Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 | Page 4

but one of the forty groups in the
Dance at Bâle, which was the germ of Holbein's, and which, indeed,
until very recently, was attributed to him, although it was painted more
than half a century before he was born. It is generally assumed that a
skeleton has always been the representative of Death, but erroneously;
for, in fact, Holbein was the first to fix upon a mere skeleton for the
embodiment of that idea.
The Hebrew Scriptures, which furnish us with the earliest extant
allusion to Death as a personage, designate him as an angel or
messenger of God,--as, for instance, in the record of the destruction of
the Assyrian host in the Second Book of Kings (xix. 35). The ancient
Egyptians, too, in whose strange system of symbolism may be found
the germ, at least, of most of the types used in the religion and the arts
of more modern nations, had no representation of Death as an
individual agent. They expressed the extinction of life very naturally
and simply by the figure of a mummy. Such a figure it was their
custom to pass round among the guests at their feasts; and the Greeks
and Romans imitated them, with slight modifications, in the form of the
image and the manner of the ceremony. Some scholars have found in
this custom a deep moral and religious significance, akin to that which
certainly attached to the custom of placing a slave in the chariot of a
Roman conquering general to say to him at intervals, as his triumphal
procession moved with pomp and splendor through the swarming
streets, "Remember that thou art a man." But this is too subtile a
conjecture. The ceremony was but a silent way of saying, "Let us eat
and drink, for to-morrow we die," which, as Paul's solemn irony makes
but too plain, must be the philosophy of life to those who believe that
the dead rise not, which was the case with the Egyptians and the Greeks,
and the Hebrews also. An old French epitaph expresses to the full this
philosophy:--

"Ce que j'ai mangé, Ce que j'ai bu, Ce que j'ai dissipé, Je l'ai maintenant
avec moi. Ce que j'ai laissé, Je l'ai perdu,"
What I ate, What I drank, What I dissipated, I have with me. That
which I left I lost.
The figure of the sad youth leaning upon an inverted torch, in which the
Greeks embodied their idea of Death, is familiar to all who have
examined ancient Art. The Etruscan Death was a female, with wings
upon the shoulders, head, and feet, hideous countenance, terrible fangs
and talons, and a black skin. No example of the form attributed to him
by the early Christians has come down to us, that I can discover; but we
know that they, as well as the later Hebrews, considered Death as the
emissary of the Evil One, if not identical with him, and called him
impious, unholy. It was in the Dark Ages, that the figure of a dead body
or a skull was first used as a symbol of Death; but even then its office
appears to have been purely symbolic, and not representative;--that is,
these figures served to remind men of their mortality, or to mark a
place of sepulture, and were not the embodiment of an idea, not the
creation of a personage,--Death. It is not until the thirteenth or
fourteenth century that we find this embodiment clearly defined and
generally recognized; and even then the figure used was not a skeleton,
but a cadaverous and emaciated body.
Among the remains of Greek and Roman Art, only two groups are
known in which a skeleton appears; and it is remarkable that in both of
these the skeletons are dancing. In one group of three, the middle figure
is a female. Its comparative breadth at the shoulders and narrowness at
the hips make at first a contrary impression; but the position of the
body and limbs is, oddly enough, too like that of a female dancer of the
modern French school to leave the question in more than a moment's
doubt. Thus the artists who did not embody their idea of death in a
skeleton were the first to conceive and execute a real Dance of Death.
In both the groups referred to, the motive is manifestly comic; and
neither of them has any similarity to the Dances of Death of which
Holbein's has become the grand representative. These had their origin,
we can hardly tell with certainty how, or when, or where; although the
subject has enlisted the investigating labors of such accomplished
scholars and profound antiquaries as Douce and Ottley in England, and
Peignot and Langlois in France. But a story with which they are

intimately connected, even if it