Dance of Death: Adam Tilling the Ground

The print Dance of Death: Adam Tilling the Ground by Hans Holbein the Younger is a pivotal work of graphic arts created between 1521 and 1531. Executed as a meticulous and extremely detailed woodcut, this piece exemplifies Holbein’s mastery of relief printing, a highly influential artistic technique across 16th-century Germany. The exceptionally small scale of these images belies the dramatic intensity achieved by the artist, contributing to the series’ widespread fame across Northern Europe.

This work illustrates one of the central vignettes in the Danse Macabre sequence, which allegorizes the power of Death over all strata of society. The subject depicts Adam immediately following the expulsion from Eden, destined to work the earth for sustenance and reminded of his impending mortality. Adam is shown laboring in harsh, barren earth, physically strained by the consequence of original sin, while the figure of Death aggressively dictates the pace of his toil. The scene acts as a powerful theological and moral commentary on the universality and inevitability of death.

Younger’s series of "Dance of Death" woodcuts were widely circulated as mass-produced prints, contributing significantly to the dissemination of sophisticated visual culture and Reformation-era morality tales originating in Germany. The series became a celebrated example of Northern Renaissance graphic work, and today high-quality images of this classic work are often available through public domain resources. This impression of Dance of Death: Adam Tilling the Ground is held in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.