This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1868 Excerpt: ... dancing and dying comprised a profound and philosophical criticism, and a sarcastically biting raillery upon the ordinary courses of human life in its various ranks. It has been termed by a celebrated French critic a gallery of sublime buffoonery, a sepulchral phantasmagoria; and by another French writer, "l'epopee ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1868 Excerpt: ... dancing and dying comprised a profound and philosophical criticism, and a sarcastically biting raillery upon the ordinary courses of human life in its various ranks. It has been termed by a celebrated French critic a gallery of sublime buffoonery, a sepulchral phantasmagoria; and by another French writer, "l'epopee lugubre;"--terms which are at once happily and accurately conceived; for the grim and sardonic crudity of the allusions, combined with an irresistible, though mocking and caustic drollery, are so intermingled with deeply tragic elements, often treated with a singularly poetical sense of grandeur, that the buffoonery itself seems to culminate in a kind of wildly horrible sublimity. Emile Souvestre, in his "Voyage a Basle," says, speaking of the "Dance of Death" originally executed there, more than a century before the time of Holbein, "Onne scaurait imaginer sans l'avoir vu, combien le peintre a depense de l'imagination pour varier et donner a chaque scene de la drame uniforme l'intert et l'imprevue de l'ceuvre le plus varie." Baron Taylor and M. Jubinal express equal surprise at the energy and variety with which the subject has been treated; and Coxe, in his letters on Switzerland, expressed his unfeigned astonishment at the variety and invention displayed in the "Dance of Death " which he saw on the walls of the Dominican cemetery at Basle; while the art often displayed is M. Paul De la Croix (le Bibliophile Jacob). of so high a kind that M. Fortoul does not hesitate to say of the woodcuts of the early printed editions of the subject that they vividly recall the style, at once large and delicate, of the painted glass of the 14th century, and are fit to rivalize with the very best specimens of th...
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Seller's Description:
New in New jacket. Hans Holbein's Celebrated Dance of Death: Illustrated by a Series of Photo-Lithographic Facsimiles from the Copy of the First Edition Now in the Briti (Paperback or Softback)
