Used as tools for devotion and preparing one’s soul for a Christian death, personal prayer books often featured dance of death imagery. The margins of this Book of Hours include fifty-six such scenes. The manuscript was produced in Paris, and the scenes are supposedly derived from the original dance of death mural, dating to 1424–25 (and destroyed in 1699), in the city’s Cemetery of the Holy Innocents. Here you can see the minuscule, simplistically rendered pope (left) and emperor (right). Unlike the Parisian mural, this dance of death excludes women, which might indicate that the original patron was male.
Book of Hours
Paris, 1430–35
Illuminated by Bedford Master and workshop (act. 1415–35)
The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan, 1909; MS M.359, fols. 123v–124r