The Abbot and Death

A woodcut illustration from the 'Dance of Death' series showing an elderly abbot in monastic robes looking back in alarm as a skeletal figure of Death stands behind him. Death, grinning with hollow sockets, pulls the abbot's miter from his head with one hand while gripping the shaft of a pastoral crozier with the other. The background features a barren tree and a distant hilly landscape. The abbot's robes are rendered with heavy hatching, contrasting with the stark, bony limbs of the skeleton.

This print is part of Hans Holbein the Younger’s 'Les Simulachres & Historiees Faces de la Mort' (1538), a seminal work in the Danse Macabre tradition that reflects the universal mortality regardless of social or ecclesiastical standing. It serves as a visual sermon on the transience of worldly power.