Basler Totentanz

By 1773 the great Dance of Death painted around 1440 on a churchyard wall in Basel was more than 300 years old and falling apart. Generations of repainting had blurred it and damp had eaten into it. Just then a Basel baker turned self-taught topographer, Emanuel Buchel, sat down and copied the mural figure by figure in watercolour, Death leading away the pope, the emperor, the merchant, the child, each in turn. He worked in clear colours, recording what was actually still on the wall rather than tidying it up. A little over 30 years later, in 1805, the city tore the whole wall down. A few rescued fragments of the wall itself are kept in the Basel Historical Museum, and Buchel's careful sheets remain the closest thing anyone has to seeing the whole of what stood there for centuries.