Füssen's Dance of Death

The dance of death in the St. Anna Chapel of the former Benedictine monastery of St. Mang in Bavarian Füssen is the oldest surviving dance of death in Bavaria and is now considered one of the significant monumental dances of death in Europe.

The dance of death is a pictorial representation that emerged in the 14th century of the power of death over human life in a series of allegorical groups under the image of the dance. In March 1602, the then abbot of the Benedictine monastery of St. Mang, Matthias Schober, commissioned the Füssen painter Jakob Hiebeler to paint a dance of death on the occasion of the restoration of the Anna Chapel. The artist was particularly inspired by the great Basel dance of death, the Bern dance of death, and the "Images of Death" by Hans Holbein the Younger. The accompanying verses largely adhered to one of the contemporary printed versions of the Basel model. Füssen, with the dance of death representations in the Anna Chapel and the St. Sebastian cemetery church, thus became a central location for dance of death iconography alongside Basel, Lübeck, Lucerne, and Vienna.

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