Tod und Mädchen. Ein Motiv in der Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit

Taking Hans Sebald Beham’s engraving ‘Sleeping Woman and Death’ as a starting point, this article explores the depictions of ‘Death and the Maiden’ that emerged in the early 16th century. Like Beham, artists such as Hans Baldung Grien and Niklaus Manuel Deutsch imbued encounters between Death and young women with eroticism. Central to the article is the question of the origin of the ‘Death and the Maiden’ motif, which is often associated with representations of the Danse Macabre. The article proposes an alternative origin in late medieval allegorical representations of vanitas, voluptas/luxuria, or Frau Welt, in which vanity and the forgetfulness of death were explored. These older motifs were further eroticised in the 16th century.