The Dance of Death, also known as the Danse Macabre, is an allegorical subject in late medieval art arising from the omnipresent fear of death, thoughts about the transcience of human life and sin. It emerged in the 15th century amongst other new death-related subjects in iconography and it spread throughout Europe primarily through painting. The Dance of Death is a cortège consisting of skeletons or cadavers and living people of all social classes, the latter being shown in a hierachical order starting with the clergy and concluding with the lowest classes. Folk beliefs associated with death, morality plays and the sermons of Franciscan and Dominican preachers all influenced the formation of the Danse macabre motif, yet its exact origin is unknown. The first painted Danse macabre mural, dating from 1424, occupied the outer wall of Holy Innocents' Cemetery in Paris. Aside from the aforementioned exemplar, other Dances of Death analyzed in this paper include murals in Basel, La Chaise-Dieu, Beram, Hrastovlje and in Berlin.