Of Death, and Dances with Same

We’ve looked at the Dance of Death concept in class (or in French, La Danse Macabre) and I thought I’d take a minute and put some extra links here for those interested. It’s certainly not exhaustive, and searching the Web for “Dance of Death” will no doubt provide more. I’ve picked these few for now mostly because of the quality of their images, or depth of information:

For a scholarly take on the Dance of Death phenomenon, you might want to check out this Finally, you might like to read this article at the Catholic Encyclopedia—it’s not very long, and provides a solid overview.

Pieter Bruegel (the Elder)
We looked at Pieter Bruegel’s “The Triumph of Death” in our slideshow. Here’s his page on the Artchive, and here he is on Wikipedia. His paintings (like I said in class) weren’t all gruesome; many showed snippets of ordinary life in his day. You might like to take a look at a couple other rather famous paintings of his in that vein: “Children’s Games” and “Peasant Wedding.” He also painted the very famous “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” that British poet W.H. Auden (1907–1973) wrote a poem about.

Hieronymous Bosch
I may have mentioned Bosch in passing; he’s not really relevant to our exploration, but you’ll want to check out his paintings anyway, simply to—oh, I don’t know—blow your minds. 😛 Some hold that Bosh’s work did influence Bruegel’s “Triumph of Death,” and taking a look at the center of his “Temptation of Saint Anthony,” you can really see similarities in style and tone. Check out all of Bosch’s bizarre paintings on his Atrchive page.

Hans Holbein
It was Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death we looked at in class. The Project Gutenberg version has by far the best set of illustrations (click each to enlarge) I’ve seen on the Web (better than the ones I used for my slides, I think!) The texts, however, are in French, and the Bible verses in Latin, with no translations provided (Gutenberg’s hardcore like that). 

This site has a ton of information about Holbein’s engravings, but is a little weird to navigate. (The plates, for instance begin near the upper right-hand corner with “The Creation,” rund down the side of the page, and finish in what appears to be another section all stacked in rows and columns.) You can click on each, though to read a detailed description of what they represent, as well as see other variations on the same theme in other versions—very nice! Also, check out the rest of the site for information about and illustrations from other Dances of Death. (Dance of Deaths? Does that have a proper plural? :wink:)

Finally, this page has a few more modern engravings (from the 1700s and 1800s) along the same theme.