Chapter 3
MEDIEVAL PLAGUES AND THE MACABRE
Elina Gertsman
FORASMUCH AS THE PASSAGE OF DEATH, of the wretchedness of the exile of this world, for ignorance (uncunning) of dying—not only to lewd men (laymen) but also to religious and devout persons—seemeth wonderfully hard and perilous, and also right fearful and horrible; therefore in this present matter and treatise, that is of the Craft of Dying, is drawn and contained a short manner of exhortation, for teaching and comforting of them that be in point of death.1
Thus begins the Book of the Craft of Dying, a late medieval English manual that helped men negotiate their last moments in this terrestrial world.2 This instructional handbook on dying, an English translation of the anonymous Ars moriendi, encapsulated the late medieval conception of the “good death,” that is, death with the benefit of the church’s sacraments, in one’s own home, and surrounded by family and friends. The original Latin treatise came in two versions—a short one and a long one—and although scholars disagree about its original author, it seems clear that one of the main sources of the Ars moriendi is the third part of Jean Gerson’s Opus tripartitum de praeceptis decalogi, de confessione et de arte moriendi.3 Enormously popular in the fifteenth century, the treatise effectively staged the drama of death, involving the dying man, Moriens, in an elaborate spectacle of his own mortality. [65]Gathered around his bed to decide his ultimate destiny are the Trinity, the Virgin, the devil, the angels, and the demons. Death here is not personified, but is instead figured as a moral event, a public display of mankind’s negotiations with mortality (fig. 3.1). These negotiations have a decidedly mechanical, reflexive flavor. Moriens is subjected to five temptations—to reject faith, to despair over sins, to become impatient, to indulge in vainglory, and to succumb to avarice—and to five inspirations—to confirm faith, to hope for mercy through the act of contrition, to sustain patience through suffering, to recollect one’s sins, and finally to achieve detachment from the material world. Upon successfully overcoming each temptation and meekly acceding to all inspirations, Moriens is consequently, somewhat perfunctorily, and certainly inevitably saved. This predetermined structure of the required steps towards salvation demonstrates an attempt to normalize dying and regulate its rituals, which had been disrupted by the sudden onset of plague epidemics, but now again had come to the fore.
This very same impulse, it seems, underlies the multiplication of representations of burial rituals in the late medieval books of hours. In her study of fifteenth-century manuscript illuminations, Gloria Fiero has drawn attention to the funerary ritual imagery, postulating these images as “a manifestation of the intense psychological need within European society to restore the religious and social traditions of funeral and burial that were disrupted by the Black Death.”4 In the fourteenth century, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote in his Decameron that the dead were no longer accorded “the lamentations and bitter tears of their relatives . . . nor did the priests go to the trouble of pronouncing solemn and lengthy funeral rights, but . . . hastily lowered the body into the nearest empty grave they could find.”5 Eventually, he writes, “there were no tears or candles or mourners to honor the dead; in fact, no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown towards dead goats.”6 Boccaccio may have had a flare for the dramatic, but around 1359/60 another man, a Carmelite friar named Jean de Venette, reported in his chronicle the following news regarding the plague and the flagging funerary rites: “As a result of that pestilence a great many men and women died that year and the next in Paris and throughout the kingdom of France, as they also did in other parts of the world. The young were more likely to die than the elderly, and did so in such numbers that burials could hardly keep pace . . . the cowardly priests took themselves off, leaving the performance of spiritual offices to the regular clergy.”7
[67]The representations of burials seem to betray a desire to standardize the funerary rites and codify them in the Offices of the Dead. In the fifteenth century, the epidemics subsided and the books of hours swelled with detailed illuminated Offices of the Dead that recorded, painstakingly, funerary rituals. In the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, for instance, the Matins opens with a deathbed scene, wherein the priest who came to hear the last confession prepares to give viaticum and administer extreme unction. On the pages of the Prime, the corpse is prepared for burial: the shuttered window has now been opened, as the private ritual of dying is here replaced by a communal spectacle of death; this signals the beginning of the public part of the ritual, in which the deceased would be carried through the streets to the church. There, placed before the altar, the corpse would be blessed and the Mass sung, as is seen in the image that accompanies the Terce; after being carried to the graveyard, the body, again blessed, would be delivered to the ground, the ritual invoked in the image that accompanies Sext. The “Hours of the Dead” conclude with an image of the Requiem Mass.8 In the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, as well as in the Ars moriendi, one sees, perhaps, a visualized reaction to the chaos brought about by the plague, the desire to regularize the process of death itself and to assure a satisfactory outcome.
DEATH AND THE IMAGE IN THE MIDDLE AGES
The plague is also often implicated with a very different kind of imagery that gained popularity in the late Middle Ages—the imagery of the macabre. The macabre focused on the decay of the body, and portrayed death by means of decomposing corpses, skeletons stripped of flesh, and, especially, juxtapositions of these putrefying bodies with the whole and as yet uncorrupted flesh of those still living.
Death has been visualized in medieval art in a variety of ways, most often in the context of Passion and martyrdom narratives, and frequently as a physical visceral event, from the crucifixion of the emaciated and bleeding Christ to the cruel grilling of Saint Lawrence. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the death of mortal men and women came to be represented in a proliferation of Last Judgment scenes that unfolded above the portals of many pilgrimage churches; there, too, as in the story of Lazarus (whose miraculous revivification fated him to die twice), death was figured by means of resurrection (fig. 3.2). Finally, in the years before and especially in the wake of the Black Death epidemic, a decidedly gruesome [69]subject became popular in European art—the Triumph of Death.9
Unlike the Last Judgment imagery, the Triumph figures Death personified as an apocalyptic figure described by John in Revelation 7:8: a morbid earthbound apparition on a pale horse that tramples crowds as it sweeps the land.10 In a wall painting in the Sacro Speco at Subiaco, the skeletal Death takes on decidedly female characteristics: the woman was associated with death throughout the Middle Ages, not least because Eve, responsible for biting the fateful apple, helped bring death into this world (fig. 3.3).11 A skeletal Death wrapped in a black shroud rides triumphantly in an oxcart in Lorenzo Costa’s the Triumph of Death from the church of S. Giacomo Maggiore in Bologna;12 it gallops on horseback over the unfortunate beggars and the sick and attacks an unsuspecting group of nobles in a 1445 fresco at the Palazzo Sclafani in Palermo.13 Such a specter is described in Pierre Michault’s La Danse aux Aveugles: “this thing, disfigured, mounted on a horse, it is Death. It passes by and does not spare anybody, and it hits with its arrow that is so sharp.”14
The Triumph iconography lurks on the margins of the macabre, but its allegorical nature and lack of focus on the corruptibility of the human body leave it devoid of the visceral quality of true macabre art, which is so fascinated with the flesh and its fragmentation, reveling in the spectacle of the sordid, foul, tainted nature of human bodies that decompose and fall apart within their repugnant graves. The Triumph lacks the uncanniness of the macabre, the eerie and disturbing quality of which is predicated on the spectacular display of decomposed bodies, their overt physicality, their repetition and doubling, and, ultimately, their disquieting sense of spiritual isolation. In Lorenzo Costa’s Triumph of Death, men and women cowering on the ground are watched by God and his heavenly court, but in macabre imagery, [70]God is largely absent, and men find themselves alone, face-to-face with death. Or, rather, not exactly alone: the personal, intimate encounter between living flesh and its decaying double is made viscerally available to the gaze of the viewer—an encounter so disquieting, so unsettling, and so unmistakably macabre.
Three visual and literary themes are associated especially with the macabre: the accidental encounter of living and dead as told in the story The Legend of the Three Dead and the Three Living, in which a group of noblemen encounter three corpses during the hunt; the transi tombs, in which an idealized effigy of the patron is doubled by an image of his decomposed corpse underneath; and the Dance of Death, which shows men and women of different estates brought to a morbid dance with death. All carry a didactic and penitential rhetoric, and all possess the defining characteristics of the macabre—the themes of doubling and repetition, the stress on the physicality of the decomposing body, and the preoccupation with spectacle and display.15
[71]MACABRE ART
This imagery, in its nature, is extremely different from what has been examined thus far. In the macabre images, instead of a regularized procedure of dying, the ugly and the fantastic side of Death resurfaces, extraordinary and grotesque, as revitalized corpses confront the living in a series of morbid encounters. Each such encounter offers one and the same message: Death is an equalizing force that sweeps away all human ambition, and strikes women and men, the rich and the poor, and the young and the old. One who witnesses such an encounter benefits directly by learning and internalizing a jolting didactic lesson: the macabre exists by way of the reader-viewer who receives the message. In the late medieval poem “A Disputation betwixt the Body and Worms” makes a double appeal to the audience: first, to the author of the poem who is himself addressed by the tomb epitaph he reads and relates to his readers (“Take hede un to my figure here abowne / And se how sumtyme I was fresche and gay / Now turned to wormes mete and corrupcion”), and then to the reader of the poem proper, when the poet elaborates on the meaning of his verses: “That ther at sum wisdom thou may lere / To se what thou art and here aftyr sal be / When thou leste wenes, venit mors te superare / When thi grafe grenes, bonum est mortis meditari.”16
This same message is reiterated in The Legend of the Three Dead and the Three Living.17 The poem, originally written in the thirteenth century and later retold in various versions, both poetic and visual, tells of three young noblemen, who, during a hunt, encounter three decomposing corpses.18 A dialogue ensues and, in its course, the corpses tell the noblemen about the transitory nature of life, make the young men confront the repugnancy of flesh, and, by doing so, point to the need for timely atonement. The visual presence of the illustrated Legend in manuscripts and murals attests to its popularity, and although the Legend became a Franco-German phenomenon, it also appears early on in Italy, England, and Spain.19 The world of the dead and the world of the living collide in this morbid encounter, which may be considered the first manifestation of macabre art in the Middle Ages.
[72]An excellent example of the Legend appears on the walls of the church of Sts. Blaise and Orien at Meslay-le-Grenet (figs. 3.4 and 3.5). There, six figures encounter one another in a cemetery, its ground sprinkled with small crosses. A window cut in the wall between the figures of the dead and the living emphasizes the divide between the two realms. Wrapped in long white shrouds, their skeletal feet bare on the ground, the dead are contrasted with the three noblemen on horseback, clad in elaborate garments; falcons above signify their status as hunters. For scholar Jean Baudrillard, “the figure of the double [is] intimately bound up with [the figure] of death,”20 and the uncanny quality of the image is here signaled precisely by the doubling of the bodies, by the implied mirroring of the noble hunters, so full of life, and the passive figures that appear, without warning, directly in front of them.
The hunters react forcefully and so do their horses. Two of the animals turn away from the morbid specters, while the riders look over their shoulders, seemingly disbelieving the apparition of the corpses. The falcons above them turn towards the corpses as well. The third rider faces the dead, his hands emphatically raised; he seems to be in the middle of delivering his speech of repentance, while his horse rears in horror. The gazes and gestures of the hunters draw attention to the three dead, who stand defiantly, their skeletal heads tossed back; the skeleton on the far right is clearly aware of his decomposed body, and arches his back, as if displaying his decaying flesh. The contrast between the luxurious dress of the hunters and the shrouded ghostlike dead emphasizes the somehow inappropriate physicality of the dead bodies in question.
The position of the viewer vis-à-vis this scene is significant. The beholder stands below the image, privy to the spectacle unfolding above, but evidently unnoticed. The audience is witnessing a clash between two realms, a clash necessary for the construction of a macabre image: here, one world intrudes upon another. This trespassing of the liminal border between life and death is mutual: the living are made to confront, incredibly, the future corruption of their bodies, while the dead return to the world of the living, reversing, unexpectedly and impossibly, their initial journey into the realm of death. This journey is uncanny, in the sense that literary theorist Nicholas Royle defines it as “a matter of something gruesome or terrible, above all death and corpses” that “has something to do with the sense of a secret encounter: it is perhaps inseparable from an apprehension, however fleeting, of something that should have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”21 Because the viewers are separated from this intimate scene so emphatically, they witness the scene in secret, unseen; the beholders are voyeurs, peeking from behind the enigmatic [74]portal that separates life and death. This sense of separation reminds the viewers that they, unlike the unfortunate hunters, are not being doubled in a decomposing mockery of the body; the macabre may strive to traumatize its beholders, but it always leaves a caveat for escape. Turning away from the morbid encounter, the viewers are encouraged to think about and internalize the moral lesson of what they have just seen.
In the Legend, then, the living are faced with their own mortality. This moral lesson is quite straightforward and articulated in the declaration of one of the dead: “We once were what you are now; you will become what we are now.” One must always be mindful of death, which comes inevitably and sometimes suddenly. The dead in the Legend are apparitions, phantoms, ghosts, revenants: they rise from their graves to warn and advise, to caution and counsel repentance. A different kind of apparition carrying essentially the same penitential rhetoric accompanies transi tombs, which became popular in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries among the northern European ecclesiastical literati.22 These tombs, like the images of the Legend, offer a spectacle of the macabre: here, images of men carved on a tombstone are doubled by the representation of their decomposed bodies underneath.23 Traditionally, medieval effigies drew attention away from contemplation of the dead body within the tomb, but in the late Middle Ages, transi tombs reversed these expectations by exposing the reality of the decay and making it permanent in stone—that is, putting the body on display.24
The importance of this display is underscored in the opening of the inscription on the Avignon tomb of Cardinal La Grange, which dates from around 1402: “Spectaculum facti sumus mundo” (We have been made a spectacle for the world) (fig. 3.6).25 The idealized effigy sculpted on top of the sepulcher and the decomposed corpse carved below echo one another in a sort of uncanny encounter, as if the corpse is being reflected in a distorted mirror.26 Here, however, the two realms are kept emphatically distinct: the intact body on top of the tomb comes in no visual or physical contact with the decaying corpse below; the transi, too, although turned towards the effigy, cannot “see” it through the stone screen. The viewer here is privy to more than the cardinal himself, and is allowed to behold what the cardinal, [75]dead and buried, can no longer see. In the Legend, the moral lesson about the fleeting quality of life was ostensibly meant for the hunters, but here, in the transi, it is unequivocally directed at the viewer.
The address to the viewer is stressed still further in the seven heads sculpted above the inscription, which are usually identified as belonging to a pope, two cardinals, a bishop, a king, a young prince, and a burgher. The inscription itself resonates incontrovertibly with the moral lesson of The Legend of the Three Dead and the Three Living: “You will revert, as we have done, to a fetid cadaver, food and tidbits for worms and ashes.”27 The encounter in the Legend may have been conceived as a moral exemplum, but it focused its attention on three rich men; the transi tomb of Cardinal La Grange includes all others in its didactic lesson by pointing out the inevitability of death for “the old and the young . . . of whichever status, sex or estate.” And if the Latin of the inscription itself was reserved for the learned elite, the chorus of sculpted heads was meant to guide the viewing of those who could not read: it emphasizes the equality of death by inviting them to extend the transformation of La Grange’s body to all bodies: royal, clerical, and one’s own. The Latin inscription, moreover, hardly bars an illiterate [76]viewer from understanding the full impact of the striking difference between the two sculpted versions of the cardinal’s body, as the slightly skeletonized heads emphasize the equality of death for all. The emphasis on this corruption of doubled flesh is seen most dramatically in the imagery and texts of the Dance of Death. Of all macabre images, it is the Dance that is most commonly associated with the plagues or, rather, with local outbreaks that continued to rage throughout Europe over the next couple of centuries.28
Even more popular than the Legend, the Dance of Death became fashionable throughout Europe and was found in Germany, France, England, Spain, Italy, Scandinavia, and the Baltic.29 The Dance of Death from Meslay-le-Grenet, France, dating from approximately 1500, is a fairly typical example (fig. 3.7).30 Grasped by Death embodied, a long procession of men of different classes, laymen and clerics, rich and poor, young and old alike, eloquently communicate the message of the inevitability of death, which is here symbolized by the dancing skeletons. Inscribed below the scene is a series of verses, written in the vernacular, that exhort the living to dance along.
Space does not allow for a full discussion of the complexity of the Dance of Death; however, it is worth mentioning the same aspects of doubling, repetition, and display that were traced for the other macabre themes. Here, too, one encounters a representation of death as an oppressive materiality of the flesh, as skeleton after skeleton parades in front of us, each prancing, displaying its body, showing it off from every imaginable angle. Each, of course, is doubled by a living person led away in the morbid dance with death. Death is transformed into a spectacle of crumbling flesh, as body after body flaunts its own decay and disintegration for the benefit of the viewer. The uncanny effect brought about by the doubling of the bodies is deepened in the repetitive structure of the Dance of Death by the recurrence of the paired, doubled dancers that follow one another. Here, the series of personal encounters with death found in the Legend is multiplied dramatically, transformed into a spectacle for all society to see and experience. The secrecy and the privacy of the encounter between a human being and death is compromised, and the dancers here are clearly aware of the viewers: they stare back at them, imploringly, beseechingly, as if attempting to secure their intercession, to beg them to disrupt this gruesome romp.
[78]Moving alongside the painting, the medieval beholder would inevitably have come to his or her own double—a life-sized figure of a bailiff, a physician, a ploughman. In The Legend of the Three Dead and the Three Living, as well as in transi tombs, the victims of Death were doubled by (their own) dead bodies; here, it is the viewer who encounters his or her own painted double, who makes eye contact with the beholder. As the skeletal Death grabs its victim, the victim looks at the viewer; the viewer, in turn, reads the verses in which he or she is directly addressed: the verses—the words spoken by Death—comment specifically on his or her profession. The beholder is here cast as a terrified onlooker, not hidden from view, but exposed for the dancers to see. The painting is physically experienced in such a way that the distinction between the picture and the audience is considerably confused, as the viewer is drawn into the morbid dance, invited to become a part of the procession of Death. Death, here, claims all.
THE PLAGUE AND THE MACABRE
It is no wonder that a number of scholars implicate the plague in the appearance of macabre images—in their somatic and visceral nature and especially in their overall lesson about the equalizing nature of death. The fascination with the macabre decay of the human body is often taken to have gone hand in hand with the advent of deadly epidemics, which, by increasing societal violence and by making death such a common occurrence, cheapened the value of human life.31 Indeed, macabre imagery appeared in many areas affected by outbreaks of plague: in France (Paris alone suffered the loss of 40,000 people in 1466), in the cities of the Hansa,32 and in Italy, all of which were repeatedly affected by bouts of plague throughout the fifteenth century.33 Based on the inflammatory speeches of Girolamo Savonarola, the plague continued to reign everywhere; as late as 1496, he promised his audiences that “there will not be enough men left to bury the dead; nor means to dig enough graves . . . . Men will pass through the streets crying aloud, ‘Are there any dead? Are there any dead?’”34
However, to hold medieval plagues responsible for the spread of macabre imagery is highly problematic. To begin with, both geographical and temporal frameworks of the development of the macabre do not coincide with the disastrous progress of the Black Death through Europe. The Encounter of the Three Dead and the Three Living, for example, appeared [79]in manuscript illumination at the end of the thirteenth century—long before the first bout of plague in 1347.35 Conversely, the Dance of Death gained popularity by the end of the fifteenth century, when the epidemics had subsided considerably and lost their initial horrifying moral impact. Moreover, one finds very few transi tombs or Dances of Death in Italy, the initial locus of the plague, and in the fifteenth century even the iconography of the Encounter of the Three Dead and the Three Living became far less frequent south of the Alps. The Dance of Death is still found in Italy in the sixteenth century, long after the epidemics, though still fear-inspiring, had become a more routine part of people’s experience and ceased to terrify in the same way they had done during the fourteenth century; unlike the Dance of Death in Paris, painted in the heart of the city at the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, sixteenth-century Italian images are found in small towns, painted high up on the cemetery chapel facades, such as those in Pinzolo and Carisolo, both painted by Simone Baschenis,36 located within a few kilometers of one another. The configuration of these images is quite distinct, as they betray the desire to transform the macabre from an intimate and visceral encounter with somatic decay into a broad-spectrum reflection on the nature of death. Both, for instance, include a representation of Christ (hanging on the cross in Pinzolo, and standing and blessing in Carisolo37), and both introduce the image of Death on horseback shooting arrows at its victims, thereby conflating the Dance with the more familiar Triumph of Death.
Equating the progress of the Black Death with the rise of macabre imagery becomes especially problematic in view of new findings recently published by Samuel Cohn Jr.38 Basing his research on over 40,000 documents—among them chronicles, wills, and burial records—Cohn demonstrates that the disease underwent radical transformations in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and that with these changes in the character of the plague came adjustments in mentality. Because of the domestication of what he calls a “new toxic germ,” the mortality rate declined rapidly after the first onset of the disease in 1348, which “allowed doctors to congratulate themselves on what they and their patients perceived as successful medical intervention, the discovery of new remedies and measures for prevention.”39
[80]The changes in the nature of the disease led to another important fact: the plague stopped being the ultimate equalizer. Later fifteenth-century epidemics struck mainly children and spared adults, who developed some immunity to the disease. In examining burial records and analyzing chronicles gathered from around Europe, Cohn draws attention to the increase in the proportion of children’s deaths to the overall numbers of the dead.40 For instance, Sienese Camporeggio records indicate that while in 1348 children formed under 9 percent of all the plague burials, in 1363, when the epidemic returned, children constituted over one-third of those who died from the disease and were buried at the cemetery. Similarly, if European chroniclers lamented the equalizing force of the plague in 1348, by the end of the fourteenth and certainly by the fifteenth century chronicles from places as different as Pisa, Mainz, and Paris pointed to the fact that children were the most frequent victims of the plague;41 the British Anonimalle Chronicle even goes as far as to call the plague “la mortalite des enfauntz.”42 How, then, should the fundamental message of the macabre imagery that hails the leveling force of death be dealt with? The sculptor of the monumental tomb of La Grange included, as a company for the cardinal, seven sculpted heads that belonged to men from different strata of society: death equalizes all. The monumental murals of the Dance of Death that include the rich, the poor, the young, the old, laymen, and ecclesiastics transform the danse macabre into Bakhtinian carnival proper:43 the pope, the king, the peasant, the beggar, for just this moment are all alike in the grip of equalizing death. If a disproportionate number of children were susceptible to the later plagues, then it is the representation of the Child in the Cradle, commonly tucked in at the end of the procession, that should have come to the fore, multiplied into the images of infants, toddlers, young children, and adolescents (fig. 3.8).
Finally, the philosophy that accompanied this change in the nature of the disease contradicts, at its core, the call of the macabre imagery to think constantly of death. The somatic spectacle of decomposition highlighted by the doubling between the uncorrupted body and its putrefied doppelganger, the requisite and identifying characteristics of the macabre, stand in stark contrast with the ordered and controlled images from the Offices of the Dead and with the predictable and tidy series of struggles between the good [82]and the evil that accompany the Ars moriendi treatises. This is, in part, Baudrillard’s “primitive” double—“the dead man [who] is the double of the living,” just as “the double is the familiar living figure of the dead.”44 But this is also what he terms a “haunting double” who, with internalizing of the soul, “comes to the fore as the subject’s discontinuity in death and madness.”45 Instead of preparing one for a good death or showing the proper burial rites that ought to follow such a death, the macabre showcases and promotes obsessive thinking about mortality. The skeletal Death of the Parisian danse macabre, for instance, quite specifically asks: “Tell us, for what reason, have you not been thinking about death?” Medieval doctors—among them Tommasso del Garbo and Johann Widmans—would have had a very good and ready answer to this: they advised against thinking about death precisely because they believed it made one susceptible to the plague. If Girolamo Savonarola incited his Florentine congregation to dwell on death as divine punishment, his namesake and contemporary, Paduan doctor Michele Savonarola, warned that plague is fueled by melancholy, sadness, and, especially, by heavy thoughts of death.46
There is one medieval mural that bears a direct connection to the Black Death, however. This is a fresco from the church of Saint André in Lavaudieu, France, painted in 1355—that is, in the wake of the first devastating epidemic. This Death is personified as a woman—not an unusual choice—and carries arrows that strike those around her, often in the neck and the armpits—in other words, places where the buboes commonly appeared. Entitled Mors, this fresco stands at the intersection of such themes as the Triumph of Death (there, too, a female figure, albeit skeletal, strikes its victims with arrows) and the Dance of Death (in which laymen and clerics of various ages line up in the deadly cavalcade).47 This is a curious inversion of an iconographic theme usually called the Madonna of Mercy that portrays the Virgin as a monumental figure draped in an expansive mantle. However, if the Madonna of Mercy, often invoked in connection with the plague, gathers the crowds under her wide cloak to protect the devout and shelter them from harmful arrows (fig. 3.9),48 the personified Plague at Lavaudieu shelters no one, allowing men and women to collapse on the ground on either side of her towering body, her cloak remaining conspicuously empty. [84]One must note, too, the striking resemblance of this personification of the Black Death with the mysterious figure of a woman that appears in the midst of the dancers in the Dance of Death at Kermaria, between the physician and the usurer (fig. 3.10).49 Its placement in the middle of the procession otherwise devoid of women is startling; what is more startling is that she takes the place of one of the skeletal dancers. Could it be that she is Death personified, and those skeletons that prance amidst the mournful cavalcade of victims are her morbid decaying vassals?
Macabre imagery, then, exists in an uneasy relationship with the later plague epidemics. Certainly, it was not engendered by them and often it contradicted medical advice by exposing and by insisting upon the reality of omnipresent death. Here, the macabre resonates with late medieval sermons, with their apocalyptic, eschatological appeal strongly flavored with didacticism.50 Unquestionably, the plague epidemics contributed to the popularity of the macabre and especially to its dramatic message of the inevitable and equalizing nature of death. It is important to understand, however, that much of the earlier drama and violence of the Black Death [85]waned in the late medieval and early modern period. Pogroms, although no less numerous, lost their direct connections to the plague; only one known massacre in the late fourteenth century directly implicated the Jews in the outbreak of the disease. Flagellants, too, became less numerous, and their movement became more localized, often organized by a local church or town authority. Nor did the drama of the macabre, with its visceral focus on the flesh, stem directly from the plague epidemics, but rather became their frequent companion; on the late medieval canvas of Europe it painted its own imagery amidst the devastation of the old world and the building of the world. Instead, it is the Ars moriendi, the handbook of mortality, that processes and digests the earlier horrors of the plagues and, when the respite finally comes, patiently and tirelessly instructs its readers on the best and tidiest way to finally die.
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1 “Here Beginneth the Book of the Craft of Dying,” in Comper, Book of the Craft of Dying, 3.
2 The bibliography on the Ars moriendi treatises is vast. Especially useful are Bayard’s critical edition of L’art du bien mourir au XVe siècle and O’Connor, Art of Dying Well.
3 Bayard, L’art du bien mourir, 18.
4 Fiero, “Death Ritual in Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Illumination,” 271. For further discussion of the representation of death in the Books of Hours, see Alexandre-Bidon, “La mort dans les livres d’heures,” in A Réveiller les morts, 83–94.
5 Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. William, 10.
6 Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. William, 11.
7 Quoted in Geraud, Chronique Latin de Guillaume de Nangis avec les continuations de cette chronique, 2:210–16; reprinted in Horrox, Black Death, 54–57. The entire chronicle is translated and annotated by Richard newhall and Jean Birdsail, in Chronicle of Jean de Venette.
8 Hours of Catherine of Cleves, fol. 97 (Matins), fol. 99v (Prime), fol. 101 (Terce), fol. 102v (Sext), fol. 104 (Mass). For more on the text of the Office of the Dead, see Ottosen, Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead.
9 Liliane Brion-Guerry’s Le thème du “Triomphe de la mort” is the most helpful resource on the subject.
10 A slight variation on the theme was produced in an illustration of Petrarch’s Trionfi, in which Death triumphs over Love, Time triumphs over Death, and Divinity triumphs over Time. Various Triumphs of Death that constitute a part of the extensive cycles were inspired by Petrarch’s poems. For a comprehensive study of the influence of Petrarch’s Trionfi on fifteenth-century artistic production, see Ortner, Petrarcas “Trionfi.”
11 See Imagerie du Sacro speco; Egidi et al., I monasteri di Subiaco, 486; Dantier, Les monastères bénédictins d’Italie, 2:222; and Brion-Guerry, Le thème du “Triomphe de la mort,” 118–19.
12 For both the Triumph of Fame and the Triumph of Death frescoes in Bologna see Marr, “Die Erlösungsallegorie von Lorenzo Costa.”
13 Literature on this Triumph of Death includes Carta, “L’affresco del Trionfo della morte”; Abbate and Cordaro, Trionfo della Morte di Palermo; Mazze, “Il Trionfo della Morte a Palermo”; Bresc-Bautier, Artistes, patriciens et confréries; and Giuffrida, “Aspetti della politica.”
14 “Cette chose toute defiguree assise sur un boeuf, c’est la Mort. Elle pase et n’epargne personne et frappe de son dard qui tant est poignant.” Quoted in Utzinger, Itinéraires des Danses macabres, 97. The synthesis of all these themes—triumphant Death, ubi sunt tradition, Mors de la Pomme, Death on Horseback, etc.—will appear only at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in Robert Gobin’s Les Loups ravissans: Cestuy liure / Ou autrement doctrinal moral / Intitule est: Qui deliure Douze chapitres en general / Ou chascun se brutte et rural / Nest par trop, il pourra congnoistre / Comment euiter vice et mal / On doit et tresvertueux estre [Paris, ca. 1505].
15 For the themes of mirroring and doubling, see Binski, Medieval Death, 123–63.
16 Horrox (Black Death, 347) renders this as “Look at my image / and see how I was once fresh and gay / who am now turned to worms; meat and corruption / . . . / So you may learn some wisdom from studying it / and realize what you are and what you shall become / When you least expect it death comes to conquer you / While your grave is still undug it is good to think on death.” For the full text see Conlee, Middle English Debate Poetry, 51–62
17 The best resource on the Legend is Vifs nous sommes, morts nous serons.
18 Stefan Glixelli was the first to differentiate among five versions of the poem in his Les cinq poèmes des trois morts et des trois vifs. For additional literature on the texts, see De Mointaglon, L’Alphabet de la mort d’Hans Holbein entouré; Storck, Die Legende von den drei Lebenden und von den drei Toten; and Künstle, Die Legende von den drei Lebenden und von den drei Toten und der Totentanz. Images are treated in Servières, “Les formes artistiques du ‘Dict des Trois Morts et des Trois Vifs’”; Offner, Corpus of Florentine Painting, 3.5.261–63; and Rötzler, Die Begegnung der drei Lebenden und drei Toten.
19 For the full list, see Vifs nous sommes.
20 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 141.
21 Royle, Uncanny, 2. For further discussion of the notion of the uncanny, see Arnzen, Return of the Uncanny; Bronfen, “The Death Drive (Freud)”; and Chisholm, “The Uncanny.” See also Dolar, “‘I Shall Be With You on Your Wedding-Night’”; Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”; Johnson, “Ambient Technologies, Uncanny Signs”; Kofman, “Un philosophe ‘unheimlich’”; and Rank, Double.
22 On transi tombs see Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol; King, “The Cadaver Tomb in England”; Lawson, “Cadaver Effigies”; and Binski, Medieval Death, 139–52.
23 Jurgis Baltrusaitis (Le Moyen Age fantastique, 240) was the first to suggest the similarities between the two: both warn the viewer about the sin of pride, and both equally confront us with the contrast between a decomposing and a whole body.
24 On Gothic effigies see, for instance, Morganstern, Gothic Tombs of Kinship.
25 Binski, Medieval Death, 145.
26 All that remains are the tomb fragments; the double effigy was once capped by a representation of the heavenly court and included a scene in which angels interceded on La Grange’s behalf.
27 Binski, Medieval Death, 143–45. Specifically on Lagrange’s tomb, see Morganstern, “The La Grange Tomb and Choir.”
28 Dubruck, Theme of Death in French; and Brosselet, “Les danses macabres en temps de peste.”
29 The bibliography on the Dance of Death imagery is too vast to be given fair treatment here. Quite a few important scholarly works have considered the Dance of Death paintings within the broader context of the late medieval world, with varying degrees of success; see Mâle, Religious Art in France, 328–48; Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages; Boase, Death in the Middle Ages, esp. 104–9; Camille, Master of Death, esp. 158, 196; and Binski, Medieval Death, 153–59.
30 See Gertsman, “Visual Space and the Practice of Viewing.”
31 See esp. Ziegler, Black Death, 85–111; and Tuchman, Distant Mirror, 82–127, 172–89. The bibliography on the Black Death is enormous; I have profited most from the compendium of medieval plague sources translated and edited by Rosemary Horrox (see note 6 above).
32 Schildhauer, Hansa, 175.
33 Hay, Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, 33.
34 Savonarola quoted in Aston, Fifteenth Century, 15.
35 See, for example, Bib. Nat. de France, Paris, Arsenal, ms. 3142, fol. 311v, created ca. 1285–92; the poem there is accompanied by the image of the three dead and the three living.
36 An inscription on the façade window of Santo Stefano reads: “Simon de Baschenis pingebat die 12 Mensis Juli 1519.” A seminal study of the Italian Dances is Vigo, Le Danze Macabre in Italia.
37 The inclusion of Christ particularly, inasmuch as it is reminiscent of Berlin’s Marienkirche mural, may indicate a German influence; Brion-Guerry, Le thème du “Triomphe de la mort,” 61.
38 Cohn, Black Death Transformed.
39 Cohn, Black Death Transformed, 238–40.
40 Cohn, Black Death Transformed, 212–16.
41 For Pisa, see Banti, Cronaca di Pisa di Ranieri Sardo, 186; for Mainz, see “Chronicon moguntinum, 1347–1406 und Fortsetzung bis 1478,” 222; and for Paris, see Tuetey, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris 1405–1449, 111, 228, 295.
42 Galbraith, Anonimalle Chronicle, 50.
43 Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua (translated by Helene Iswolsky as Rabelais and His World). This idea is present throughout Bakhtin’s book, but especially in chapter 3, which deals with festive folk imagery in Rabelais’ work, and chapter 5, which specifically addresses grotesque bodies and their implied ambivalence.
44 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 141.
45 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 142.
46 Savonarola, I trattati in volgare della peste.
47 See Courtille, “Vers une nouvelle datation des peintures.” See the essay by Pamela Berger in this volume for an illustration and further discussion of this mural.
48 For instance, in the early fifteenth century in the bishopric of Fermo, documents allowing the building of the churches dedicated to the Virgin link her directly to the protection from the epidemics. The Mother of Mercy was meant to intercede on humanity’s behalf to stop the disease. See Sensi, “Santuari politici ‘contra pestem.’” For further discussion of the Madonna of Mercy and her protective powers against plague, see Sussmann, “Maria mit dem Schutzmantel”; and Marshall, “Manipulating the Sacred,” 512–27. Marshall also discusses images that feature the chosen ones shielded by Mary’s cloak, while others are collapsing on the ground, as in Plague Madonna della Misericordia by Pietro Alemanno (1485) and Barnaba da Modena (1370s).
49 On Kermaria, see Soleil, La danse macabre de Kermaria-an-Isquit; Chardin, Chapelle de Kermaria-Nisquit en Plouha; and Cocaign and Mesnard, Itron-Varia-an-Iskuit, Plouha.
50 I am thinking, e.g., of the Franciscan friar Richard who preached apocalyptic sermons at the Cemetery of Holy Innocents in front of the Dance of Death murals. The moral, didactic flavor of his sermons is easy to surmise from the fact that his audience, contrite and repentant, threw expensive clothing and gaming paraphernalia into a fire that burned nearby. See Tuetey, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, 233–34.