Danse Macabre

From Free net encyclopedia

This article is about La Dance Macabre, the late-medieval allegory. For other meanings of Dance Macabre or Dance of Death, see Danse Macabre (disambiguation).

Image:Holbein-death.png

La Danse Macabre, also called Dance of death, La Danza Macabra, or Totentanz, is a late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the dance of death united all. La Danse Macabre consists of the personified death leading a row of dancing figures from all walks of life to the grave—typically with an emperor, king, pope, monk, youngster, beautiful girl, all in skeleton-state. They were produced under the impact of the Black Death, reminding people of how fragile their lives were and how vain the glories of earthly life were. Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts, the earliest artistic examples are in a cemetery in Paris from 1424.

1 Paintings
2 Printing
3 Musical Settings
4 Films
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit]

Paintings

Image:Thetriumphofdeath.jpg The earliest artistic example is from the frescoed cemetery of the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris (1424). There are also works by Konrad Witz in Basel (1440), Bernt Notke in Lübeck (1463) and woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger (1538).

A famous The Triumph of Death painting (c.1562) in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, is by Pieter Brueghel the Elder who was strongly influenced by the style of Hieronymus Bosch.

[edit]

Printing

The earliest known depiction of a print shop appeared in a printed image of the The Dance of Death, in 1499, in Lyon, by Mattias Huss. It depicts a compositor at his station, which is raised to facilitate his work; and a person running the press. To the right of the print shop an early book store is shown. Early print shops were gathering places for the literati of the day.

[edit]

Musical Settings

Musical examples include the Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns (1874) and the Totentanz by Franz Liszt (1849), a set of variations based on the plainchant melody Dies Irae.

[edit]

Films

A particularly sarcastic Danse Macabre fashion show appears in Roma by Federico Fellini.

The final shots of the film The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman depict a kind of Danse Macabre.

A scene in episode 11 of the Inhumanoids cartoon features a danse macabre, in which a giant skeleton-monster with fake angel wings, D-Compose, dances with Sandra Shore, a woman transformed in a demonic giantess, while skeleton insects play a sinister music on organic, bone and tissue musical instruments.

[edit]

References

James M. Clark. The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 1950.
Israil Bercovici. O sută de ani de teatru evriesc în România ("One hundred years of Yiddish/Jewish theater in Romania"), 2nd Romanian-language edition, revised and augmented by Constantin Măciucă. Editura Integral (an imprint of Editurile Universala), Bucharest (1998). ISBN 9739827225.
André Corvisier. Les danses macabres, Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. ISBN 2130494951.

[edit]