page_title: Danse Macabre
section_title: Paintings
hierarchical_section_title: Danse Macabre / Paintings
caption_attribution_description: La Danse macabre. Paris, Guy Marchant, 1486&#160;: Un abbé et un bailli. Illustration numérisée d'après le microfilm R 1760, Paris, BnF (Réserve des Livres rares et précieux), cote&#160;: Res Ye 189/Microfilm R 1760
context_page_description: The Danse Macabre, also called the Dance of Death, is an artistic genre of allegory of the Late Middle Ages on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Danse Macabre unites all.
  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 laborer. It was produced as memento mori, to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life. Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now-lost mural at Holy Innocents' Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424 to 1425.
context_section_description: The earliest recorded visual example is the lost mural on the south wall of the cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris, which was painted in 1424–25 during the regency of John, Duke of Bedford: with its 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. There were also painted schemes in Basel (the earliest dating from c. 1440); a series of paintings on canvas by Bernt Notke, 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 (1471), 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 in 1516/7. This work was destroyed when the wall was torn down in 1660, but a 1649 copy by Albrecht Kauw 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, known as the 'Dauce 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 mediaeval 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 Ars moriendi).
  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 mediaeval 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 Arabic: مقابر‎, 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.
caption: An abbot and a bailiff, dancing the Dance Macabre, miniature from a 1486 book, printed by Guy Marchant in Paris
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