Overview
The dance of death is an iconographic theme commonly found in the history of Western art. The Church once used macabre images in its sacred buildings to convey Christian thought about theafterlife. The dance of death is a story about an encounter between three living souls and three dead ones. It represents the dead who drag the living into a dance, in which people from different social classes take part. Death influences the meaning of life, as it is represented as an inevitable fate that befalls each of us. At one time, painted or carved representations of the dance of the dead would only include men, but later female figures were also included. The fifteenth-century fresco of the Oratorio dei Disciplini in Clusone is a prime example of Franco-German painting that combines the themes of the triumph and the dance of death. The fresco also depicts Hell and Paradise, although parts of it have been lost over time. Despite the missing parts, Clusone's fresco clearly shows the author's attention to satire and is a representation of the inevitable realities of human life: death, judgement, Hell and Paradise. People from different social classes join the queue towards eternal life, led by skeletons, while the uncertainty of the hour of death is emphasised.
