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Danse Macabre

Danse Macabre - Wikipedia
Danse Macabre - Wikipedia

The Danse Macabre (dɑːns_məˈkɑːb(rə); dɑ̃s ma.kabʁ) (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 labourer. The effect is both frivolous and terrifying, beseeching its audience to react emotionally. It was produced as memento mori, to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain are the glories of earthly life. Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now-lost mural at Holy Innocents' Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424 to 1425. 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 are not fleeting or temporary.

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Related concepts (3)
Reformation
_The Reformation The Reformation (alternatively named the Protestant Reformation, and the European Reformation) was a major movement in Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the Catholic Church and in part, it also posed a challenge to papal authority. The Reformation marked the start of Protestantism and in the Western Church, the Latin Church, remained the Catholic Church. It is considered one of the events that signified the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period in Europe.
Death (personification)
Death is frequently imagined as a personified force. In some mythologies, a character known as the Grim Reaper (usually depicted as a berobed skeleton wielding a scythe) causes the victim's death by coming to collect that person's soul. Other beliefs hold that the Spectre of Death is only a psychopomp, a benevolent figure who serves to gently sever the last ties between the soul and the body, and to guide the deceased to the afterlife, without having any control over when or how the victim dies.
Late Middle Ages
The Late Middle Ages, late medieval period, or Lower Middle Ages was the period of European history lasting from AD 1350 to 1500. The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern period (and in much of Europe, the Renaissance). Around 1350, centuries of prosperity and growth in Europe came to a halt. A series of famines and plagues, including the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the Black Death, reduced the population to around half of what it had been before the calamities.

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