The Dance of Death Print

**This product is no longer available** This print is a recreation of a beautiful anonymous German engraving from 1635 that features a standing, smiling skeleton aiming a crossbow. An hourglass rests by his back foot. A broken arrow sits beside it and there is another one in the quiver. It was a piece of art designed to hang at eye level so that the arrow—the one locked and loaded into the crossbow—was pointing directly at the viewer. In French, the inscription reads Ma flesche (asseure toy) n’espargnera personne Vous danserez trestout ce balet, que je sonnne My arrow (I promise you) spares no one You will all dance the ballet of which I sing It’s a fantastic and haunting memento mori, meant to be looked at multiple times a day. It calls  to mind the quote from the movie Gladiator, which has been wrongly attributed to Marcus Aurelius, “Death smiles at every man, and all a man can do is smile back.” More than “art,” this was a practice, part of a genre known as “The Dance of Deat