Reaper Capers
Let’s dance.
The New York Review of Books has a gallery of woodcuts from Hans Holbein’s The Dance of Death on display in conjunction with the new Penguin Classics edition of the work. The book contains commentary from Ulinka Rublack (whose The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for his Mother is also worth checking out) that offers a brief biography of Holbein and helps situate the work in the context of its era. You’ve probably come across a few of these before but it’s much more powerful to see them together as a piece (this is a case where purchasing an ebook version might be the better choice, simply to be able to enlarge the details) with a compelling guide that lets you know what you’re seeing and what you should be looking for. Anyway, this all feels timely, for some reason. The gallery is here: