INTRODUCTION

In my investigation of orador and defensor attitudes to death, from those of the dying to those of the bereaved, I have described two coherent and distinct ideologies which I believe co-existed and came into conflict in fifteenth-century Castile. Though I have drawn my evidence mainly from written sources, we have also seen that the division between the orador and defensor ideologies can be detected in the visual arts. The most striking images of death created in the fifteenth century were probably those of dancing skeletons and hideous beckoning corpses, but while some individuals may have believed that the macabre representations of a personified Death were accurate portrayals of reality, this was probably not the case for the intellectual elite of the oradores:

Macabre iconography was not the only artistic response to death and Martínez de Toledo’s definition of death as the separation of body and soul finds its artistic expression in the Arte de bien morir which, rather than showing a personified Death, emphasizes the struggle between angels and devils for the soul of Moriens. The illustrations accompanying the Arte de bien morir indicate the moment of death by a small human figure, which we can assume is the soul, emerging from Moriens’s head and ascending towards the angels hovering above the bed.