1. Thematic Unit 9:
The Danse Macabre
Warm-Up: Why do we love to be afraid? Why, in some
strange way, are we attracted to death?
2. Danse Macabre
• The Dance of Death is an artistic genre
of late-medieval allegory on the
universality of death: no matter one's
station in life, the Dance of Death unites
all.
• The Danse Macabre consists of the dead
or personified Death summoning
representatives from all walks of life to
dance along to the grave, typically with
a pope, emperor, king, child, and
labourer. They were produced to remind
people of the fragility of their lives and
how vain were the glories of earthly life.
The Abbot, woodcut from the Dance of Death
series, 1523–26, 6.5 x 4.8 cm by Hans Holbein
the Younger.
3. Danse Macabre
• The earliest recorded visual example is
from the cemetery of the Church of the
Holy Innocents in Paris (1424–25).
• There were also painted schemes
in Basel (the earliest dating from
c.1440);
• woodcuts designed in the early 1520s
by Hans Holbein the Younger and
executed by Hans
Lützelburger (published 1538).
• La Danse macabre (Abbot and Bailiff).
Paris, Guy Marchant, 1486.
Lübecker Totentanz by Bernt Notke (around
1463, destroyed in a bombing raid in 1942).
4. The Black Death
• 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 penitence, but it also evoked
a hysterical desire for
The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael
amusement while still possible; Wolgemut, from the Liber chronicarum by
a last dance as cold comfort. Hartmann Schedel.
5. Ars Moreindi (the Art of Dying)
• 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
• Books, such as the Ars Moreindi, prepared people
faced with the Plague
• 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 (where it was known as
the Totentanz, and in Spain as la Danza de la
Muerte). The French term danse macabre may
derive from the Latin Chorea Machabæorum, La Danse macabre (Abbot and
literally "dance of the Maccabees.” Bailiff). Paris, Guy Marchant, 1486.
6. Danse Macabre
Fussli, Johann Heinrich (Henry Fuseli) The
Temptation of lack of Faith; engraving Nightmare 1781 Oil on canvas 127 x 102 cm
byMaster E. S., circa 1450 Detroit Institute of the Arts
9. Explain the Aestethetics that brings alive a
scary movie, picture or sound and why it puts
us in a
macabre mood (use principles of Design):
• See:
• Smell:
• Taste:
• Touch:
• Hear:
