The Dance of Death
Michael Wolgemut's woodcut of the danse macabre, printed in 1493 — a visual language that took hold in Europe after the plague years.
The dance of death puts skeletons and the living in the same procession, and it appears everywhere in European art after the middle of the fourteenth century. That is not a coincidence. Communities that had buried a third of their neighbours needed an image for a death that took the abbot and the labourer with the same indifference, and monastic houses — where mortality ran especially high — were among the places that felt it most sharply. Read the full story in our article on Plaques and Perils: The Black Death’s Impact on Monastic Life in Late Medieval England.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
