By the time the pestilence reached the Holy Roman Empire in 1348, there was already a trail of fields untended and overgrown, of churches empty and abandoned, of cottages left to disrepair, their inhabitants already dead. The Black Death, with its hacking, bloody cough and high-fevered stupor, empurpled buboes and blackened extremities, “followed no logical pattern,” an anonymous German treatise with the arresting title Is it from divine wrath that the mortality of these years precedes, penned the following year, bemoaned. “Instead the filthy disease took a wandering turn and irregular route from place to place, as if blown along by the wind.”
A century and a half later, in 1526, an artist named Hans Holbein the Younger would create a series of engravings known as Der Totentanz, or The Dance of Death — many of which are held by The Met — that would express how the horror of the Black Death endured in the Western consciousness. As the French poet Gilles Corrozet wrote in a lyric that accompanied the 41-print series, “Death is the despots’ Despot/ All must bide, /Later or soon, the message of his might.” Executed in his Basel studio and featuring Hans Lützelburger’s exemplary and detailed woodcuts of Holbein’s designs alongside biblical quotations and verse by Corrozet, The Dance of Death was a mass-media phenomenon, going through several printed editions — some bootlegged.
Among the most justly feted of Northern Renaissance masters, Holbein was the portraitist for the Dutch humanist Erasmus and the utopian Thomas More, who was the architect of the English Reformation under Thomas Cromwell and the Tudor despot Henry VIII. Fabled for his precision, his accuracy, his eye for striking color executed in green velvet and rough brown, cosmic blue and fleshy red, Holbein traveled Europe from his native Augsburg to Basel and then to England, that frigid country where he would help develop Renaissance visual culture. Son of a celebrated artist heavily indebted to the late Medieval Gothic style, Holbein the Younger was very much a denizen of this new age, drawn to both the humanism of the Renaissance and Martin Luther’s calls for Reformation (even while equally availing himself to patronage from Catholics and Protestants). “Change was a constant feature of Holbein’s life,” writes Jeanne Nuechterlein in Hans Holbein: The Artist in a Changing World (2020). Though she is aptly describing his position in a Europe riven by competing religious and political claims in this quote, inconstancy is also the theme of The Dance of Death — and the message for all of us who face inevitable extinction.
Equally disturbing and didactic, The Dance of Death is an arresting, shocking, and terrifying evocation of Death’s dominion. In Holbein’s illustration “The Emperor” (all works c. 1526/38), a haughty monarch in trimmed robe and cape brandishes a scepter-like sword as he examines his court, while behind him, a grinning skeleton filches his crown. In another print, a mitered bishop, crozier in hand, is led off from a flock of sheep, his free arm grasped by a walking, bony corpse. In yet another, the eponymous robed Abbot in the wilderness is retired by yet another skeleton, this one wearing the bishop’s miter and holding his crozier. The monk’s expression is panic-stricken, and for good reason — a rapidly draining hourglass sits upon a branch of the tree behind him, marking his rapidly approaching descent.
Noblemen, judges, monks, priests, bishops, kings, aristocrats — Death comes for them all in Holbein’s illustrations, a mark of the radical and anticlerical sympathies that may have motivated the artist. Yet Death is nothing if not egalitarian. “The Ploughman,” for instance, depicts a simple, rough, earthen peasant working his fields while a skeleton lashes his horses, and “The Child” heartbreakingly depicts a cherubic toddler being tugged out of an impoverished hut by the Grim Reaper, a mother and an older sister watching in grief and terror. Capricious and mercurial, universal and inevitable — Death, in Holbein’s imagination, is the oblivion that spares no one, regardless of what you have or haven’t done, regardless of who you are.
The bleak years between 1346 and 1353, indeed, saw a full third of the continent perish. But even numbers that disturbing can’t give a sense of how nightmarish the plague could be at a local level. Sources suggest that nearly 70% of the population perished in Venice, while Genoa saw only one person out of seven survive. Indeed, though Holbein was born in 1497, nearly a century and a half after the Black Death had abated and the population loss almost made up, the residual traumas of the event, despite a lack of living memory, endured. “The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them,” writes Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (2016). “They become themselves the symptom of history that they cannot entirely possess (and thus which possesses them).”
The artist’s world wasn’t exactly free of disease and strife, either. In an era before modern medicine, Holbein — like everybody — was conversant with the cheapness of life, with the squalid, filthy, stinking, blood-soaked, and pus-filled particulars of what it meant to have a body. All four horsemen of the apocalypse would gallop through Europe as the Middle Ages transitioned into the Renaissance, with pestilence, famine, war, and death being the lot for millions.
By the time Holbein put pen to paper, he was already working amidst a veritable kingdom of bones, an empire of death. For Holbein wasn’t the originator of the Dance of Death as an artistic trope; examples exist in print and fresco, painting and stained glass, from England to Croatia. The earliest example can be found at the Holy Innocents Cemetery in Paris, and is dated to 1424 — within living memory of the oldest survivors of the Black Death. During the 15th century, the Danse Macabre — wherein skeletons in varying degrees of decomposition, both grimacing and grinning, lead a simultaneously merry and terrified band of women and men across all social stations in a jig towards the void — became a popular trope, though Holbein’s comparatively late example was by far the most popular and widespread work to explore the theme. What these representations all shared was a relative grotesquery — a newly blunt examination of death that argued for both an equality of humanity before our demise and an attendant meaninglessness of the human experience. What Holbein proffered, even unconsciously, was a world where death meant both nothing and everything precisely because everybody dies, and nobody can be saved.
This senselessness, the lack of meaning that spread as surely as the infected fleas clinging to the fur of rats, incubated a potent nihilism, as the pious attempted to explain what seemed to them inexplicable. Some, such as the flagellants, scoured their naked flesh with whips and brandishes in contrition before God, ironically spreading the disease in the process. Many saw fit to scapegoat the marginalized in their midst, most commonly the Jews, who often survived the pestilence because of religiously mandated hygiene, even if they did not survive the supposed “Christian love” of their neighbors. At Augsburg, in the Holy Roman Empire, where Holbein was born, almost the entire Jewish community had been massacred or expelled. In Basel, in present-day Switzerland, where Holbein would produce his woodcuts, hundreds of Jews were burnt alive in a wooden building constructed for that purpose on an island in the Rhine River. Horrors both epidemiological and cultural spread spatially in a literal sense — but also temporally, in that their aftereffects could still be seen in a work such as Holbein’s. The Dance of Death, then, is not just allegory, but also cultural memory, a means of processing. “The pandemic was the most devastating incident in human history,” writes novelist Hisham Matar in the Guardian. “It altered not only human society but the imagination itself. Its traces can be perceived today.”
From Holbein’s Dance of Death to the cackling calaveras of Dia de los Muertos, Andy Warhol’s “Skulls” (c. 1976) to the shuffling, reanimated corpses of director George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), the cannibalistic cadaver as an art motif is a distinctly post-plague innovation. Not that skulls didn’t exist as a memento mori before — they’re too obvious not to. But the bubonic plague, in some sense, reinvented Europe’s idea of death, for such a massive devastation only underscored how anemic both faith and empiricism were in making sense of such senselessness. After the pestilence, death could never quite be depicted in the same way again.
Holbein’s engravings are newly charged today, when we’re bedeviled by both pestilence and irrationalism, bigotry and superstition. Tellingly, none of the figures in the Totentaz actually dance, unlike in other instances of the theme. Here, there is only surprise and grief — not even the respite of final joy. Though each of Holbein’s engravings tells a different story, the implied conclusion to each narrative is the same. They serve to remind us — a strangely death-haunted and death-averse culture — that we all too shall perish. What unremarked-upon deaths have affected us? What traumas do we deny in the midst of our own seasons of dying?
Meanwhile, among the prints within Holbein’s book, there is a curious absence — there exists none entitled “The Artist.” Imagine what such a work could look like: the rough-featured printer with his languid, brown bowl-cut wearing an ink-smudged apron. Perhaps he stands over a drafting table, an assortment of quills and graphite before him. As he begins to illustrate the pictures within The Dance of Death, perhaps a curious and patient skeleton stands behind him with broad smile on his face, waiting. Holbein himself would die far from home, in London in 1543. According to some sources, the cause of Holbein’s death was the bubonic plague. Sic transit gloria mundi, you could say — “Thus passes the glory of the world.”
