The Angel of Death in Painting: 12 Works and Where the Skeleton Came From
Death in European painting almost never arrives as a skeleton with a scythe by accident. That figure was invented late, around the fourteenth century, after the plague. Before it, death came as an angel, and painters kept both versions running side by side for four hundred years.
Where the scythe came from
The skeleton with a scythe appears after the Black Death of 1347 to 1351, not before.
The Angel of Death in Christian imagery is usually a beautiful young man, not a monster.
One painter made a whole print series of Death coming for every rank of society.
A famous painting shows Death and the young woman in an embrace that is deliberately ambiguous.
And the pale rider of Revelation is the only one the text actually names.
1 | The Triumph of Death, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (around 1562)
An army of skeletons drives the living into a giant trap, and nobody is spared: a king counting coins, a cardholder mid game, a couple still playing music.
It hangs in the Prado. More on him in Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
2 | The Dance of Death, Hans Holbein the Younger (drawn 1523 to 1525)
Forty one small woodcuts in which Death takes the pope, the emperor, the merchant, the ploughman and the child, each in one image, each in the middle of ordinary business. Holbein drew them by 1525, and they were not published until 1538 in Lyon.
More on him in Hans Holbein the Younger. The technique is in what is a woodcut.
3 | Death and the Maiden
German painters of the sixteenth century, Baldung Grien above all, painted Death holding a young woman by the hair or the waist, and made the pose ambiguous on purpose.
The subject runs from there to Schiele in 1915. More on him in Egon Schiele.
4 | The Isle of the Dead, Arnold Bocklin (1880 to 1886)
A boat approaches a rock island of cypresses, carrying a coffin and a white figure standing behind it. Bocklin made five versions and refused to explain any of them.
More on him in Arnold Bocklin.
5 | The pale rider
Revelation gives one horseman a name: his name was Death, and Hades followed with him. That is the only place scripture personifies it directly.
The reading system is in what is iconography.
6 | Azrael and the angel traditions
In Jewish and Islamic tradition the angel who takes the soul is named or described, and the imagery is calm rather than gruesome. That calm version fed back into Christian art.
It is why so many deathbed paintings show a serene winged figure instead of a skeleton.
7 | The transi tomb
Some late medieval tombs are carved in two levels: the person in state above, the same person as a decaying corpse below. The patron paid for both.
It is the same argument as a vanitas, in stone. More in what is vanitas.
8 | The Triumph of Death in Palermo
A huge fresco of around 1446 shows Death as an archer on a skeletal horse, riding over the rich while the poor beg him to take them. It is often compared to Guernica, though there is no record of Picasso standing in front of it.
More on him in Pablo Picasso.
9 | Death in Symbolist painting
Around 1900 painters stopped using the skeleton and started using atmosphere: a shadow at the door, a woman in black, a figure just outside the frame.
More on that world in what is symbolism in art.
10 | Death as a friend
Alfred Rethel made a woodcut in 1851 of Death as an old pilgrim ringing the church bells while a bell ringer sleeps for the last time. It is gentle, and it was meant to be.
He made it as one half of a pair. The other half shows Death as a cholera visitor at a Paris masked ball of 1831, and it is the opposite in every way.
11 | Mexican Death and the Catrina
Jose Guadalupe Posada engraved a skeleton in a feathered hat around 1910 to mock people who denied their own roots. It became the emblem of the Day of the Dead.
Diego Rivera named her Catrina and put her at the centre of a mural.
12 | Why the skeleton won
The angel is theologically correct and visually weak. A skeleton is legible at any size, from a church wall to a playing card, and it needs no caption in any language.
The image that survived is the one that worked from across a room.
The angel of death, questions people ask
When did Death become a skeleton? The skeletal personification spreads in Europe after the Black Death of 1347 to 1351, in Dance of Death cycles from the fifteenth century onward.
Is the Angel of Death in the Bible? Revelation names one horseman Death. Named angels of death such as Azrael come from later Jewish and Islamic tradition.
What is Death and the Maiden? A German subject of the sixteenth century in which Death embraces a young woman, treated by Hans Baldung Grien and much later by Egon Schiele.
What is the Isle of the Dead? A painting by Arnold Bocklin made in five versions between 1880 and 1886, showing a boat carrying a coffin to a rock island.
Where can I see these? The Prado for Bruegel, Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo for the fresco, the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Met for versions of Bocklin.
The detail I find hardest to forget: Holbein’s Death does not threaten anyone. He joins in. He plays the fiddle for the peasant and holds the hourglass for the merchant, and the person only notices at the last second.
More painted death sits at the Met and the Rijksmuseum.