Hi Em.
I was going to PM this to you, but your box is full.
I got interested in your question about death.
It seems that death was first personified as the grim reaper that we know today after a huge famine in the early 1300s and the Black Death 1348-50 ish. (They didn't call it that then, they called it the great plague and stuff like that.)
http://www.vlib.us/medieval/lectures/black_death.html
I can't say for sure that death was never personified before that, he probably was, but after the plague these depictions became common.
Examples of these are the dance of death (danse macabre), the earliest of which is known from the 1420s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre
Then it carries on with stuff like the Michael Wolnegut picture that is at the top of that page, some of the skeletons there are sort of cloaked, but the colour of the cloak isn't defined.
And Hans Holbein who did a whole death alphabet. Cute.
http://www.dodedans.com/Eholbein.htm
A lot of these images show the skeleton of death wound in a white cloth, which I suppose is the winding sheet of the dead.
Like this one from 1376.
http://www.heritage-images.com/Preview/PreviewPage.aspx?id=2330429&pricing=true&licenseType=RM
The earliest depiction I can find of death in a specifically black robe is this,
http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:818...l~23~23,ODLodl~1~1,ODLodl~24~24&mi=42&trs=307 (sorry about the big link)
It's by Guillaume de Deguileville, from his book Le Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine (the pilgrimage of the human life).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_de_Deguileville
I can't date this. Deguileville wrote his book in the 1330s, and another edition was made in the 1350s. So that would straddle the black death.
However, this illustration comes from the Bodliean library, and is part of the Douce collection, which was given to the library in the will of Francis Douce
http://www.rsl.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/mss/douce.htm
The catalogue of the collection dates this manuscript (douce 300) to the early 15th century
http://www.rsl.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/jpegs/sumcat/vol-iv/SCIV585.jpg
So, if that's correct then it would be a later edition made after the black death.
The first tarot card I can find with a robed death is the Gringonneur (15th C) which has death robed and on a horse, but the robes aren't black.
The Rosenwald sheet (16th C) has death on a horse with a robe and scythe, but it's just a line drawing. So the robe looks white.
Tarot de Paris (17th C) has something draped on him. Not sure what.
Same with the Vandeborre.
Grand Etteilla, from 1788 has a standing robed death, but the picture I can find shows the robe as brown.
http://tarotconnection.net/etteilla/page/6/
In the encyclopedia of tarot (1) the Tellurian tarot (1971) shows a robed death, but no scythe.
Other tarots from that time period show variations of this image. Morgan Greer probably the best known. Nice card.
So, the cloak is one of death's things, and it comes and goes. It's optional. It seems to have developed from the idea of a winding sheet, and then (possibly as winding sheets went out of use) morphed into a sort of monks robe, maybe influenced by gothic literature around 1800, that had loads of spooky monk stuff going on.
Part of this could also be artistic considerations. A cloak covers a load of complicated bones.
There is a great Grim reaper scene from Metropolis. But again the robes aren't black.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cag6CSo-g9c&feature=related
The reason that the black robed image is so common now is probably down to a film, The Seventh Seal, (1957) which shows death as robed and hooded, and playing chess (borrowed from medieval imagery), where death also played chess.
This has been parodied so many times (Bill, Ted and Twister) that it's pretty much how we see death now.
My favourite Death is Neil Gaiman's, from Sandman. But she's not very typical.
Hope this is of some use to you.
Even if it's not, I had a good time looking it all up.