little with designing for woodcuts, but he did not entirely
neglect the art, and was, without doubt, of great service in spreading a
taste for it in England, and in improving its practice there. The
English printers imported their best woodcuts, and probably
wood-engraving was hardly a recognized English art before Holbein’s day.
The great titlepage which he designed for Coverdale’s Bible in 1535 was
apparently cut by some Swiss engraver, as were some other similar works;
but a few designs, which Holbein seems to have drawn so as to require
the least possible skill in the engraver to reproduce them, were
apparently executed in England. They were produced when England was
separating from Rome, in the time of Cromwell’s power, and are marked by
the same satirical spirit as Holbein’s earlier work at Bâsle; the
self-righteous Pharisee wears a cowl, the lawyers, who are offended when
Christ casts out the devil from the possessed one, have bishops’ mitres;
the unfaithful shepherd who flees when the wolf comes is a monk. These
cuts, in which Holbein last used his art as a weapon of civilization,
mark the close of his practice of it.
In the course of that practice he had not merely found utterance for his
genius, but he had shown the entire adequacy of wood-engraving for the
purposes of the artist when the laws which spring out of its peculiar
nature are most rigidly observed. He had employed it with complete
success as a mode of obtaining beautiful architectural design, of
depicting charming _genre_ scenes, of attacking abuses by the keenest
and most effective irony, of making real for the popular comprehension
the solemn and beautiful stories of the Scriptures, and of expressing
passionate feeling and profound thought; and he thus exercised upon his
own time and upon the future an influence which was perhaps more
powerful than that exercised by any contemporary artists. Within the
limits of the Dance of Death he had embodied in wood-engraving tragedy
and humor, satire and sermon, poetic sentiment, dramatic action, and
wise reflection, and he thus gave to that work a special interest for
his contemporaries as an expression of the sympathies, efforts, and
problems of that time, and an enduring interest for all men as the
truest picture of universal human life seen at its most tragic moment
through the hollow sockets of Death. He did this without offering
violence to the peculiar nature of the art, without wresting it from its
appropriate methods or requiring of it any difficult effort; he
perceived more clearly than Dürer the essential conditions under which
wood-engraving must be practised, and he conformed to them. If he had
needed cross-hatching, fine and delicate lines, harmonies of tone, and
soft transitions of light, he would have had recourse to copperplate;
but not finding them necessary, he contented himself with the bold
outlines, easily cut and easily printed, which were the peculiar
province of wood-engraving, and by means of them created works which not
only made wood-engraving illustrious, but rank with the high
achievements and valuable legacies of the other arts of design. Holbein
was one of the great geniuses of the race, and he put into his works the
fire and wisdom of genius; but, independently of what his works contain,
and merely as illustrations of artistic methods, they show for the first
time an artist perceiving and choosing to obey the simple laws of the
art, and exhibiting its compass and capacity, its wealth and utility,
within the sphere of those laws. This thorough understanding and
rational practice of the art, in connection with his intellectual and
artistic powers, made Holbein the most perfect master who has ever left
works in wood-engraving, and give his works the utmost value both as
forms of art and as embodiments of imagination and thought.
VII.
THE DECLINE AND EXTINCTION OF THE ART.
[Illustration: T FIG. 55.--From “Opera Vergiliana,” printed by Sacon.
Lyons, 1517.]
The wood-engravers of France produced no great works like those of
Maximilian, and no single cuts of the artistic value of those by Dürer
and his contemporaries. They limited themselves almost exclusively to
the illustration of books. The early printers, who had expended so much
care in the adornment of their religious books, were succeeded by other
printers who were hardly less animated by enthusiastic devotion to their
art, as was shown by their efforts to make their works beautiful both in
text and illustration. The Renaissance had now penetrated into France,
and entered into the arts. Geoffrey Tory (c. 1480-1533), who had
travelled in Italy, appears to have been the first to introduce a
classical spirit into wood-engraving; from his time two distinct schools
may be distinguished in French wood-engraving--one Germanic and archaic,
the other filled by the Italian spirit. The most distinguished engravers
belonged to the latter school, and their work was characterized by the
curiously modified Italian taste which marked the French Renaissance.
They understood design, and showed considerable power in it; they
regarded the main lines and principal harmonies and contrasts of masses
which are necessary to it; but they transformed its simplicity into
elegance, and overlaid it with ornamentation and trifling detail which
marred its effect, and gave to their works an appearance of
artificiality, of over-labored refinement and mistaken scrupulousness of
taste. As a rule, indeed, taste was their characteristic rather than a
developed sense of beauty, and skill rather than power. Finally, they
passed, by a natural progress, into a complexity and fineness of line
which are unsuitable to wood-engraving; they lost the sense of unity in
the abundance of detail, and were forced to give up engraving in wood
and adopt engraving on copperplate, which was so much better fitted to
the meaningless excess of delicacy and accumulation of ornament in which
the French Renaissance ended.
The most talented of the French designers for wood-engraving was Jean
Cousin (1501-1589), a member of the Reformed Church, little favored at
court and much neglected by his contemporaries. He appears to have been
of a robust and independent spirit, an admirer of Michael Angelo and the
Italians, and an industrious and painstaking workman in many branches of
art. A large number of designs are ascribed to him; but, as is the case
with nearly all the French engravers, there is great difficulty in
making out what really was his work. Among the characteristic products
of French wood-engraving were representations of royal triumphal entries
into the great cities of the kingdom. Two of these are ascribed to
Cousin--the entry of Henry II. into Paris, published in 1549, and his
entry into Rouen, published in the next year. In the latter the captains
of Normandy lead the march; they are followed by ranks of foot-soldiers,
trumpeters, men holding aloft laurel wreaths, other men with antique
arms and banners, and a band which, with a reminiscence from Roman
festivals, carry lambs in their arms for sacrifice to the gods; next
succeed new ranks of soldiers, then elephants and captives, the fool and
musicians leading on Flora and her nymphs, after whom comes the Car of
Happy Fortune, on which the royal family are enthroned, and the
triumphal Chariot of Fame; the procession closes with men-at-arms and
two captains, with succeeding scenes of some places by which the pageant
had passed. In this work the French Renaissance shows itself in the
prime of its career, when some simplicity and nobility of design were
still kept, and the tendency toward refinement of line and
multiplication of ornament were still held in check by a regard for
unity of effect. The Entry of Henry II. into Paris is, perhaps, even
more excellent. The two works rank with the best French wood-engraving
in the sixteenth century.