Danse macabre de Bâle

By 1773 the great Dance of Death painted 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. These careful sheets are now the closest thing anyone has to seeing the original that stood in Basel for centuries.