La Danse Macabre
The Dance of Death
"With its grim ironic prediction of life as a merry dance towards the grave, the danse macabre was a product of the later Middle Ages that had survived until the sixteenth century, when, as the medieval world view faded, it lost its moral force ...
The tradition dates back to the Black Death, but the earliest surviving source for the dance is the sequence of illustrated verses inscribed in 1524 on the walls of the cemetery of Holy Innocents in Paris."
Rosemary Hill, 2023, Times Witness : History in the Age of Romanticism, Penguin Books, p 243.
"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 ... The effect is both frivolous and terrifying ...
The deathly horrors of the 14th century such as recurring famines, the Hundred Years War in France, and, most of all, the Black Death ... 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.
The Danse Macabre combines both desires ..."
<en.wikipwedia.org/.wiki/Danse_Macabre>
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Historian Rosemary Hill approaches the Dance of Death as part of her discussion about the "antiquarians" of the Revolutionary and Romantic periods (approximately 1789 to 1832). These included those of that eccentric bunch of English and French collectors and compilers who were most obsessed with evidence of the theme ― including, "the peppery Francis Douce (1757-1834), annotator of Shakespeare and scholar of the Dance of Death", and Eustache-Hyacinthe Langlois (1777-1837), who produced his "study inspired in part by the vestiges in the cemetery at St-Maclou and in part by his own savagely satirical temperament."
The creators of the Wikipedia entry also contribute to our understanding with their comments introducing the notion of two elements to the early examples of Dance Macabre. It is important to note that "gallows humour" was an essential if contradictory part of the medieval Dance of Death. The craziness of dancing skeletons may be off-putting to modern sensibilities, but that was part of the mock horror that blunted the sombreness of a strictly religious "preparation for burial". An appreciation of the sort of cynicism or irreverence that may have been common in the Middle Ages can be gained from concentrating on the reports of the actual surviving examples by observers like Douce and Langlois.
The problem with the later more "serious" illustrations produced by the Younger Hans Holbein (1523-1525) is that "no one is actually engaged in a dance with Death. This removes an element of comic catharsis found in the mutuality of earlier dancers. Holbien's more static figures respond to Death realistically. The old man is stoical. The panicked knight fights with all his useless might. The rich miser throws up his arms in a mix of outrage and terror. The peddler is almost too busy to even acknowledge his time has come". In other words, "Holbein's woodcuts were a highly original take on a medieval theme", rather than accurate representations of the real thing.
Ned Pennant-Rea, nd, 'Hans Holbein's Dance of Death (1523-5)', The Public Domain Review,
It is useful to return to the already quoted Wikipedia article, which describes the original medieval images in an instantly engaging way. "A Dance 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 medieval hierarchy (usually pope and emperor) descending to its lowest (beggar, peasant, child), each mortal hand is taken by an animated skeleton or cadaver. The famous Totentatz by Bernard Notke in St Mary's Church, Lubeck (destroyed by Allied bombing in World War Two), presented the dead dancers as very lively and agile, making the impression that they were actually dancing, whereas their living dancing partners look clumsy and passive."
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Historian Sophie Oosterwijk, writing at Oxford Bibliographies, has produced an interesting "short list" of Late Medieval representations of the Dance. "The earliest recorded visual example is a (lost) wall painting of 1424-1425 in Paris, which became the catalyst for the spread of the theme across Europe; it incorporated the French dialogue poem with a painted chain of dead and living dancers. John Lydgate adapted the French poem for his Middle English Dance of Death c. 1426, which formed the basis for a (lost) painted cycle of c. 1430 at Old St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The German Totentanz tradition may have been a parallel development: visual examples include the (lost) painted cycles in Basel (c. 1440) and Lubeck (1463)." This article will consider the first two (and their "copies).
A History of the Dance of Death
An earlier medieval theme, the story of the Three Living and the Three Dead, has a similar but less pronounced suggestion of the macabre. In this tale three proud young noblemen are confronted by three corpses. The stern moral lesson imparted is captured by the Latin tag memento mori ― remember that you must die! More pointedly, the ghouls are saying to the living: "We were once as you are. We are now what you will be."
"One famous English example of the Three Living and the Three Dead can be found in the early-14th-century Psalter of Robert de Lisle. Here, a French poem with Latin headers is accompanied by a miniature of three startled kings opposite three decaying corpses. Each of the six characters has his own short line in Middle English, starting with the Three Living :
Ich am afert I am afraid
Lo whet ich se Look what I see
Me thinketh hit beth develes three I believe these are three devils
Ich was wel fair I was once quite fair
Such scheltou be Thus shall you be
For godes loue be wer by me For God's love, be warned by me
This dialogue is continued in the poem itself, which is a shortened version of a French poem of the 13th century. The third corpse in particular paints a telling picture of his earlier existence:
Ieo fu de mon lynge chief I was the chief of my lineage
Princes reys et constables Princes, kings and constables,
Beals et riches ioyanz mes tables fair and rich enjoyed my tables
Ore su si hidous et si nuz But now I am so hideous and naked
Ke moy ver ne deigne nuls that even the worms scorn me
The remark about princes, kings and constables almost hints at the theme of the danse macabre, in which a skeletal figure forces people from all ranks in society to take part in his dance. [Note: 'In art, the original confrontation (12/13th centuries) appears peaceful, though obviously very frightening; only later (14/15th centuries) do the Three Dead adopt a more menacing state, at times even threatening the Three Living with spades, scythes, darts and spears."]
" The earliest known monumental danse was to be found in Paris ... The so-called Burgeois de Paris recorded in his diary that the famous mural on the walls of the cemetery of ... Aux Saints Innocents was painted between August 1424 and Easter 1425, during the English occupation of the French capital. The cemetery already featured another piece of macabre decoration: only a few years earlier, Jean, duc de Berry, had commissioned a sculpted tympanum above the doorway to the cemetery illustrating the story of the Three Living and the Three Dead.
The cemetery at Les Innocents was undoubtedly one of the most sought-after burial places in Paris, as well as a popular meeting place where one could stroll around the various market stalls and listen to the open-air sermons, or pick up a prostitute (or a client). Preachers may well have used the wall-painting and its surroundings as a visual aid to point out to their audiences the vanities of this earthly life, and the fact that death is inevitable yet often unexpected."
Sophie Oosterwijk, 2004, 'Of Corpses, Constables and Kings: The Danse Macabre in Late Medieval and Renaissance Culture', The British Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 157, pp 62,64,66.
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The burial ground and associated church were described by sources in the 12th century. French king Philip II (1180-1223) had a three-metre high wall built that fully enclosed the cemetery. By then it was no longer just a site for individual burials but had become the location for mass graves. Each pit received 1,500 bodies before it was closed and another opened. In the 14th century citizens constructed arched structures called charniers (or charnel houses) along the cemetery walls to relieve the overcrowded mass graves. Skulls and skeletal bones were excavated from the pits and stacked under cover.
Then, "Between August 1424 and Lent 1425, during the Anglo-Burgundian alliance when John Duke of Bedford ruled Paris as Regent after the deaths of Henry V of England and Charles VI of France, a mural of the Danse Macabre was painted on the back wall of the arcade below the charnel house on the south side of the cemetery. It was one of the earliest and best-known depictions of this theme. It was destroyed in 1699 when this wall was demolished to allow the narrow road behind it to be widened."
<en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy-Innocents'-Cemetery>
"The mural in Paris was destroyed many centuries ago, but an idea of its text and overall composition has been preserved for posterity in a printed edition with woodblock illustrations first published in 1485 by the Parisian printer Guyot Marchant. In as far as this printed edition can be relied upon as a faithful record, the mural probably comprised some thirty characters who each held a dialogue with Death, or possibly their own dead counterpart ...
Printing a book version of the Parisian mural forced Marchant to introduce one important change: in contrast to the mural, which depicted continuous chain of living and dead figures, Marchant's edition just showed two pairs per page, usually a juxtaposition of one religious and one lay character. The woodcut illustrations present Death (or the dead) as a putrid corpse, either naked or half-covered by a shroud, sometimes even worm-infested, and often holding a typical attribute; a large dart, a spade, a coffin or a scythe".
Sophie Oosterwijk, 2004, p 67.
The Spread of a Medieval Mega-Myth
"Meanwhile, it was an English visitor to Paris who helped the dance macabre cross the Channel. John Lydgate, a monk and poet from Bury St Edmunds, composed the first Middle-English version of the Parisian poem before 1430 ... In his introduction, Lydgate referred his readers to 'the exawmple whiche that at Parise I founde depict ones on a walle',but his concluding 'envoye' explain that his is clearly a relatively free translation:
Owte of the frensshe I drowe hit of entente
Not worde be worde but folwyng the substaunce
Lydgate's poem obviously made an impression back home in England, for in 1430 a request was made that his verses should be incorporated into a newly commissioned Dance of Death scheme in the medieval cloisters of Pardon Churchyard at Old St Paul's Cathedral in London. The patron responsible for this danse was the wealthy London town clerk John Carpenter (1372-1442) ...
Carpenter's new danse macabre scheme was probably painted onto wooden panels rather than onto the walls of the cloisters. Just like the cemetery of Les Innocents in Paris, the cemetery of Old St Paul's was a 'pardon churchyard' and thus very popular. ["First named in 1301 as 'le Pardoncherchawe', its providence of pardon rendered it an attractive place for those who had not received Final Absolution, including plague victims", TJ Farrow, 2021, Mortality 28.1]. The paintings in London were destroyed when the cloisters were demolished in 1549 ["The unceremonious listing of St Paul's charnel as 'charnel chapel and shed' in the inventory of 1548 effected administrative de-sanctification by refusing its recognition as a site of any elevated significance ... The demolition of structures within Pardon Churchyard commenced on 10 April 1549 'so that nothing of them was left but a bare plot of ground'", TJ Farrow, 2021, Mortality 28.1].
However, the programme in London became so well known that the danse macabre schemes elsewhere in England were often described as the 'Dance of Poulys', or dance of St Paul's."
Sophie Oosterwijk, 2004, pp 68-9
It is to one of these that we must turn if we want to gain a reasonable idea of what the 1430s Carpenter/Lydgate mural actually looked like to medieval parishioners and penitents. Most of the other danse macabre wall paintings commissioned outside of London have been lost, and only fragments remain. Fortunately, the north wall of the Guild Chapel in Stratford-upon-Avon has survived intact, with the assistance of meticulous restoration by expert Wilfrid Puddephat in the 1950s. His research established that the Stratford scheme drew directly on the original Old St Paul's version and Ludgate's manuscripts (e.g."manuscripts in group B of Lydgate's poem are also actually entitled 'the Daunce of Powlys' and 'Daunce of Poules'.")
"Interestingly, it is likely that the Guild Chapel scheme at Stratford was financed with a bequest in the will of Sir Hugh Clopton, a former Lord Mayor of London, who retired to Stratford and lived in the vicinity of the chapel until his death in 1496 ... Only the north wall of the Guild Chapel in Stratford-upon-Avon still remains a complete medieval danse macabre mural with accompanying verses, as recorded by John Stow in 1576 ..."
K Giles, A Masinton, & G Arnott, 2012, 'Visualising the Guild Chapel: Stratford-upon-Avon: digital models as research tools in buildings archaeology', Internet Archaeology, 23 (1), See '4.6 The nave north wall: the Dance of Death'.
"The Dance of Death was painted immediately beneath the windows of the north wall of the nave. It extended 33 1/4 feet v(10.1m) across and 6 1/2 feet (1.9m) deep ... The 'frescoes'
were arranged in two tiers ... the distribution of surviving images indicated that each contained nine compartments ... The first compartment of the Stratford Dance of Death was reserved for two verses of the 'verba auctoris' and the last two for concluding the sequence. The procession of the actual Dance of Death was therefore spread across the remaining fifteen compartments. Each compartment featured sixty participants arranged in pairs; two in each compartment, while each pair consisted of 'a sprightly cadaver with a reluctant victim in its grasp'.
Despite the condition of the painting, enough pigment had survived for Puddephat to note that the background of each compartment was painted a rich scarlet, with a 'floor' of 'vermilion and black tiles' set in a chequered pattern in the upper tier and a lozenge pattern in the lower. The figures appeared to be moving westwards across each of the compartments. The 'gaunt and grinning personifications of Death' were painted in a clay colour, leading victims dressed in the robes of their earthly rank, and carrying symbols of their worldly office. The use of pigments to visualise vividly the stages of putrefaction of corpses is also common in other Dance of Death schemes."
K Giles et al, 2012, '4.6 The nave north wall : the Dance of Death'
"As elsewhere, the Stratford Dance commenced with those of the highest rank in the upper tier, descending in order to the lowest beneath. The band below each of the figures featured Lydgate's poem, the stanzas of which were spaced at intervals of approximately 11 inches (28cm), beneath the relevant illustration ... Stratford includes in its cast the civic characters that appear in these texts, including the Justice, Mayor, Sergeant of Law, Merchant, Artisan, Labourer, Sergeant of Office and Juror, which would have had particular resonance for its civic audience [i.e. less 'lords temporal and spiritual' and more typical city and borough people]."
K Giles et al, 2012, '4.6 The nave north wall : the dance of death'
Lydgate originally followed the order and range of the Parisian characters in his earlier version ... but in a subsequent revised and expanded version he added a number of female characters ... the empress, the 'lady of great estate' (also described as the princess), the abbess, and the gentilwoman amerous (also described as the young gentlewoman). No women appear in Marchant's all-male version ... regarded as an indication that they were absent in the Parisian mural too."
Sophie Oosterwijk, 2004, p 69
POSTNOTE
In conclusion, the wall-painting of "danse macabre" in les Innocents, Paris and the "dance of Death" in Old St Paul's, London have much in common beyond their shared theme. They are both the earliest known examples of these motifs in a medieval setting, with the French version recorded at 1424-25 and the English in the 1430s. As both were subsequently lost through demolition in 1699 and 1549 respectively, we cannot be exactly sure of what they looked like (nor the precise wording of the original French poem that inspired them).
The most contemporary representations were Guyot Marchant's printing of the Parisian mural and its accompanying text in 1485 and the Guild Chapel, Stratford-upon-Avon "fresco" painted in the 1490s. While they undoubtedly followed on from the two originals, some changes were made in the intervening 60 years ― Marchant, for example, had to adjust his "copies" from a continuous wall-painting to the interrupted pages of a book, and Lydgate is known to have revised his cast of characters from manuscripts series A to series B.
What does seem consistent, however, is a pictorial and poetic narrative that is full of horror and, at the same time, the comically grotesque. The awkwardness of this counterpoint was presumably by design. In any event, it is an aspect of this extraordinarily dramatic Middle Ages art-form that is worth exploring further.
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