This passage is rather confusing, and at one time was supposed to refer to the designer, and not to the engraver of the woodcuts, and that Holbein, therefore, who was alive in 1538, could not have been the author of the designs. Now, however, that more modern research has proved that Lützelburger died in the summer of 1526, leaving several blocks which had been commissioned by the Trechsels unfinished, it becomes clear that Vauzelles, in his preface, is praising the woodcutter, and not the artist. It is true that the word “painctre” is used in one place, and that the term “imaginé” has been taken in the modern sense by earlier writers, whereas it is from the Latin “imaginatus” which has the same meaning as “sculptus.” In old French “ymaginier” is the same as “tailleur d’images,” just as “sculptor” was the common Latin expression for a stone-cutter or engraver. There is the possibility that Vauzelles was ignorant of Holbein’s share in the work, and imagined that both the designing and cutting of the blocks were the work of one man; but this is not very probable, for in the same year the Trechsels published the Old Testament woodcuts, also engraved by Lützelburger, in a second edition of which, issued in the following year, 1539, Holbein’s name as the designer is expressly mentioned in Nicolas Bourbon’s Latin verses which were added to the volume. Bourbon was in Lyon at the time, and in a new edition of his _Nugæ_, published shortly afterwards, he included a Latin epigram, not given in the first edition of 1533, headed, “De morte picta à Hanso pictore nobili,” which undoubtedly refers to Holbein as the painter or deviser of the “Dance of Death.” Taking these facts into consideration, it does not seem probable that Vauzelles would have been ignorant of Holbein’s connection with the work. In any case, the publishers must almost certainly have known it, and it may be conjectured that Bourbon’s verses were written expressly to accompany the “Dance,” just as his other lines were written for the Old Testament woodcuts, but that for some reason they were not used for that purpose.