 Often they turn towards the altar, or are kneeling facing it in profile.In the late Middle Ages, influenced by the Black Death and devotional writers, explicit "memento mori" imagery of death in the forms of skulls or skeletons, or even decomposing corpses overrun with worms in the "transi" tomb, became common in northern Europe, and may be found in some funerary art, as well as motifs like the Dance of Death and works like the "Ars moriendi", or "Art of Dying".It took until the Baroque period for such imagery to become popular in Italy, in works like the tomb of Pope Urban VIII by Bernini (1628–1647), where a bronze winged skeleton inscribes the Pope's name on a tablet below his enthroned effigy.