Danse Macabre

The ''Danse Macabre'' (; ) (from the French language), also called the Dance of Death, is an artistic genre of allegory of 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 laborer. The effect was both frivolous, and terrifying; beseeching its audience to react emotionally. It was produced as ''memento mori in Paris dating from 1424 to 1425.

Background

Historian Francis Rapp (1926–2020) writes that "''Christians 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.''" This ''Danse Macabre'' was 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.

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, of pandemics, are not fleeting or temporary. The 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

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 (1389–1435). 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.

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'').

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 ar , 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.

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:
File:Totentanz Maria im Fels Beram.JPG, The fresco at the back wall of the chapel of Sv. Marija na Škrilinama in the Istrian town of Beram (1474), painted by Vincent of Kastav, Croatia
File:Hrastovlje Dans3.jpg, Johannes de Castua: Detail of the ''Dance Macabre fresco'' (1490) in the Holy Trinity Church in Hrastovlje, Slovenia
File:Dance of Death (replica of 15th century fresco; National Gallery of Slovenia).jpg, ''Dance of Death'' (replica of 15th century fresco; National Gallery of Slovenia)
File:Totentanz in Hrastovlje.JPG, The famous ''Danse Macabre'' in Hrastovlje in the Holy Trinity Church
File:Trionfo della morte - Chiesa S. Maria Annunciata - Bienno (ph Luca Giarelli).jpg, ''Danse Macabre'' in St Maria in Bienno, 16th century

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''."

These woodcuts soon appeared in proofs with titles in German. The first book edition, 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. Ten further designs were added in later editions.

The ''Dance of Death'' (1523–26) refashions the late-medieval allegory of the ''Danse Macabre'' as a reformist satire, and one can see the beginnings of a gradual shift from traditional to reformed Christianity. That shift had many permutations however, and in a study Natalie Zemon Davis has shown that the contemporary reception and afterlife of Holbein's designs lent themselves to neither purely Catholic or Protestant doctrine, but could be outfitted with different surrounding prefaces and sermons as printers and writers of different political and religious leanings took them up. Most importantly, "''The pictures and the Bible quotations above them were the main attractions ��Both Catholics and Protestants wished, through the pictures, to turn men's thoughts to a Christian preparation for death.''".

The 1538 edition which contained Latin quotations from the Bible above Holbein's designs, and a French quatrain below composed by Gilles Corrozet (1510–1568) actually did not credit Holbein as the artist. It bore the title: Les simulachres & / HISTORIEES FACES / DE LA MORT, AUTANT ELE/gammēt pourtraictes, que artifi/ciellement imaginées. / A Lyon. / Soubz l'escu de COLOIGNE. / M.D. XXXVIII. ("Images and Illustrated facets of Death, as elegantly depicted as they are artfully conceived.") These images and workings of death as captured in the phrase "histories faces" of the title "are the particular exemplification of the way death works, the individual scenes in which the lessons of mortality are brought home to people of every station."

In his preface to the work Jean de Vauzèle, the Prior of Montrosier, addresses Jehanne de Tourzelle, the Abbess of the Convent at St. Peter at Lyons, and names Holbein's attempts to capture the ever-present, but never directly seen, abstract images of death "simulachres." He writes: "'' ��simulachres les dis ie vrayement, pour ce que simulachre vient de simuler, & faindre ce que n'est point.''" ("Simulachres they are most correctly called, for simulachre derives from the verb to simulate and to feign that which is not really there.") He next employs a trope from the memento mori