Calaveras (Spanish for skulls) are produced every year for the Day of the Dead a day of festivity when prints, skeletal artefacts, toys, cakes and sweets are sold and ritualistic offerings made to dead relatives.
The great Mexican printmakers Manuel Manilla and J. G. Posada made hundreds of Calaveras or Dances of Death which showed skeletons in everyday acts, working, drinking, dancing, preaching, fighting, flirting and riding bicycles and display an incomparable mixture of vitality and morbidity.
