T h e m a t i c U n i t 9 : T h e D a n s e M a c a b r e

Warm-Up: Why do we love to be afraid? Why, in some strange way, are we attracted to death?

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.

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).

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 amusement while still possible; a last dance as cold comfort.

The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Liber chronicarum by Hartmann Schedel.

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, literally "dance of the Maccabees.”

La Danse macabre (Abbot and Bailiff). Paris, Guy Marchant, 1486.

Danse Macabre

Fussli, Johann Heinrich (Henry Fuseli) The Nightmare 1781 Oil on canvas 127 x 102 cm Detroit Institute of the Arts

Temptation of lack of Faith; engraving byMaster E. S., circa 1450

“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

Explain the Aestethetics that brings alive a scary movie, picture or sound and why it puts us in amacabre mood (use principles of Design):

• See:• Smell:• Taste:• Touch:• Hear: