31 January 2020
Word of the Day: Dance of Death
DANCE OF DEATH. Originally a spectacular play, given in a churchyard,
going back to the fourteenth century, when the Black Death and other epidemics
had impressed the popular imagination. The plays opened with a sermon on death,
and then a series of figures resembling skeletons appeared. The dancing movement
was a later development. Traces of these plays are still found in Germany, France,
England, and Italy. Pictorial representations of these plays were made on the
walls of cemeteries and elsewhere. Among such engravings the most famous are
those of Hans Holbein (1460-1524) and Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528).
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