1725 Dance of Death Abbot Plate
DESCRIPTION
This hand-colored copperplate engraving excerpted from a 1725 reissue of Matthäus Merian’s Todten-Tantz is one of a series of memento mori reminding viewers that death eventually levels us all—even the abbot, despite all the authority of his office.
At the center of the sheet titled Todt zum Apt, or "Death to the Abbot," is a copperplate engraving of a Totentanz, or “Dance of Death,” scene centered on an abbot. In it, a gaunt, skeletal figure personifying death jauntily taunts and dances around a sullen abbot clad in black robes. Death gloats here because it’s stolen the abbot’s mitre—the clerical headpiece from which the abbot draws his social status and power.
Surrounding this scene is a hand-drawn architectural border added by a later hand and unique to this piece. It shows two columns carved into mustached and sashed figures and houses letterpress elements of a printer’s housekeeping such as the page number (59), signature (H 2), a catchword (Todt) pointing to the following page, and dialogue between Death and the abbot.
A rough translation of the dialogue reads:
Death to the Abbot.
Sir Abbot, I pull your mitre off,
and so your crozier serves you no more:
if you have been a good shepherd
here to your sheep, that honour shall be yours.
The Abbot.
I raised myself up as an abbot,
and lived in high honour:
nor did anyone set himself against me,
yet even so I am Death’s equal.
The Totentanz
This plate was never meant to be viewed alone; it’s only one entry within the procession of figures that typifies the Totentanz genre. These works are composed of a series of scenes wherein a corpse or skeleton leads archetypes from across social strata towards their common end—death. Starting with a figure of universal power (usually a pope or emperor), each plate moves one rung down the social ladder. The majority of this descent moves towards particularity, showing locale-specific offices within the town of its production. In a final return to universality, though, the series ends with recognizable figures like the peasant, painter, mother and child, and Adam and Eve.
Though the engraved image originated from a mural on a 15th-century Dominican cemetery wall in Grossbasel, this plate comes from a 1725 Frankfurt reissue of Matthäus Merian’s Todten-Tantz, first published in 1621 and revised in 1649. Death’s donning of the abbot’s mitre appears to be a unique invention of Merian’s not seen in other iterations of the mural. Merian here aligns the content of the verse with the image, giving Death the mitre that the verse describes it having stolen whereas all previous editions had left Death bare-headed.
CONDITION
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