Artwork story
About Creation of Eve, from "The Dance of Death"
The artist and artwork
Hans Holbein the Younger designed Creation of Eve around 1526 for The Dance of Death, and the highly skilled Hans Lützelburger cut the image into a woodblock. The print was not published until 1538, in Lyon. Here Holbein compresses the Genesis creation into a sheet only about two and five-eighths inches high: God bends toward Eve as she emerges from the side of the sleeping Adam, while a dense assembly of living creatures witnesses the act.
The world around it
The image belongs to a series of fifty-eight designs made amid the Reformation's religious and political upheaval. Basel was both a university city and a major publishing center, and the humanist Erasmus was Holbein's most important patron there before the artist left for England. Dance-of-Death imagery reminded viewers that mortality crossed every boundary of rank, profession, wealth, and religious office. When Melchior Trechsel finally issued the series in Lyon in 1538, the portable woodcuts carried Holbein's sharply observed social world into another city and language market.
A detail to notice
This opening scene begins a cycle about death at the instant human life is doubled. Adam lies diagonally across the ground, his bent arm propping his head as though he sleeps through his own transformation. God, crowned and haloed, supports the newly formed Eve by the arms. Around them, creation seems almost too abundant for the tiny frame: deer, ox, boar, dog, rabbit, cat, birds, fish, and a snail occupy earth and water, while stars and human-faced sun and moon fill the sky. Rays converge on the central figures from both sides. The picture's scale makes Lützelburger's cutting especially remarkable; black curves distinguish feathers, fur, scales, waves, leaves, clouds, and bodies without losing the story. The later Dance of Death scenes show Death interrupting people in recognizable roles, but this first woodcut quietly establishes what can be lost: bodies, relationships, animals, landscape, and the created order.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is print made in Woodcut and held in the Drawings and Prints department.
Recorded dimensions include Sheet: 2 5/8 x 1 15/16 in. (6.6 x 4.9 cm).
Subject terms include Birds, Boars, Deer, Dogs, Fish, and Rabbits. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Rogers Fund, 1919.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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