The Danse Macabre consists of the dead, or a personification of death, summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer.

[1] Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme (apart from 14th century Triumph of Death paintings) was a now-lost mural at Holy Innocents' Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424 to 1425.

[2] Early examples of Dance of Death artwork were present in religious contexts such as murals on Christian church walls.

[3] In his 1998 study on medieval religious practices, historian Francis Rapp wrote thatChristians were moved by the sight of the Infant Jesus playing on his mother's knee; their hearts were touched by the Pietà; and patron saints reassured them by their presence.

[2] The paintings include body positions that seem to indicate movement, particular gestures, and specific orders and dynamics between the characters, while texts use relevant dance vocabulary.

[2] The Danse Macabre was possibly enacted at village pageants and at court masques, with people "dressing up as corpses from various strata of society", and may have been the origin of costumes worn during Allhallowtide.

The bubonic plague and its devastating effects on the European population were significantly contributing factors to the inspiration and solidification of the Dance of Death tradition in the fourteenth century.

What is often considered to be the earliest recorded visual example is the lost mural on the south wall of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris.

It is possible that the Maccabean Martyrs were commemorated in some early French plays, or that people just associated the book's vivid descriptions of the martyrdom with the interaction between Death and its prey.

Numerous mural versions of that legend from the 13th century onwards have survived (for instance, in the Hospital Church of Wismar or the residential Longthorpe Tower outside Peterborough).

A Danse Macabre painting may show a round dance headed by Death or, more usually, a chain of alternating dead and live dancers.

From the highest ranks of the mediaeval hierarchy (usually pope and emperor) descending to its lowest (beggar, peasant, and child), each mortal's hand is taken by an animated skeleton or cadaver.

The apparent class distinction in almost all of these paintings is completely neutralized by Death as the ultimate equalizer, so that a sociocritical element is subtly inherent to the whole genre.

William Ivins (quoting W. J. Linton) writes of Lützelburger's work wrote: "'Nothing indeed, by knife or by graver, is of higher quality than this man's doing.'

The first book edition, titled Les Simulachres et Historiées Faces de la Mort and containing forty-one woodcuts, was published at Lyons by the Treschsel brothers in 1538.

The Dance of Death (1523–26) refashions the late-medieval allegory of the Danse Macabre as a reformist satire, and one can see the beginnings of a gradual shift from traditional to reformed Christianity.

[17] That shift had many permutations however, and in a study Natalie Zemon Davis has shown that the contemporary reception and afterlife of Holbein's designs lent themselves to neither purely Catholic or Protestant doctrine, but could be outfitted with different surrounding prefaces and sermons as printers and writers of different political and religious leanings took them up.

[23] This is perhaps nowhere more strikingly captured than in the wonderful blocks showing the plowman earning his bread by the sweat of his brow only to have his horses speed him to his end by Death.

Or there is the nice balance in composition Holbein achieves between the heavy-laden traveling salesman insisting that he must still go to market while Death tugs at his sleeve to put down his wares once and for all: "Venite ad me, qui onerati estis."

There is a Spanish Danza de la Muerte, a French Danse Macabre, and a German Totentanz with various Latin manuscripts written during the 14th century.

Similarly to the musical or artistic representations, the texts describe living and dead persons being called to dance or form a procession with Death.