Understanding the world’s history involves many components. A key component to understanding the past is having concrete evidence to explain the time, origin, people, and the way of thinking that categorized that time and people. Many of these means of learning about the past have survived over time. There are documents, sculptures, architecture, pottery, paintings, and more. One example of this is the painting The Culture of Death in St. Nicholas’s Church in Estonia.
The painter of The Culture of Death, found in chapter eleven of Macmillan’s World History, was Berndt Notke. Notke was an artist in Germany in the 1460’s. This painting is a reliable source because the artist lived through the plague. He saw with his own eyes the devastation …show more content…
The Black Death is a plague that decimated one third of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century. It was associated with the victim’s skin looking like it had turned to ash before death took him away. The people infected with the Black Death were rotting from the inside out. The disease was spread by the unsanitary conditions of Europe attracting rats that were carriers for the disease from the Mongolian Empire. The painting The Culture of Death focuses on the difference of life and death and how prominent death was in society at the time. In the painting, each living person is holding a conversation with someone who has died from the plague. The painter even went as far as to make every dead person into a skeleton with skin just barely stretched over the emaciated frames along with white funeral wrappings clothing the body. Each living person in the painting seems to have a different occupation. There appears to be a priest or a bishop, some type of king, an empress, and either someone from the elite society or a commoner. Each person is having a separate conversation with the dead. Although, the empress is even having a conversation with Death himself. In the translated lines, the empress is seen telling Death that he has the wrong person. After all, even Death can not touch an empress. Death simply replies by telling her that it