DANCE OF DEATH. — The theme is connected with the communal meditations of the 14th and 15th centuries on the transience of earthly goods and splendor and on the equality of all men in the face of death.
Already in the 13th century, the “comparison of the three dead and the three living” was frequent in French literature; it soon became known in Italy as well, as is evident from the famous frescoes in the Campo Santo of Pisa and those from which they derive, fragments of which remain in Santa Croce in Florence, attributed to Andrea Orcagna.
Even the image of death itself, conceived as a skeleton, was already common in the 14th century. In the same century, the strange word *macabre* (originally *macabre*) appears in France. “Je fis de macabre la dance,” says the poet Jean Le Fèvre in 1376. The etymology of the term *macabre* is much debated; it nevertheless seems certain that it is connected with a proper name; indeed, it has been linked to the Maccabean martyrs. In any case, a *d. m.*—that is, a sequence of scenes or panels in which images of the dead and the living appear dancing—was performed in France at the beginning of the 15th century; and the Duke of Burgundy had such a dance performed in 1449 in his palace in Bruges. From these theatrical representations would derive not only the engravings of Guyot Marchant and Holbein but also the most famous of all ancient *d. m.*, namely the one painted in 1424 on the porch of the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris, later destroyed in the 17th century, from which in turn derived the numerous other *d. m.* painted in France at that time, including some that survive, such as the one in the church of La Chaise-Dieu, dating from the second half of the 15th century.
The representation spread to Germany and other countries where French Gothic taste and culture took hold, and it also appeared in northern Italy, where the most interesting example is certainly that of Clusone, near Bergamo, painted in 1485.
In Italy, however, from the 14th century onward, the theme of the “Triumph of Death” prevailed, not only in the frescoes of the Campo Santo in Pisa, mentioned above, but also in the 14th-century Rimini school of painting; a “Triumph of Death” is depicted in a panel of the Pinacoteca of Siena attributed to Pietro Lorenzetti and in a large 15th-century fresco, the work of a painter trained in the forms of Catalan art, originally in the courtyard of the Palazzo Sclafani in Palermo and now in the town hall of that city.