fannidada – Luca Ragagnin
IL REGNO DEL SIGNOR HANS HOLBEIN

Description

We have no danger of invasion: no neighboring people would want to annex a parliamentary kingdom with human greenhouses and buttons for coins, which elects Usurers by lottery and does not have the sea.

Inspired by Hans Holbein the Younger’s Alphabet of Death (1524) – 24 initial letters that narrate the dance of death in hierarchical order, from the pope to the child – this volume reinterprets each letter in a visual and poetic composition.
Fannidada and Luca Ragagnin create an epistolary dialogue made of surreal verses and satirical images, playing with full and empty spaces in a fusion of art history and contemporary memento mori.

“Leafing through a copy of the Rizzoli Larousse Great Universal Encyclopedia, we discovered the existence of the Alphabet of Death, a series of 24 initial letters created in 1524 by the German artist Hans Holbein the Younger and engraved on wood by Hans Lutzelburger.
Hans Holbein was a very productive artist: during his residence in Basel, a well-known center for studies and dissemination of the ideas of the Protestant Reformation, he created cycles of images dedicated to the Dance of Death.
The subtly satirical images of dancing skeletons with women and men took up the late medieval allegory of the dance of death, a memento mori addressed to all members of society starting with the pope and then following the emperor, the king, the queen, common people such as the drunkard and the usurer, up to the last element of the social ladder, the child.
Unlike previous representations, where the dance took place in a single place and in a single scene, Holbein divided the danse macabre into individual images that he subsequently arranged as initials, according to the social hierarchy of the time, in the Alphabet of Death.
We too, influenced by the history of these images, decided to create our own reinterpretation using the identical volumes of the encyclopedia that we had kept for many years.
Just as Luca Ragagnin, in an invented modernity, followed Holbein’s scheme by matching each letter of the alphabet with the corresponding social figure. A sort of exchange of letters was born, which saw Luca regularly sending his surreal compositions inspired by our initials, while we responded to his submissions by constantly adjusting the full and empty spaces with great mutual amusement”. (fannidada)