Holbein's Dance of death, with an historical and literary introduction / [by F.W. Fairholt].

Date:: 1849

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Holbein's Dance of death, with an historical and literary introduction / [by F.W. Fairholt]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

20/388 (page 8)

Dance was not unknown to the ancients, “ indicating, as it is ingeniously supposed, that the passage from death to another state of existence has nothing in it that is sorrowful, or capable of exciting fear.” He also notices, that at a meeting of the Archeological Society at Rome, in 1831, a Roman lamp was exhibited, “on which were three dancing skeletons, and such are said to occur in one of the paintings at Pompeii.” Monsieur Hippolyte Fortoul, in a preliminary essay to the Paris edition of Schlotthauer’s engravings of the ‘Dance of Death,’ says, that the Etruscans having thus “furnished the first idea of the Dance of Death,” it was reserved for the early Christians to enlarge upon it. The ancient Christian church celebrated its mysteries in the catacombs of Rome, among the bodies of the early martyrs, and death was thus constantly before them, but was in their eyes no horrible thing, but a cessation from persecution, and a passport to celestial joy. The many inscriptions remaining, prove that it was with no gloomy feeling that death was contemplated by these ancient professors of our faith; it must have been a daily or hourly reflection with them, but one full of hope and happiness. The words, “in pace,” so con- stantly a part of their mortuary inscriptions, give a com- plete key to the general feeling which governed their com- position.* The bird with the olive-branch, the phcenix, * See Aringhi’s Roma Subterranea; or the Church in the Cata- combs, by C. Maitland, m.p.