AnonymousBiblio.com
AnonymousBiblio.com
La grande danse macabre
1728ref. anonymous-la-grande-danseTroyes: Jean-Antoine Garnier 1728. hardcover. Good. Des Hommes et des Femmes historisée et renouvelée du vieux gaulois en langage le plus poli de notre temps. 1728. In 4to. Pp. 1 f.e. 1-76 1 r.e. Troyes. Jean-Antoine Garnier. Contemporary marbled boards rubbed; spine worn and cracked but sound with small losses at the head and foot and an early paper shelf label "197." Mounted heraldic bookplate on the front pastedown identifiable through heraldic research as that of the von Neindorff family an old Saxon noble house and hereditary cupbearers to the Dukes of Brunswick bearing the characteristic zigzag bend and stag with the motto trew ist wildbrat "loyalty is as rare and prized as game". Characteristic browning and foxing throughout on the inexpensive papier à chandelle typical of Bibliothèque bleue publications with occasional soiling light marginal wear and a few small marginal chips. The lower margin has been trimmed very close to the text occasionally affecting signatures but never the printed text itself. A sound attractive copy of an intrinsically fragile popular production. Fine. A popular eighteenth-century Troyes edition of one of the most influential illustrated books of the late Middle Ages preserving the Danse Macabre within the celebrated Bibliothèque bleue the inexpensive chapbook tradition that carried classic texts to a mass readership throughout France. With provenance form the Library of a noble German family. La Danse Macabre French originated as late-medieval allegories expressing the universal fragility of life while criticizing the rich and potent. Evolving from Black Death tragedies and sermons the earliest artistic examples took the form of elaborate murals in the cemetery of the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris. Similar paintings popped up across Europe depicting personified Death leading a chain of people from popes and kings to peasants and children toward the grave. When the Paris murals began to decay publisher Guyot Marchant copied the poetry and commissioned woodcut illustrations publishing the first definitive printed version La Danse Macabre in 1485. The motif became one of Europe's enduring visual and literary allegories reminding readers that death levels every distinction of rank profession age and sex. By the eighteenth century the work had entered the world of the Bibliothèque bleue: the inexpensive woodcut-illustrated books printed principally at Troyes and distributed by itinerant colporteurs from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. In this new setting a late medieval moral allegory became household reading devotional literature and popular picture book at once its illustrations surviving through generations of reused and recut woodblocks. The title page identifies Jean-Antoine Garnier active as printer-bookseller at Troyes from 1766 while the privilege printed on p. 76 reproduces the royal privilege granted in 1728 to Pierre Garnier. This juxtaposition is entirely characteristic of the Bibliothèque bleue: privileges woodcuts and popular texts alike passed from one generation of the Garnier family to the next and were routinely reprinted unchanged as editions continued to be issued throughout the eighteenth century. The privilege thus records the continuity of the Troyes press rather than the date of the present impression. Ref. Fairfax-Murray 108; Graesse II 327; Socard 126; also Hagstrøm dodendans.com. The title-page is adorned with a so to say lively woodcut of four skeleton musicians immediately announcing the macabre pageant that follows. The volume is illustrated throughout with sixty woodcuts some original and some reproduction of earlier editions retaining much of the directness and expressive power of their medieval prototypes: animated skeletons seize popes and princes monks and merchants physicians lawyers lovers and laborers alike leading each inexorably into the universal dance. Following the author's prologue "Ô créature raisonnable. C'est la Danse des Machabées" each encounter unfolds as a dialogue in verse Death first addressing its victim before receiving a reply the paired texts printed beneath the corresponding woodcut. A second procession extends the dance to women from queens and duchesses to brides pregnant women nuns and young gentlewomen reaffirming that beauty youth wealth and rank offer no exemption from mortality. The accompanying illustrations are remarkably theatrical juxtaposing the living and the dead with a stark economy of line that made the Danse Macabre one of the most enduring visual inventions of late medieval Europe. The volume concludes with several companion texts in the tradition of the ars moriendi including La Mort menace l'humain lignage the Exhortation de bien vivre et de bien mourir and a concluding prayer. There's something deliciously fitting about this particular copy as if its delightfully rock'n'roll skeletons weren't already enough to make us smile. This modest Bibliothèque bleue edition printed cheaply for a mass readership survives from the library of a noble German family. The book seems to have practiced exactly what it preached paying little attention to social hierarchy: just as in the Danse Macabre kings and queens merchants bishops beggars and lovers all take Death's hand in turn so too did this humble chapbook find its way into aristocratic hands - and now into ours. Jean-Antoine Garnier hardcover
La Fenice Antiquaria · Estados Unidos3200,00 US$≈ 2858,93 €
