The Abbess (Danse Macabre)

A skeletal figure of Death, wearing a jester's cap with long, drooping flaps, pulls an abbess by her habit toward the left. The abbess, wearing a veil and holding rosary beads, looks backward with a distraught expression, her mouth open. Behind her, in the arched stone doorway of a building, a younger nun stands with both hands raised in alarm. An hourglass, a traditional memento mori symbol, sits on the ground in the foreground.

Part of Hans Holbein's 'Les Simulachres & Historiees Faces de la Mort' series, this print is a central example of the late medieval and Renaissance 'Danse Macabre' tradition. It reflects the preoccupation with the leveling power of death, which strikes without regard for ecclesiastical status or social rank.