“ The typical form which the allegory takes is that of a series of pictures, sculptured or painted, in which Death appears, either as a dancing skeleton or as a shrunken corpse wrapped in grave-clothes to persons representing every age and condition of life, and leads them all in a dance to the grave. Of the numerous examples painted or sculptured on the walls of cloisters or churchyards through medieval Europe few remain except in woodcuts and engravings. Thus the famous series at Basel, originally at the Klingenthal, a nunnery in Little Basel, dated from the beginning of the 14th century. ”

“ Of the many engraved reproductions, the most celebrated is the series drawn by Holbein. Here the long ring of connected dancing couples is necessarily abandoned, and the Dance of Death becomes rather a series of imagines mortis.
Concerning the origin of this allegory in painting and sculpture there has been much dispute. It certainly seems to be as early as the 14th century, and has often been attributed to the overpowering consciousness of the presence of death due to the Black Death and the miseries of the Hundred Years’ War. ”

“ There was a celebrated fresco of the subject in the cloister of Old St Paul’s in London, and another in the now destroyed Hungerford Chapel at Salisbury, of which a single woodcut, “Death and the Gallant,” alone remains. ”