Dance of Death, or danse macabre (or danse macabré)
Dance of Death, or danse macabre (or danse macabré),gave expression to the sense especially prominent in the 15th cent. (perhaps as a consequence of the plague and the preaching of the mendicant friars) of the ubiquity of Death the leveller. The Dance appears to have first taken shape in France, as a mimed sermon in which figures typical of various orders of society were seized and haled away each by its own corpse (not, as later, by the personification of Death). The earliest known painting of the Dance, accompanied by versified dialogues between living and dead, was made in 1424 in the cemetery of the Innocents in Paris, and the German artists (including Holbein ) who later depicted it appear to have drawn inspiration from French sources. The origin of the word macabre or macabré has been the subject of many conjectures, such as that the latter is a corruption of Old French Macabé, to refer to a mystery play in which the...
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