DANCE OF DEATH. - The theme is connected with the meditations common in the 14th and 15th centuries on the transience of human goods and splendors and on the equality of all men before death.
Already in the 13th century in French literature the "comparison of the three dead and the three living" was frequent, and moreover it soon became known in Italy as well, as is evident in the famous frescoes of the Camposanto of Pisa, and in those from which they derive, of which fragments have remained in S. Croce in Florence, attributed to Andrea Orcagna.
Even the image of death itself, understood as a skeleton, was already common in the 14th century. In that same century the strange word macabre, originally macabré, makes its appearance in France. "Le fis de macabré la dance" says the poet Jean Le Fèvre in 1376. The etymology of the term macabre is much debated; it seems certain, however, that it is connected to a proper name; indeed some have sought to link it to the Maccabean martyrs. In any case a d. m., that is a sequence of scenes or tableaux in which images of the dead and of the living appeared in the act of 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 at Bruges. From those theatrical performances would derive not only the engravings of Guyot Marchant and of Holbein but also the most famous of all the ancient d. m., 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. then painted in France, among which some are preserved, such as that of the church of La-Chaise-Dieu, which belongs to the second half of the 15th century.
The figuration was repeated in Germany and in the other countries where the taste and culture of French Gothic spread, and it appeared also in northern Italy, where the most interesting 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 Camposanto of Pisa, mentioned above, but also in the painting of Rimini in the 1300s; a "triumph of death" is also depicted in a small panel of the picture gallery 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, formerly in the courtyard of the Palazzo Sclafani in Palermo and today in the town hall of that city.
Bibliography3 works
Emilio Lavagnino