The Middle Ages
Trails
Danse Macabre
The phrase may ring a bell, even if you can't place exactly what it means. As the name implies, you may want to avoid this topic unless you have a taste for the macabre.
It's a literary topos as well as a visual one, so be on the watch for that.
One of the really striking aspects about this art is the attention to gruesome details. Notice how hair remains on two of the skeletons. Notice how the newer corpses still have flesh and entrails. This shows a distressing intimacy with the stages of decay.
A characteristic theme is death striking people in the midst of their daily lives. This picture shows that clearly.
Same theme. Here we have death in the form of a winged skeleton carrying off a baby while the mother sleeps. These images still have the power to disturb, unlike most medieval art.
Dürer's famous woodcut of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. See if you can figure out which one is which. If you need to, go look up the Four Horsemen. They're in Revelations. That would be in the New Testament. <grin>
There are *lots* of other images. Oddly, only a relative handful are on the Net. Look for late medieval art books in the library.