3-056-961 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Man dying of the plague, 14th-15th century. A priest gives the last rites to a sufferer, as a smiling devil wounds him with a spear. God looks down from above. The Black Death, which arrived in 1348, killed about half of England's population of 5-6 million. Images of death pervade the art of post-plague England. Not only are images of mortality more frequent than before the plague, but they are more explicit in their dipiction of death and decay. This example is from an illustrated collection of English religious texts compled by a Carthusian monk in Yorkshire in the 15th century.