The Danse Macabre (; ), also called the Dance of Death, is an artistic genre of allegory from the Late Middle Ages on the universality of death.
The Danse Macabre consists of the dead, or a personification of death, summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer. It was produced as memento mori, to remind people of the fragility of their lives and the vanity of earthly glory. Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme (apart from 14th century Triumph of Death paintings) was a now-lost mural at Holy Innocents' Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424 to 1425. In 1874 the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns wrote Danse macabre, Op. 40, a haunting symphonic "poem" for orchestra. It premiered 24 January 1875.
Background Religion is an important contextual factor around the Dance of Death tradition and its effect on the population, with new eschatology concepts in the fourteenth century being critical for the development of the Dance of Death. Early examples of Dance of Death artwork were present in religious contexts such as murals on Christian church walls. These served to remind people about the inevitability of death and urge moral reflection in order to cope with this reality. In his 1998 study on medieval religious practices, historian Francis Rapp wrote thatChristians were moved by the sight of the Infant Jesus playing on his mother's knee; their hearts were touched by the Pietà; and patron saints reassured them by their presence. But, all the while, the danse macabre urged them not to forget the end of all earthly things.It is generally agreed upon by scholars that Dance of Death depictions do show realistic dancing based on the quality of gestures seen in artwork and familiarity with steps found in texts. The paintings include body positions that seem to indicate movement, particular gestures, and specific orders and dynamics between the characters, while texts use relevant dance vocabulary. These elements may indicate the presence of past enacted dances and that the depictions were read for a performative function, as hypothesized by Gertsman in her paper "Pleyinge and Peyntynge: Performing the Dance of Death." This view centers on the incorporation of both visual and theatrical devices in these depictions to create effective artwork. Gertsman writes thatBy drawing its inspiration from the sphere of performance, the Dance of Death imagery, along with its text, invites a performative reading, informed by specific structures of the verses, the concept of movement, and the understanding of the body language of the danse macabre's protagonists. However, there is scarce evidence surrounding a physical dancing performance tradition of the Dance of Death outside of its other depictions. The Danse Macabre was possibly enacted at village pageants and at court masques, with people "dressing up as corpses from various strata of society", and may have been the origin of costumes worn during Allhallowtide. Regardless, its main influence has been in the form of visual arts such as murals, paintings, and more.
The bubonic plague and its devastating effects on the European population were significantly contributing factors to the inspiration and solidification of the Dance of Death tradition in the fourteenth century. In her thesis, The Black Death and its Effect on 14th and 15th Century Art, Anna Louise Des Ormeaux describes the effect of the Black Death on art, mentioning the Danse Macabre as she does so: Some plague art contains gruesome imagery that was directly influenced by the mortality of the plague or by the medieval fascination with the macabre and awareness of death that were augmented by the plague. Some plague art documents psychosocial responses to the fear that plague aroused in its victims. Other plague art is of a subject that directly responds to people's reliance on religion to give them hope. The cultural impact of mass outbreaks of disease are not fleeting or temporary. In their paper on "Black Death, Plagues, and the Danse Macabre. Depictions of Epidemics in Art," Rittershaus and Eschenberg discuss artistic representations of various epidemics starting with the bubonic plague and extending to cholera and recent epidemics. The suffering and realization of death's closeness, which the black death caused in Europe, were integrated with concepts of morality and Christianity to give rise to the Dance of Death tradition as a direct response to the epidemic. Cholera cases in the nineteenth century inspired a resurgence of Dance of Death depictions after the initial black death depictions, with religious connotations still present but less important. The Dance of Death tradition is a testament to the profound impact of an epidemic on people as depicted in art. A disease's effect can endure past the initial stages of outbreak, in its deep etching upon the culture and society. This can be seen in the artworks and motifs of Danse Macabre as people attempted to cope with the death surrounding them.
Paintings
What is often considered to be the earliest recorded visual example is the lost mural on the south wall of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris. It was painted in 1424–25 during the regency of John, Duke of Bedford. It features an emphatic inclusion of a dead crowned king at a time when France did not have a crowned king. The mural may well have had a political subtext.Oosterwijk (2008). However, some have argued that 14th century Triumph of Death paintings such as the fresco by Francesco Traini are also examples of danse macabre.
There were also painted schemes in Basel (the earliest dating from ); a series of paintings on canvas by Bernt Notke (1440–1509) in Lübeck (1463); the initial fragment of the original Bernt Notke painting Danse Macabre (accomplished at the end of the 15th century) in the St Nicholas' Church, Tallinn, Estonia; the painting at the back wall of the chapel of Sv. Marija na Škrilinama in the Istrian town of Beram (1474), painted by Vincent of Kastav; the painting in the Holy Trinity Church of Hrastovlje, Istria by John of Kastav (1490).
A notable example was painted on the cemetery walls of the Dominican Abbey, in Bern, by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch (1484–1530) in 1516/7. This work of art was destroyed when the wall was torn down in 1660, but a 1649 copy by Albrecht Kauw (1621–1681) is extant. There was also a Dance of Death painted around 1430 and displayed on the walls of Pardon Churchyard at Old St Paul's Cathedral, London, with texts by John Lydgate (1370–1451) known as the 'Dance of (St) Poulys', which was destroyed in 1549.
The deathly horrors of the 14th century such as recurring famines, the Hundred Years' War in France, and, most of all, the Black Death, were culturally assimilated throughout Europe. The omnipresent possibility of sudden and painful death increased the religious desire for penance, but it also evoked a hysterical desire for amusement while still possible; a last dance as cold comfort. The Danse Macabre combines both desires: in many ways similar to the medieval mystery plays, the dance-with-death allegory was originally a didactic dialogue poem to remind people of the inevitability of death and to advise them strongly to be prepared at all times for death (see memento mori and ).
Short verse dialogues between Death and each of its victims, which could have been performed as plays, can be found in the direct aftermath of the Black Death in Germany and in Spain (where it was known as the Totentanz and la Danza de la Muerte, respectively).
The French term Danse Macabre may derive from the Latin Chorea Machabæorum, literally "dance of the Maccabees." In 2 Maccabees, a deuterocanonical book of the Bible, the grim martyrdom of a mother and her seven sons is described and was a well-known medieval subject. It is possible that the Maccabean Martyrs were commemorated in some early French plays, or that people just associated the book's vivid descriptions of the martyrdom with the interaction between Death and its prey.
An alternative explanation is that the term entered France via Spain, the , maqabir (pl., "cemeteries") being the root of the word. Both the dialogues and the evolving paintings were ostensive penitential lessons that even illiterate people (who were the overwhelming majority) could understand.
Mural paintings
Frescoes and murals dealing with death had a long tradition, and were widespread. For example, the legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead. On a ride or hunt, three young gentlemen meet three cadavers (sometimes described as their ancestors) who warn them, Quod fuimus, estis; quod sumus, vos eritis ("What we were, you are; what we are, you will be"). Numerous mural versions of that legend from the 13th century onwards have survived (for instance, in the Hospital Church of Wismar or the residential Longthorpe Tower outside Peterborough). Since they showed pictorial sequences of men and corpses covered with shrouds, those paintings are sometimes regarded as cultural precursors of the new genre.
A Danse Macabre painting may show a round dance headed by Death or, more usually, a chain of alternating dead and live dancers. From the highest ranks of the mediaeval hierarchy (usually pope and emperor) descending to its lowest (beggar, peasant, and child), each mortal's hand is taken by an animated skeleton or cadaver. The famous Totentanz by Bernt Notke in St. Mary's Church, Lübeck (destroyed during the Allied bombing of Lübeck in World War II), presented the dead dancers as very lively and agile, making the impression that they were actually dancing, whereas their living dancing partners looked clumsy and passive. The apparent class distinction in almost all of these paintings is completely neutralized by Death as the ultimate equalizer, so that a sociocritical element is subtly inherent to the whole genre. The Totentanz of Metnitz, for example, shows how a pope crowned with his tiara is being led into Hell by Death.
Usually, a short dialogue is attached to each pair of dancers, in which Death is summoning him (or, more rarely, her) to dance and the summoned is moaning about impending death. In the first printed Totentanz textbook (Anon.: Vierzeiliger oberdeutscher Totentanz, Heidelberger Blockbuch, ), Death addresses, for example, the emperor:
At the lower end of the Totentanz, Death calls, for example, the peasant to dance, who answers:
Various examples of Danse Macabre in Slovenia and Croatia below:
Hans Holbein's woodcuts
Renowned for his Dance of Death series, the famous designs by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543) were drawn in 1526 while he was in Basel. They were cut in wood by the accomplished Formschneider (block cutter) Hans Lützelburger.
William Ivins (quoting W. J. Linton) writes of Lützelburger's work wrote:
"Nothing indeed, by knife or by graver, is of higher quality than this man's doing.' For by common acclaim the originals are technically the most marvelous woodcuts ever made."Ivins, p. 234.
These woodcuts soon appeared in proofs with titles in German. The first book edition, titled Les Simulachres et Historiées Faces de la Mort and containing forty-one woodcuts, was published at Lyons by the Treschsel brothers in 1538. The popularity of the work, and the currency of its message, are underscored by the fact that there were eleven editions before 1562, and over the sixteenth century perhaps as many as a hundred unauthorized editions and imitations.Clark (1947), p. 32. Ten further designs were added in later editions.