| In the midst of the luxuriant vegetable imagery of the Malinalco garden murals is a fresco depicting the inevitability of death. In a confessional built into the north cloister wall is a painting of an Augustinian monk and Death as the skeletal reaper with his scythe. The image of the friar and Death was borrowed either from a published version of the popular medieval themes Dance of Death (danse macabre) or from illustrations of the Triumph of Death in a prayer book, such as the Book of Hours. The Augustinian murals of Death as Reaper like this one in Malinalco, or another in the Augustinian monastery of Huatlatlauhca, Puebla, served not only as a grim reminders of mankind’s mortality, but of sin and therefore, of the need for forgiveness and salvation. |
