Dancing from early ages has been associated with the conception of death. In many primitive races these dances seem to pertain to mimetic magic, and purport to expedite the passing of the spirit of the deceased. Both Greeks and Romans preserved dancing in their funeral celebrations, and representations of these funeral dances have been found in connexion with Greek and Etruscan tombs. These are commonly a file of maidens, holding each other’s hands, and led by a youthful male coryphaeus. Anacreon,[158] Tibullus,[159] and Vergil[160] all depict the revelry of the dance in the land of departed souls, and joy is the key-note of the dance. Christianity, in superseding paganism, for better or for worse inculcated a gloomy conception of death, as a punishment, a penalty for original sin. Recurrent epidemics of pestilence served to transform the conception into that of an inexorable foe revelling in the subversion of human happiness and the futility of human affairs. The literature of the age no less than its art bears the imprint of this conception. Petrarch has left us a Triumph of Death, and Langland in his Vision of Piers Plowman[161] has given us in verse a Dance of Death:
Death came driving after, and all to dust pashed Kynges and Knightes, Kaysers and Popes, Learned and lewde: he ne let no man stande; That he hitte even, stirred never after. Many a lovely ladie and her lemmans of knightes Swouned and swelte for sorwe of Death’s dyntes.
The earliest authenticated painting of the Death-dance is that which was once to be seen in the churchyard of the Innocents at Paris, painted in a.d. 1434, but it is improbable that it was actually the first. A closely similar theme of earlier date may still be seen in the Campo Santo at Pisa. Vasari attributed it to Andrew Orcagna (a.d. 1329-68), but modern critics believe it to have been painted by Pisan artists, about a.d. 1350. This fresco shows three young men following the chase on horseback. Coming to the cell of St. Macarius, an Egyptian anchorite, they are brought face to face with three open coffins, in which are a skeleton and two dead bodies, reminding them of the fleeting nature of human pleasures. This subject also is one adopted from contemporary literature. Under the title of ‘Les trois Morts et les trois Vifs’ it had figured in thirteenth-century verse, and is frequently illustrated in the manuscript Horae of the period. It is suggested that this legend is the origin of the name ‘Danse macabre’, or ‘Macaber Dance’, used often as an alternative name for the familiar ‘Dance of Death’.
PLATE XIII DANCE OF DEATH, AT BASLE (Face Page 135)
It is not in Italy and not in France, but rather, as we should expect, in Germany and Switzerland, that these Dances of Death found most favour, as befits the countries that gave birth to Luther and shelter to Calvin. In 1462-3 plague raged fiercely at Lübeck. In the chapel at the east end of the Marienkirche is a much restored ‘[Dance of Death]’, dated 1463, and showing the costumes of the period. It is interesting as being considerably older than the more famous Basle Dance.
By far the most celebrated ‘Dance of Death’ was that painted in a shed in the churchyard of the Dominican convent at Basle. It is believed to have been painted in commemoration of a plague that occurred during the session of the Grand Council of Basle, that lasted from a.d. 1431 to 1443. It has been attributed on insufficient evidence to Holbein. It was destroyed by a riotous mob in a.d. 1806, but relics of the life-size figures, painted in oil, are still to be seen in the Historical Museum at Basle. Engravings of it also exist that record its characters in detail. Holbein did actually paint a ‘Dance of Death’ in fresco on the walls of the old Whitehall Palace, which was destroyed in the fire of a.d. 1697. It was an appropriate subject for the brush of an artist, who himself was to die of plague (a.d. 1554). It is probably referred to by Matthew Prior in his Ode to the Memory of George Villiers:
Our term of life depends not on our deed, Before our birth our funeral was decreed, Nor aw’d by foresight, nor misled by chance, Imperious death directs the ebon lance, Peoples great Henry’s tombs, and leads up Holbein’s Dance.
Holbein was almost certainly also the author of the originals of the Lyons ‘Dance of Death’, from which Hans Lutzenberger engraved the woodcuts, which represent a varied assortment of characters of each and every social order, among whom Death, in grotesque guise, plies his grim and gruesome task.