The Dance of Death

Publisher Marketing: 'Les Simulachres & Historiees Faces de la Mort avtant elegamtment pourtraictes, que artificiellement imaginees.' This may be Englished as follows: The Images and Storied Aspects of Death, as elegantly delineated as [they are] ingeniously imagined. Such is the literal title of the earliest edition of the famous book now familiarly known as 'Holbein's Dance of Death.' It is a small quarto, bearing on its title-page, below the French words above quoted, a nondescript emblem with the legend Vsus me Genuit, and on an open book, Gnothe seauton. Below this comes again, 'A Lyon, Soubz l'escu de Coloigne: M. D. XXXVIII, ' while at the end of the volume is the imprint 'Excvdebant Lvgdvni Melchoir et Gaspar Trechsel fratres: 1538', - the Trechsels being printers of German origin, who had long been established at Lyons. There is a verbose 'Epistre' or Preface in French to the 'moult reuerende Abbesse du religieux conuent S. Pierre de Lyon, Madame Iehanne de Touszele', otherwise the Abbess of Saint Pierre les Nonnains, a religious house containing many noble and wealthy ladies, and the words, 'Salut d'un vray Zele', which conclude the dedicatory heading, are supposed to reveal indirectly the author of the 'Epistre' itself, namely, Jean de Vauzelles, Pastor of St. Romain and Prior of Monrottier, one of three famous literary brothers in the city on the Rhone, whose motto was 'D'un vray Zelle'. After the Preface comes 'Diuerses Tables de Mort, non painctes, mais extraictes de l'escripture saincte, colorees par Docteurs Ecclesiastiques, & umbragees par Philosophes Contributor Bio:  Holbein, Hans Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (27 October 1466 - 12 July 1536), known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, or simply Erasmus, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, and theologian. Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497- between 7 October and 29 November 1543) was a German artist and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style. He is best known as one of the greatest portraitists of the 16th century.