Dança da morte

Notke's workshop finished this in 1463 for a chapel in St. Mary's Church in Lübeck, a rich merchant city on the Baltic. It was a Dance of Death: 49 figures, pope and emperor and merchant and child, each led off by a grinning corpse, the point being that death takes every rank the same. What made it unusual was the support. Almost every medieval dance of death was painted on a wall, but Notke painted his on canvas, roughly 30 metres of it. By 1701 it was so worn that the city had a full copy made. Both the original and the copy burned in 1942, when the church was hit in an air raid. The nearest surviving version is a fragment kept in Tallinn.