This Dance was painted upon the wall of the churchyard of the
Dominican Convent in Great Bale, by order of the very Ecclesiastical
Council of which our Aeneas Sylvius was Secretary, and in commemoration
of a plague which visited the town during the sitting of that Council,
and carried off many of its members.
What is a Dance of Death? and why should Death be painted dancing?
Some readers may think of it as a frantic revel of grim skeletons, or
perhaps--like me in my boyish musings--imagine nameless shapes with
Death and Hell gleaming in their faces, each clasping a mortal beguiled
to its embrace, all flitting and floating round and round to unearthly
music, and gradually receding through vast mysterious gloom till they
are lost in its horrible obscurity.
But neither of these notions is near the truth. The Dance of Death is
not a revel, and in it Death does not dance at all. A Dance of Death, or
a Dance Macabre, as it was called, is a succession of isolated pictures,
all informed with the same motive, it is true, but each independent of
the others, and consisting of a group, generally of but two figures, one
of which is the representative of Death.
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