An allegorical art genre from the end of the Middle Ages on the universality of death: Death, or the dead, summons people of every condition, such as the pope, emperor, king, child and laborer, to dance their way to the grave. The oldest visual record is a mural, now lost, from 1424 to 1425, in the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris. Death appears as the great leveler.
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