After that it was allowed to fall into a state of dilapidation, and in 1815 the wall of the cemetery of the monastery on which it was painted was pulled down by order of the Council, for the purpose of street improvements. A few remnants of it are still preserved in the Gallery, as well as coloured copies made by Emanuel Büchel in the same year as those he took from the Klingenthal painting. It is also well known from the engravings made after it by Merian in the seventeenth century.[475] This wall-painting was formerly regarded in Basel as the work of Holbein, a legend which was a long time dying. The mistake, no doubt, originally arose through the wide celebrity attained by the artist’s woodcut designs of the Dance, underneath which were printed verses taken from the older wall-paintings, so that the confusion between the two gradually grew, at first in Germany and elsewhere outside Switzerland, until in the end the error became established in Basel itself. At one time, too, the almost equally celebrated “Dance of Death” in the cemetery of the Dominican monastery in Berne, painted with the most biting satire by Niklaus Manuel, called Deutsch, was also attributed to Holbein. This wall-painting, which was finished before the year 1522, had completely perished by 1660, and the only records of it now remaining consist of a few drawings copied from it before its disappearance. Holbein’s designs for the “Dance of Death”[476] were all made, and nearly all the blocks were cut, before Lützelburger’s death in the summer of 1526 and his own departure for England later in that year. This is not only proved by the evidence of the cuts themselves, which display a hand so masterly that it can only be that of Lützelburger, but also more directly from a series of copies of twenty-three of them preserved in the Berlin Museum. These are circular studies, about five inches in diameter, on brown paper, enlarged from the original blocks. They are somewhat coarse in execution, and appear to have been made for reproduction as glass-paintings. That they are not the original designs for the woodcuts, or taken from such designs, but were copied from the woodcuts themselves, is proved, first, by the fact that they are not reversed, as they would have been if based on the original drawings, and, secondly, that the one of “The Duchess” repeats the initials “H.L.” on the bedpost with which Lützelburger signed his work. These copies, therefore, must have been executed after the actual cutting of the blocks; and as one of them (“The Emperor”) is dated “1527,” it gives a date before which both the woodcuts, and the designs for them, must have been prepared. The copies were taken, no doubt, from one or other of the several proof impressions which were printed off while the work of cutting was in progress, complete sets of which are in the British, Berlin, and Basel Museums, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the