DEATH AND THE PAINTER
GRÜNEISEN, [Karl].
Niclaus Manuel: Leben und Werke eines Malers und Dichters, Kriegers, Staatsmannes und Reformators im sechszehnten Jahrhundert … mit einer Steinzeichnung.
Stuttgart & Tübingen, J.G. Cotta, 1837.
8vo, pp. xv, [1], 465, [1], with lithographic frontispiece; title printed in red and black depicting Death at the feet of a painter; some spotting to frontispiece, else a very good copy; bound in contemporary blue paste-paper wrappers lined with manuscript waste on paper, manuscript labels to spine; ink stamp of the Donaueschingen Hofbibliothek to title verso.
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Niclaus Manuel: Leben und Werke eines Malers und Dichters, Kriegers, Staatsmannes und Reformators im sechszehnten Jahrhundert … mit einer Steinzeichnung.
First and only edition of the first separate biography of the Bern painter, writer, and politician Niklaus Manuel Deutsch (c. 1484–1530), with a striking frontispiece from the Berner Danse macabre.
The work, by the Stuttgart-born theologian Karl Grüneisen (1802–1878) is prefaced by a handsome lithographic frontispiece of ‘Der Todt und der Maler’ (‘Death and the Painter’), copied from Deutsch’s Dance of Death at the Dominican convent in Bern (now the French Church), painted in the late 1510s but destroyed in 1660. Manuel’s self-portrait, in which Death (balancing an hourglass on his back) attempts to knock the artist’s paintbrush from his hand, is here accompanied by an eight-line memento mori verse:
‘O Manuel, aller wellt figur
Hastu gemalt an dise mur.
Nun must sterben, do hilfft kein fundt,
Bist nict sicher minut noch stundt.’
‘Hilff ewger Heylandt drumb ich dich bitt,
Dan hje ist gar keins blybens nit:
So mir der todt min redt würt stellen,
So bhüt üch Got min lieben g’sellen.’
‘O Manuel! You painted on this wall
The living world, one and all.
But now the time has come to die;
You’ve no escape, nowhere to hide.’
‘O Saviour, for your help I pray
For here I really cannot stay.
If Death will grant a parting word:
“God help you all, ye left on Earth!”’
(trans.)
