Emile Mâle:
In the Tale of the Three Dead and the Three Living, Death is certainly formidable, but in the end, clement. It speaks harshly to the great of the world, but grants them respite; it does not place its dry hand upon their shoulders. God had instigated Death to warn the sinner, not to strike him down. In the Danse Macabre, on the other hand, all traces of compassion are gone...
In the 15th century, the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris was a place filled with violent poetry. A bishop of Paris, who could not be buried there, asked in his will that at least some of the earth from the Innocents be placed in his grave. However, the dead did not remain in this holy ground for long; they were constantly being displaced for new arrivals, since twenty parishes had the right to bury their dead in that small enclosure. And at this time there was perfect equality among the dead: the rich did not have their own houses in the cemetery, as they do today. When the time came, their grave was sold and their bones taken to the charnel houses that stood above the cloister. At every opening thousands of nameless skulls could be seen; as Villon said, there was no difference between a magistrate and a delivery boy. We understand why the poet might seek inspiration there: he would be moved by all he saw. Built against the church of Les Saints Innocents was the cell of a recluse who was immured in her prison like the dead in their tombs; there was a hollow column in which a lamp was lit nightly to drive away ghosts and that thing who walks in the shadows; there was the Tale of the Three Dead and the Three Living carved on the portal of the church; and above all, there was the Danse Macabre painted in the cloister...
No painting of the Danse Macabre earlier than that in the Cemetery of the Innocents is known. The Journal of a Parisian Bourgeois gives its exact date: In the year 1424 the Danse Macabre of the Innocents was painted; it was begun about the month of August and finished during the following Lent. There is no earlier example in all of Europe. Unfortunately, this oldest Danse Macabre was destroyed. In the 17th century, in order to widen one of the neighboring streets, the bordering charnel houses were demolished, and the old fresco disappeared without any artist bothering to make a copy of it...
There are two manuscripts from the Abbey of St. Victor which give a long dialogue in French verse between the dead and the living. At the beginning of both volumes, in each table of contents, opposite the number of the page where the dialogue begins, we read: Verses of the Danse Macabre, as they are at the Cemetery of the Innocents. There can be no possible doubt that we have her an authentic copy of the verses inscribed beneath the figures of the fresco... Thanks to the St. Victor manuscripts (which agree perfectly) we know the names of the figures painted by the artist, we know their number, and we know the order in which they were presented to the spectator...
Guyot Marchant, the Parisian printer, brought out the first edition of his Danse Macabre in 1485; very fine woodcuts illustrate a dialogue between the dead and the living. Now if we read the verses accompanying the woodcuts carefully, we see immediately that they are precisely the same as those in the two manuscripts from St. Victor. Guyot Marchant had simply copied the inscriptions from the Cemetery of the Innocents.
But if he copied the verses, might he not also have copied the figures? Could his famous prints be, by any chance, pure and simple reproductions of the Danse Macabre of 1424? If this is true, we have nothing to regret, for the work we thought lost has been found. However, we should not leap to conclusions. It seems certain that the Danse Macabre of Guyot marchant is an imitation of the Danse Macabre of the Cemetery of the Innocents, but not a close copy...
It shows thirty couples composed of a live man being led by a corpse. Who is the live man's strange companion? Is he Death, personified thirty times? That is what is generally maintained, but incorrectly so. The two manuscripts from the Abbey of St. Victor do not call this figure la Mort, but le Mort. Guyot Marchant did the same. Thus, as the text of his Danse Macabre says, the couple consists of a dead man and a live man the dead man is the double of the living; he is the image of what the living is soon to become. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that if a man wrote a formula on parchment with his own blood and then looked in a mirror, he would see himself as he would be after death. This dream is illustrated here: the living see themselves in death, before the fact. Moreover, Guyot Marchant entitled his Danse Macabre: The Salutary Mirror...
In the fifteenth century, the dead of the Danse Macabre were not skeletons; they were dried-up corpses... The mummified corpse is more terrifying than the skeleton; he seems still to be living a ghastly life. These specters who dance and balance on one leg are almost lifelike; they remind us of a slender student who has neither belly nor calves to his legs... They preen themselves in a thousand ways: one drapes his shroud around him as if it were a shawl; another modestly covers his sex, which he no longer has. They are pleasantly ingratiating and persuasive: they pass their arms familiarly through those of their victims. They do not walk, they leap, and seem to keep step to the sound of a fife.
The corpse's irony, the smile that opens his toothless mouth, all his atrocious gaiety so well rendered by the artist, was expressed by poets also, but even more bitterly. We are astonished to find the verses of the Danse Macabre so harsh and sometimes so cruel... We sense a social condition in which the abuses were great, and in which privilege began to be severely judged: death, happily, is the same for all and puts everything in order...
The live men who are drawn along by the dancing dead do not dance: they walk with a step already heavy with death. They move forward because they must, but all lament and none wants to die. The archbishop realizes that he will no longer sleep in his beautiful painted chamber; the knight that he will no longer go in the morning to awaken the ladies and play them a morning song; the curate that he will receive no more offerings. The sergeant is indignant that his dead double dares lay hands on him, an officer of the king! He tries to hold onto his titles and duties, all the human things that seemed so solid now crumble like straw in his hands... And even the newly born infant who can say only a a a regrets life, like the aged emperor and the aged pope.
The unquenchable wish to live and the impossibility of escaping death - this terrible contradiction in human nature has never, I think, been more forcefully presented. The Danse Macabre may offend our sensibilities; we do not have to like it and may find it a bitter brew, but we must admit that it is among the great creations that envision and communicate to the eyes some of the soul's primordial feelings.[Religious Art in France: the Late Middle Ages by Emile Mâle, translated by Marthiel Matthews. Princeton University Press, 1986]
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