When Death Comes Calling

Four Encounters, One Visitor

The Rich ManWealthThe NunDevotionThe PloughmanLabourThe ChildVulnerability

Four small woodcuts. Four encounters with Death. Each belongs to Hans Holbein the Younger's remarkable reimagining of the medieval Dance of Death, a tradition that had once assembled the living into a procession according to their positions in society. Holbein changed the arrangement. Instead of summoning everyone into the same line, he sent Death into the places where people lived and worked.

The wealthy man meets him at a banquet. The nun encounters him in a religious interior. The ploughman finds him in the fields. The child is led away from a household hearth. Yet these scenes do not all invite the same interpretation. Wealth and religious conduct can be subjected to moral scrutiny. Labour introduces the possibility of hardship and release. The child makes the search for blame much more difficult.

Nor should we mistake these four images for a complete explanation of Holbein's series. They are only a selection from a larger group of designs, whose meanings were shaped by the religious, artistic, and social circumstances of the early sixteenth century. What makes the images so compelling is their attention to the particular. Holbein did not simply repeat a skeleton beside forty-one interchangeable people. He devised different spaces, gestures, objects, and interruptions.

The old procession had broken apart. Death could now appear anywhere.