Danse Macabre

When vaudeville shows ended, comedians, singers, and soubrettes would parade along catwalks in front of the stage, taking bows and applause. The people of medieval times imagined something comparable at life’s end: a catwalk procession of the quick and the dead known as a Danse Macabre. Faithful to the canons of the genre, in a little church in the forests of Istria, just outside the town of Beram, the king, queen, and bishop, together with ladies, merchants, innkeepers, young men, and pilgrims, have mingled with crowds of wily, fleet-foot skeletons for centuries, staging a silent procession, at once giddy and sad. As we know, all class distinctions vanish in the face of death; more surprising still here is the disappearance of another distinction: between the chosen and the damned, as if the very ideas of Heaven and Hell had evaporated. In artworks like the Dance of Death of Beram – painted by local artists even as the dawning Renaissance just miles away was launching a celebration of humankind and its worldly triumphs – we glimpse the eternal nihilism of the outskirts and the less privileged classes.