Dance of Death

Dance of Death, also called Danse Macabre (from the French language), is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all. The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or personified Death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer. They were produced as mementos mori, to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life. Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now-lost mural in the Saints Innocents Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424 to 1425.

The earliest recorded visual example is from the cemetery of the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris (1424–25). There were also painted schemes in Basel (the earliest dating from c.1440); a series of paintings on canvas by Bernt Notke, in Lübeck (1463); the initial fragment of the original Bernt Notke painting (accomplished at the end of the 15th century) in the St Nicholas' Church, Tallinn, Estonia; the painting at the back wall of the chapel of Sv. Marija na Škrilinama in the Istrian town of Beram (1471), painted by Vincent of Kastav; the painting in the Holy Trinity Church in Hrastovlje in Istria by John of Kastav (1490). There was also a Dance of Death painted in the 1540s on the walls of the cloister of St Paul's Cathedral, London with texts by John Lydgate, which was destroyed in 1549.

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