In the late 19th century, artists were going goth. Works like Vincent van Gogh’s Head of a Skeleton With a Burning Cigarette (1886), Edvard Munch’s By the Deathbed (1893) and Hugo Simberg’s The Garden ...

The dirge is a mournful song, lamenting over the dead. In Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), Christopher Marlowe describes a procession of friars, that damn the spirit that had disrupted their meal instead of ...