Dance of Death (Lat. Chorea Machabæorum, Fr. La Danse Macabre), a name given to a certain class of allegorical representations, illustrative of the universal power of death, and dating from the 14th century. When the introduction of Christianity first banished the ancient Germanic conception of a future state, a new description of death-mythology arose, partly out of biblical sources, partly out of the popular character itself, wherein the Last Enemy was represented under simple and majestic images, such as that of a husbandman watering the ground with blood, ploughing it with swords, sowing it with corpses, rooting out weeds, plucking up flowers, or felling trees; or of a monarch assembling his armies, making war, taking prisoners, inviting his subjects to a festival, or citing them to judgment. But with a gradual change in national manners came a change in the mode of treating the subject, and it was associated with everyday images, such as the confessional, chess-playing, and above all, with the adjuncts of a festival—viz. music and dancing. This tendency to familiarise the theme increased during the confusion and turmoil of the 14th century, when the national mind alternated between fits of devotion and license, or blended both elements in satire and humour. Such a mood as this naturally occupied itself with personifying Death, and adopted by preference the most startling and grotesque images it could find—that of a musician playing to dancing-men, or a dancer leading them on; and as the dance and the drama were then intimately connected, and employed on religious occasions, this particular idea soon assumed a dramatic form.
This drama was most simply constructed, consisting of short dialogues between Death and four-and-twenty or more followers, and was undoubtedly enacted in or near churches by religious orders in Germany during the 14th century, and at a rather later period in France. It would appear that the seven brothers, whose martyrdom is recorded in the 7th chapter of the 2d Book of Maccabees, either played an important part in the drama, or the first representation, which took place at Paris in the Monastery of the Innocents, fell upon their festival, and hence the origin of the ancient name, Chorea Machabæorum, or La Danse Macabre. As early as 1400, the dramatic poem was imitated in Spain, and appears there in seventy-nine strophes of eight lines each (La Dança General de los Muertos), but it did not spread; while the French, having a love for pictorial representation, very early affixed an illustration to each strophe, and in 1425 painted the whole series on the churchyard wall of the Monastery of the Innocents, where the Dance of Death was habitually enacted. We find the subject treated in painting, sculpture, and tapestry, in the churches of Anjou, Amiens, Angers, Rouen, to say nothing of the numerous woodcuts and accompanying letterpress which succeeded the invention of printing. From Paris, both poem and pictures were transplanted to London (1430), Salisbury (about 1460), Wortley Hall in Gloucestershire, Hexham, &c.
But nowhere was the subject so variously and strikingly treated as in Germany. A picture in one of the chapels of the Marienkirche, at Lübeck, still, in spite of repeated re-paintings, bearing the unmistakable impress of the 14th century, exhibits the very simplest form of the drama, and has some Low-German verses attached to it. Here we see twenty-four figures, partly clerical, partly lay, arranged in a descending scale, from the pope himself down to a little child, and between each of them a dancing figure of Death, not in the form of a skeleton, but a shrivelled corpse, the whole being linked in one chain, and dancing to the music of another Death. This representation is almost the same as a very ancient one at La Chaise-Dieu, in Auvergne, and points to the identity of the original dramatic spectacle in both countries.
The celebrated Dance of Death on the cloister walls of the Klingenthal, a convent in Basel, though painted probably not later than 1312, exhibited a departure from the simplest form—the number of persons exceeding the original twenty-four, and the chain being broken up into separate couples. But both alike are only to be regarded as scenes from a drama, and cannot, therefore, be justly compared with a painting in the Pisan Campo Santo, the 'Triumph of Death,' ascribed to Andrea Orcagna. And the acted drama enduring till the 15th century, we find that while there were varieties in the paintings, the poem, which was the most important feature, remained almost unchanged.
About the middle of the 15th century, however, the drama being altogether laid aside, the pictures became the main point of interest, the verses merely subsidiary. Accordingly, we find from this time the same pictures repeated in different places, with different verses, or no verses at all, till at length both verses and pictures entirely change their original character. The Dance of Death being transferred from the quiet convent walls into public places, gave a new impulse to popular art. Duke George of Saxony had, in 1534, the front of his Dresden castle ornamented with a life-size bas-relief of the subject, and other representations are to be found at Strasburg and Bern. There was a Dance of Death painted round the cloister of old St Paul's in London, in the reign of Henry VI.; and there is a sculptured one at Rouen, in the cemetery of St Maclou. But Holbein has the credit of availing himself most effectively of the original design, and giving it a new and more artistic character. Departing from the idea of a dance, he illustrated the subject by fifty-three distinct sketches for engravings, which he called 'Imagines Mortis.' The originals of these are at St Petersburg, and impressions of them have been frequently repeated under different names.
See Peignot's Recherches sur les Danses des Morts (1826); Massman's Baseler Todtentänze (1847); and Douce's Dance of Death (1833).