Thursday, February 1, 2024

dance of death




The above woodcut is part of Hans Holbein's Imagines Morti (The Dance of Death). A procession in which skeletons or corpses escort the living to thir graves was a major theme in the visual arts as well as drama, music, and poetry. His designs ranged from the humorous (peasants chasing a fox) to genre (dancing peasants and playing children) to the macabre. 

Pretty effective, since we have our modern Dance of Death.

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