via HYPERALLERGIC
By the 15th century, an ominous motif was established in art and literature: the danse macabre, or dance of death. Skeletons and cadavers draped with putrified flesh cavorted with the living in murals and woodcuts, mingling with people from across social classes as reminders of the fate they all shared. One of the most famous depictions was the 1463 frieze by Bernt Notke at St. Mary’s Church in Lübeck, Germany. Set against a landscape of the surrounding city, 24 figures, from pope to peasant to corpse, were led in a life-size chain of movement by a skeleton with a flute. It was destroyed in a 1942 Allied bombing during World War II.
Although the dance of death reached its peak in the Late Middle Ages, its imagery remains. Dancing with Death, at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin, is exploring works on paper from the 15th to 20th centuries that are part of this visual tradition. “Danse macabre wasn’t just a generalized response to mortality, but instead specifically a performative social leveling that could be used by Late Medieval Christians to think about mortality and the inevitability of physical decay,” Elizabeth Welch, Andrew W. Mellon curatorial fellow in prints, drawings, and European paintings at the Blanton Museum, told Hyperallergic.
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