Abbey panel may be lost 'Dance of Death' painting

HIGH tech work by a heritage scientist may have tracked down the missing image in a Northumberland series of medieval paintings.

- TONY HENDERSON on tracking down a missing link in a macabre series of paintings

A wooden panel, found in Hexham Abbey, could be the missing part of a run of panel paintings called the Dance of Death.

Four surviving paintings dating to around 1500, illustrate Death visiting powerful figures, including a cardinal, a king, an emperor and the Pope.

The possible existence of a fifth painting in the series had been discussed for hundreds of years.

Hexham Abbey's panels are considered some of the most important surviving examples of medieval English panel painting, a genre that was particularly vulnerable to destruction during periods of religious reform, such as the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century.

For centuries, scholars and art historians had speculated about the existence of a fifth panel, thought to depict the 'introducer or caller' introducing the sequence, following a 1790s sketch by antiquarian John Carter.

Then in 2017 a wooden panel, which had not been seen since the 1990s, was discovered in Hexham Abbey's triforium an area of the Abbey rarely visited due to its inaccessibility.