The danse macabre is a medieval picture of Death leading people of every rank to the grave, a pope, a king and a peasant each paired with a dead partner. The best known early one was painted on the wall of a Paris cemetery in 1424 and 1425, and the most famous painting to grow out of the tradition is Pieter Bruegel's The Triumph of Death, made around 1562 and now in the Prado.
Death is the one who leads. The living follow in order of rank, from the pope down to the hermit, and a few lines of verse were written beneath each pair. The word dance is meant literally: the figures are paired off like partners in a line, one living and one dead.
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The story usually told about it is a plague story. The Black Death killed so many people that painters began to cover walls with Death, and the dance was a lesson in mortality. It is a clean explanation, and it is not the one the Paris wall itself suggests.
That dance was painted in 1424 and 1425, while the city was held by the English and their Burgundian allies. Two years earlier, in 1422, Henry V of England and Charles VI of France had died in quick succession, and the art historian Sophie Oosterwijk points out that both kingdoms were left without a crowned king. The dance has a king in it twice. He is carried off among the living, and he comes back at the end as a worm eaten corpse.
Oosterwijk argues that these topical references explain why the wall became famous so fast. Without them it might have looked like one more medieval lesson about sin and death. So a picture meant to show that death spares no rank went up in a city that had just lost two kings.
What You'll Discover
Who was left out of the Paris dance.
What survives of the Paris wall.
How small Holbein made Death.
What Bruegel took out of the dance.
Who La Catrina was meant to mock.