Carved by Erasmus Grasser in 1480, the Moriscan Dancers are among the most precious possessions of the Munich City Museum. The name of the figures refers to what were originally probably Moorish jumping dances, which were later also performed at the great courts.

The first source-based record of the sculptor Erasmus Grasser dates back to 1475. The guild of "painters, carvers, silk nadders and glaziers" tried to prevent the young sculptor, who came from Schmidmühlen in the Upper Palatinate, from becoming a master in a petition to the council of the city of Munich. In this document, Grasser is characterized as an unfaithful, muddle-headed and arcklistiger servant.

Nevertheless, he succeeded in obtaining a very lucrative municipal commission a short time later, having apparently also attracted attention through the innovations of his style, which were still unusual in Munich. For the hall of the "Tanzhaus" (today's Old City Hall), which Jörg von Halsbach had been building since 1470, Grasser created eleven coats of arms as well as the sun and moon in 1477. In 1480 he was paid for sixteen moriscene dancers. The carvings were part of a heraldic ceiling program intended to historically legitimize the broad claim to leadership of Bavarian Duke Albrecht IV. The concept of the hall ceiling was probably worked out by the literary figure, historian and painter Ulrich Fuetrer (1430-1496). It provided for the crest of the barrel vault with the coat of arms of Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria with the imperial eagle and the white-blue roughened heart shield of the Wittelsbach dynasty. The coat of arms was originally surrounded by a halo of rays and was cosmologically related to the representations of the sun and moon. The world-spanning horizon of the formerly imperial and now newly articulated claim to power was marked out by a frieze of almost one hundred additional coats of arms. They were to be understood as a representation of the entire circle of the earth. The moriscene dancers, ten of which have survived, were originally part of the coat of arms frieze and were mounted on brackets at the base of the wooden barrel ceiling at a height of five meters.

Before the destruction of the hall during the Second World War, the figures were recovered for the museum in 1931, and the coats of arms in 1942. Today, they have been replaced by copies in the hall used for municipal festivities.