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Article: Personifications of Death
- Article from:
- Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Personifications of Death
Visitors to the Church of St. Nicholas in Tallinn, Estonia, will recall the representation of death as a bony, dark figure with a skull, as depicted in Bernt Notke's famous canvas,
Danse Macabre
(c. 1460). Many others are acquainted with the image of death as the reaper in Ingmar Bergman's dramatic film
The Seventh Seal
(1957).
Through the ages people have tried to personify death by giving it a humanlike form. Personification is used in this context as the mental transformation of inner thoughts and feelings into autonomous figures. The term
personify
is defined as giving inanimate objects or abstract ideas human characteristics. Formed in this way, death ...