In 1424, on the walls of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris, someone painted a procession unlike anything seen before. Pope, emperor, knight, merchant, monk, peasant and child each stood hand in hand with a grinning corpse, and each one was being led away. It was called the Danse Macabre, the Dance of Death, and it spread across Europe from churchyards to printed books. Its message was simple and democratic: death takes everyone, in any order, with no appointment.
The idea grew out of a century of catastrophe. The Black Death of 1347 to 1351 killed perhaps a third of Europe's population, and plague returned again and again for generations. People lived with sudden death as a constant neighbor, and the Dance of Death gave that fear a form that was part sermon, part satire. It was a warning to be ready, but it also took quiet pleasure in showing the rich and powerful dragged off just like everyone else.
Allaert Claesz. was a Dutch engraver active in the first half of the 1500s, one of the printmakers who worked on a tiny scale, producing images so small they could be held in the palm of a hand. The Met's example, barely three and a half inches tall, pairs a couple with Death, who beats a drum. The drum is a recurring detail in Dance of Death imagery: in Hans Holbein's famous woodcuts of the 1530s, a whole band of skeletons plays drums and trumpets, and the beat of Death's drum is the rhythm everyone eventually has to march to.
A couple is a particularly pointed choice. Lovers were a favorite target of Death in Northern European art, a theme that became "Death and the Maiden" in the German tradition. Absorbed in each other and not paying attention, they are exactly the people Death likes to surprise. The lesson is that love, youth and beauty offer no exemption, and possibly that Death likes a good party as much as anyone.
The word "macabre" is itself a mystery. One theory traces it to the Maccabees, the Jewish martyrs of the Bible, whose story was associated with prayers for the dead. Another suggests it came from an artist or poet's name. Nobody knows for sure, which suits a word that has come to mean the grim fascination we can't quite look away from.
The Dance of Death isn't really about despair. It's about perspective. Hung on a wall, a tiny engraving like this does what it did five hundred years ago: it reminds you that the music won't play forever, so you might as well notice you're dancing.
Allaert Claesz.'s Dance of Death appears on our: