This work of art was destroyed when the wall was torn down in 1660, but a 1649 copy by Albrecht Kauw (1621–1681) is extant. This can be seen in the artworks and motifs of Danse Macabre as people attempted to cope with the death surrounding them.Īn abbot and a bailiff, dancing the Dance Macabre, miniature from a 1486 book, printed by Guy Marchant in ParisĪ notable example was painted on the cemetery walls of the Dominican Abbey, in Bern, by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch (1484–1530) in 1516/7. The effect can endure past the initial stages of outbreak, in its deep etching upon the culture and society. The cultural impact of mass outbreaks of disease, of pandemics, are not fleeting or temporary. Other plague art is of a subject that directly responds to people's reliance on religion to give them hope.

Some plague art documents psychosocial responses to the fear that plague aroused in its victims. Some plague art contains gruesome imagery that was directly influenced by the mortality of the plague or by the medieval fascination with the macabre and awareness of death that were augmented by the plague. In her thesis, The Black Death and its Effect on 14th and 15th Century Art, Anna Louise Des Ormeaux describes the effect of the Black Death on art, mentioning the Danse Macabre as she does so: But, all the while, the danse macabre urged them not to forget the end of all earthly things.' This Danse Macabre was enacted at village pageants and at court masques, with people ' dressing up as corpses from various strata of society', and may have been the origin of costumes worn during Allhallowtide. Historian Francis Rapp (1926–2020) writes that ' Christians were moved by the sight of the Infant Jesus playing on his mother's knee their hearts were touched by the Pietà and patron saints reassured them by their presence. Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now-lost mural at Holy Innocents' Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424 to 1425. It was produced as memento mori, to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain are the glories of earthly life. The effect is both frivolous and terrifying, beseeching its audience to react emotionally. The Danse Macabre consists of the dead, or a personification of death, summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer. The Danse Macabre ( / d ɑː n s m ə ˈ k ɑː b( r ə)/ French pronunciation: ) (from the French language), also called the Dance of Death, is an artistic genre of allegory of the Late Middle Ages on the universality of death. The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Nuremberg Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel

Dança Macabra by Stephen King