The Danse Macabre: What the Medieval Dance of Death Is and Where It Came From

The standard layout was a procession, or a series of encounters, between the living and skeletons or corpses. The living figures usually stood for social ranks in descending order: pope or emperor first, then kings, bishops, nobles, merchants, doctors, lawyers, peasants, children and the poor. Viewers recognized each one by clothing, objects and office, so the claim that death treats everyone alike depended on showing how unequal life was. Early examples could also work as satire, aimed at vanity, greed and corrupt authority.

The surviving Tallinn fragment makes the sequence concrete. It opens with a preacher, then Death carrying a coffin and playing a bagpipe, then the pope, emperor, empress, cardinal and king. A Low German verse dialogue runs beneath the figures.

The earliest documented monumental example is usually said to be a mural at the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris, finished in 1424 or 1424 to 1425. It stood in a public cemetery lined with charnel houses and came with verses. It is lost now, but it became a model for later versions and for Guyot Marchant's printed adaptation of 1485. Paris Musées holds records of it, including an Albert Fernique photograph and an anonymous drawing, both marked CC0. The phrase itself appears earlier in writing: Jehan le Fèvre used "macabre la dance" in *Le respit de la mort* in 1376.

At St. Mary's Church in Lübeck, Bernt Notke painted a Dance of Death in 1463, explicitly modeled on the Paris example. The church says it was made for a confessional chapel at a time when plague was expected to reach the city. The original was lost, and a copy made in 1701 was destroyed in 1942, so Lübeck is a place to learn the history, not to see the painting.

Artists painted the Dance of Death to remind viewers that death could take anyone and to encourage moral preparation for it. The theme suited churches, cemeteries and devotional spaces because it joined religious teaching to a memorable procession of social types. War, famine, recurring epidemics and high mortality formed the setting.

Plague is part of that setting, but the exact link is debated. Oxford Bibliographies describes the theme as probably developing in the fourteenth century from moral teaching combined with estates satire. The Paris mural dates to about 1424 to 1425, decades after the main Black Death outbreaks of 1348 to 1350, so it is not simply a direct response to those years. Scholars continue to discuss how directly plague experience shaped the genre.

Several medieval examples survive, and each has its own character.

• Tallinn, Estonia: The Niguliste Museum, in St. Nicholas' Church, keeps the opening section of a late-fifteenth-century Dance of Death from the workshop of Bernt Notke. It is painted on canvas, about seven and a half meters long, with thirteen figures. The museum describes it as the only surviving medieval Dance of Death painting on canvas.
• Beram, Croatia: The Church of St. Mary on Škriljinah has a Dance of Death fresco finished in 1474 by the workshop of Vincent of Kastav. It is part of one of Istria's best-known fresco cycles.
• Hrastovlje, Slovenia: The Church of the Holy Trinity has a Dance of Death fresco painted in 1490 by Johannes de Castua, also called Janez iz Kastva, within a larger cycle of Gothic frescoes.
• La Chaise-Dieu, France: The abbey church preserves a fifteenth-century mural in which living figures alternate with partly decayed "transi" corpses, rather than clean skeletons.
• Clusone, Italy: The Oratorio dei Disciplini has a 1485 fresco by Giacomo Borlone de Buschis that joins the Dance of Death to the Triumph of Death and the Meeting of the Three Living and the Three Dead.

Opening hours and access change, so confirm visiting details with each museum, abbey or church before you travel.

The best-known printed version is Hans Holbein the Younger's *The Dance of Death*. He designed it around 1526, the German printmaker Hans Lützelburger cut the blocks, and it was first published in book form in Lyon in 1538. The Metropolitan Museum of Art lists it as a woodcut and holds individual sheets including *The Child*, *The Old Woman* and *Skeletons Making Music, or the Cemetery*, all marked Public Domain.

Holbein's scenes are small and sharp. Death interrupts ordinary life as an active intruder, even a trickster, among rulers, clergy, soldiers, merchants, judges, doctors, peasants, children and the elderly. Ulinka Rublack of the University of Cambridge reads the series as social commentary that mocks the hypocrisy of authority figures. The National Gallery of Art in Washington also holds Allaert Claesz's *Dance of Death* engravings of 1562, which show the motif continuing through the Renaissance. Holbein's famous skull in *The Ambassadors* has its own place in the story of famous skull art.

Saint-Saëns's *Danse macabre*, Op. 40, dates from 1874. It began as an art song for voice and piano on a French poem by Henri Cazalis, who wrote under the name Jean Lahor, and then became a tone poem for solo violin and orchestra. In the story it tells, Death tunes his violin at midnight, calls the dead from their graves and leads them in a grotesque dance until a rooster announces dawn. The solo violin is tuned unusually, and a xylophone's rattling figures suggest dancing bones.

Cazalis's poem and Saint-Saëns's performance instructions were printed with the 1875 score, according to the Morgan Library. Franz Liszt made a piano transcription, published in 1876, and the Library of Congress holds the first edition.

Dudley Murphy's silent film *Danse Macabre* appeared in 1922 as a visual response to Saint-Saëns's music. Ingmar Bergman's *The Seventh Seal* (1957) ends with an image commonly described as a Dance of Death. That is a visual use of the medieval motif, not an adaptation of the score.

Walt Disney's *The Skeleton Dance* premiered on 22 August 1929 as the first in the studio's long-running series of music-led cartoons. Skeletons dance in a cemetery at midnight and return to their graves at dawn. The cartoon turned the procession into comedy and helped make skeleton dances a familiar Halloween sight. Later works often keep the skeletons, the midnight, the music and the movement without the medieval ranks. For the seasonal side, see skeletons and Halloween.

If the Dance of Death caught your attention, begin with what memento mori means, then see how the same thought turns up in painted still lifes in vanitas paintings. For the Halloween side of the story, read about skeletons and Halloween. If the memento mori idea is one you like to wear, our Memento Mori skull tee is a shirt for you.