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This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.
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Lera Boroditsky at The Edge:
How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist’s native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.
Language Drives Art
Here are two German pictures showing Death with a beard. Baldung was a student of Duerer, so this isn't very independent evidence. I didn't find very many pictures looking for this, but Death-with-some-flesh is pretty common, though often still hard to score.
Since all the European drawings of Death that I've seen show death as a skeleton, usually almost entirely covered by a black robe, how did they classify them as male or female?