as small as a world and as large as alone

1:30pm July 27, 2013

odditiesoflife:

The Dance of Death

Dance of Death, also variously called Danse Macabre (French), Danza de la Muerte (Spanish), Danza Macabra (Italian), and Totentanz (German), 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 laborer. They were produced 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 1424–25.

The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Liber chronicarum by Hartmann Schedel. English speaking bibliophiles, however, have long called the book the Nuremberg Chronicle, after the city in which it was published. Finally, Germans have recently begun to call it Die Schedelshe Weltchronik (‘Schedel’s World History’) after its author, Hartmann Schedel, whose name appears no where in the printed edition.

source 1, 2, 3

For some reason I’ve always liked that kind of art, and the symbolism about death uniting everyone. Not in a morbid way, just because death is there and only people who have to deal with it in any way seem to remember that in this society.

730 notes