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The idea for this first piece of writing on the topic of death came from the exhibition “Image of the danse macabre in the western culture from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century” that was held at the Refectory of the Church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1995 and at the Pinacoteca Civica in Como in the past few months. The exhibition presented six hundred original prints made between 1450 and 1950 as well as some peculiar and rare pottery statuettes.
The whole iconography and people's imagery have always been attracted by this frame that closes, or rather breaks, man's life from the early Middle Ages to Humanism, to Renaissance up until the beginning of our century. Death's image, furthermore, was not only represented in Italy and in the rest of Europe,

but also in the Slavic countries. The Spanish even exported this “strong” genre in their American colonies although indigenous art already showed its interest in it and had some famous examples.
Ancient and modern, as well as contemporary, poets have been writing about death, suffice it to quote Lorenzo the Magnificent's lines that push readers to meditate over youth and life's transience, or to the famous title of Totò's poems “Death is a level” or “The level”, meaning that the rich and the poor, beautiful and ugly people, all make way for the dance when they are to face death. Actually, a closer look at this dance will reveal that, first of all, it is an apotropaic representation, that is it wards off ill-luck, and then it is a necessary rite where the entire social state is represented. The first dances of death were real processions, representations in which the members of the social classes - from the emperor to the young girl, from the doctor to the student, from the knight to the abbess - all paraded before the skeleton's sickle.
Death was a lesson of memento mori for everyone; it was, in other words, a “Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return”, as the ecclesiastics say in the catholic liturgy.

Scenes from “The triumph of death” can be found in Pisa, Palermo and Clusone, while about 400 prints of witches who died at the stake are known in Benevento. The vanitas was devoted to human shortness, especially in the eighteen century with xylographs with skulls surrounded by rotting plants, the sign of an easy passing away. Wenceslaus Hollar, for example, was specialised in making the

ecclesiastics dance with death, and Hans Holbein, Henry VIII's young court painter, drew a dance of death in five tablets, and two original fragments of it showing the emperor and his wife were saved from the destruction that took place on August 5, 1805. Zizenhausen's terracotta shows the real characters of Basle's danse macabre.
From the end of the eighteen century till today, there has been a series of English and American engravings, like Van Hassen's watercolours that depict “the glutton”, “the ballerina” and “the student”, artist Thomas Rowlandson, instead, drew episodes of hunting, a shipwreck and the “mortal blow” a boxer gives his opponent. The wood tablets on which the painter painted the two banks of the bridge connecting the lake of Lucerne with a series of macabre scenes should also be seen. An 1859 lithograph shows the fresco with death's times of the oratory of the Disciplini in Clusone. In Paris Alfred Rethel printed the series of xylographs of the “Dance of death “ in 1848. Expressionist painter Edmond Billa, after World War I, engraved a red and black danse macabre on wood where it is possible to see the Kaiser on death's arm. In 1947 José Porter used World War I, the defeat of Catalonia in 1930 and the victory over Franco as his main subjects to illustrate death and its triumph.
Death is still a mystery after all, it is a hope for the believer; people try to keep it at bay with drugs and machines to cure diseases. It continues to be the spectre threatening man's life, and the ancient, modern and contemporary painters portrayed its different and historical moments where illustrious and poor people, the old and the children, and even Christ who inaugurates the Christian era, all face each other before something that levels people, interrupts their life and continues to dance forever.

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