The Danse Macabre, also called the Dance of Death, is an artistic genre of allegory from the Late Middle Ages on the universality of death.
Example of a woodcut from the book [The Abbott]
The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Nuremberg Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel
Charnel house at Holy Innocents' Cemetery, Paris, with mural of a Danse Macabre (1424–25)
Bernt Notke: Surmatants (Totentanz) from St. Nicholas' Church, Tallinn, end of 15th century
The Black Death was a plague pandemic that occurred in Europe from 1346 to 1353. It was one of the most fatal pandemics in human history, leading to the death of up to 50 million people, around 30% to
Danse Macabre
…the fourteenth century. In her thesis, The Black Death and its Effect on 14th and 15th Century Art, Anna Louise Des Ormeaux describes the effect of the Black Death on art, mentioning the Danse Macabre as she does so: Some plague art contains gruesome imagery that was directly influenced by the mortality of the…
Yersinia pestis (200 × magnification), the bacterium that causes plague
The Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) engorged with blood. This species of flea is the primary vector for the transmission of Yersinia pestis, the organism responsible for spreading bubonic plague in most plague epidemics. Both male and female fleas feed on blood and can transmit the infection.
Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) infected with the Yersinia pestis bacterium which appears as a dark mass in the gut. The foregut (proventriculus) of this flea is blocked by a Y. pestis biofilm; when the flea feeds on an uninfected host Y. pestis is regurgitated into the wound, causing infection.
Skeletons in a mass grave from 1720 to 1721 in Martigues, near Marseille in southern France, yielded molecular evidence of the orientalis strain of Yersinia pestis, the organism responsible for bubonic plague. The second pandemic of bubonic plague was active in Europe from 1347, the beginning of the Black Death, until 1750.