Death Dance

While investigating a doctor accused of drug-facilitated sexual assaults, Manhattan Assistant DA Alex Cooper learns of the grisly death of a world-class ballerina at Lincoln Center. Fairstein's latest "New York Times" bestseller is available in a Premium Edition.

The Dance of Death Danse Macabre Hans Holbein With an introductory note by Austin Dobson Dance of Death, also called Danse Macabre, is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all. The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or personified Death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer. They were produced as mementos mori, to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life. Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now-lost mural in the Saints Innocents Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424 to 1425.

"The Dance of Death: Exhibited in Elegant Engravings on Wood with a Dissertation on the Several Representations of that Subject but More Particularly on Those Ascribed to Macaber and Hans Holbein" by Francis Douce Death has often been a source of fascination for civilizations around the world. In this book, readers are educated about the personification of this inevitable phenomenon and its evolution through time. Hans Holbein the Younger was a German-Swiss painter and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style, and is considered one of the greatest portraitists. He also was fascinated with death in some of his work, which are studied in detail in this text.

Elina Gertsman's multifaceted study introduces readers to the imagery and texts of the Dance of Death, an extraordinary subject that first emerged in western European art and literature in the late medieval era. Conceived from the start as an inherently public image, simultaneously intensely personal and widely accessible, the medieval Dance of Death proclaimed the inevitability of death and declared the futility of human ambition. Gertsman inquires into the theological, socio-historic, literary, and artistic contexts of the Dance of Death, exploring it as a site of interaction between text, image, and beholder. Pulling together a wide variety of sources and drawing attention to those images that have slipped through the cracks of the art historical canon, Gertsman examines the visual, textual, aural, pastoral, and performative discourses that informed the creation and reception of the Dance of Death, and proposes different modes of viewing for several paintings, each of which invited the beholder to participate in an active, kinesthetic experience.