Jess Ferro

CSMA 549

Final Paper

January 2015

Repent While You Can: The Danse Macabre in Dante’s Inferno and Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights

“Here is a small fact: You are going to die....” -from The Book Thief by Markus Zusak Death has been alive and well in the world since the Fall of Man. Since that time, Death,

the concept, the actual event, the figure, has permeated and haunted the human imagination.

From the cave paintings of Lascaux depicting hunting scenes (figure 1) to Death as narrator in

Markus Zusak’s 2005 bestselling novel, The Book Thief (figure 2), death has shown his face in the

arts from prehistory to the current day. As Philippe Aries traces in his lectures1 and book2, the

attitudes towards death, specifically in the Western psyche, have evolved over time, as shown

through his analysis of “diverse sources ranging from literature, art and archaeology to liturgy

and public records.”3 Perhaps one of the most fascinating manifestations of Western culture’s

attitude towards death is the genre known as the danse macabre, or the dance of death. Today this

phrase usually calls to mind the classical orchestra piece by Camille Saint-Saëns. However it has

a much longer history. This dance of death permeated much of Europe’s imagination during the

Middle Ages, emerging across the continent in its literature, visual art (example in figure 3) and

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1 Ariès, Philippe. Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975.

2 Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. New York: Vintage, 1982.

3 Charmaz, Kathy. “The Hour of Our Death.” Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1983). Book Review. JSTOR, 308.

theater. In re-reading Dante’s Inferno, this medieval tradition came to mind, especially, at least

initially, in Canto XXI. I found myself hearing Saint-Saëns’ tune, thinking about the tradition of

the danse macabre, and imagining the entire scene as though it were illustrated by Hieronymus

Bosch. After this synesthetic sensation prevailed as more than just a fleeting idea, I decided to

investigate the possibility of some sort of connection between Dante and Bosch, with the danse

macabre as the string that could harmoniously tie them together. Thus, this paper presents the

evidence for the relationship between Dante and Bosch through the genre of the danse macabre.

The Imagination on Death

In his book, The Hour of Our Death, Philippe Aries traces the ways that Western society

has thought, acted and felt towards death from the Middle Ages to the present day. He essentially

breaks down this evolution in perception in the following way: first in the early Middle Ages

there was an acceptance of death as a part of life which was transformed by the late Middle Ages

into a sense of the weightiness of death and the power of death but also the unburdening that

eventually comes through death.4 Then from the sixteenth to early nineteenth century there was a

stronger element of fear that entered the feeling of the individual towards death, which Aries

argues is because death became less communal and more localized to the family, “aspects of

bereavement previously shared by the community at large closed in now on the small circle of

immediate survivors.”5 Lastly, the modern period is marked by a sense of defeat, and because of

this, death has become an invisible menace to be ignored and hidden away; instead of finding

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4 Ibid. 308.

5 Stannard, David E. “Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 80, No. 5 (1975). Book Review. JSTOR, 1297.

“expression” as it did in the previous eight centuries, in the “twentieth century...death is silent,

suppressed and denied.”6

Medieval Death Decides to Dance

During the later Middle Ages, as the accepting perception of death melded with one that

had a new found understanding of its weightiness, death entered the artistic imagination in a new

form. Linked to the memento mori or “remember your death” trope, this new form was known as

the danse macabre, totentanz, or the dance of death.7 It has often been believed that this dance of

death emerged out of the trauma of the Black Death. For example in an educational book on

classical music in which the author discusses Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre she states: “The

interminable wars, famines and plagues that ravaged fifteenth-century Europe traumatized people

with omnipresent death, reducing the population by half. This was when the danse macabre, or

dance of death, first appeared in art, literature and theatre in the form of a rondo...”8 However, in

his interdisciplinary encyclopedia on the Black Death, Joseph Byrne actually gives evidence that

the earliest painted version of the danse macabre is from 1312 found in the Kligenthal

Augustinian convent near Basel.9 Thus, the dance predated the Black Death, but without a doubt

the plague allowed for it to gain popularity and really root itself in the medieval imagination. The

danse macabre continued to haunt the artistic imagination of Europe for sometime, with some of

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6 Modell, Judith. “The Hour of Our Death.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1983). Book Review. JSTOR, 545.

7 While there is not space to discuss this here, this genre of the dance of death was not only an artistic manifestation, but can also be linked to what Byrne calls an “unusual physical reaction to...stressed psychological states”, a psychological epidemic of sorts called dancing mania or choreomania. These were literally “epidemics of uncontrollable dancing that took place for days and involved scores if not hundreds of people broke out in northwestern Europe in 1374, in 1463 in western Germany and in Strasbourg during summer 1518.” (Byrne, 99)

8 Gerhard, Ana. Simply Fantastic: An Introduction to Classical Music. Montreal: Secret Mountain, 2014, 22.

9 Byrne, Joseph P. Encyclopedia of the Black Death. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012, 99 (this painting does not survive).

the most well known visual depictions being Hans Holbein the Younger’s Dance of Death wood

engravings (figure 4), to which he owes a great deal of his fame and Pieter Bruegel’s famous

Triumph of Death (figure 5) which combines the Northern woodcut tradition of depictions of the

dance of death (totentatz) and the similar idea of the “Triumph of Death”, which was more

prominent in Italy, Thon specifically notes the frescoes found in Palermo depicting this theme

(figure 6).10

The main theme of this visual and literary idea was that no matter your station in life,

death was the ultimate equalizer. Whether pope or emperor, peasant or lord, “Death dances a

dance to which the living are issued an invitation they cannot refuse. And a ruthlessly egalitarian

dance it is.”11 The danse is depicted as a ring dance or rondo (figure 7), with skeletons dancing in

a ring (figure 8) usually with human figures of various classes or sometimes as a procession of

paired figures, skeletal and human (figure 9). It is also necessary to note that the physicality and

structure of the dance was important. Jeremy Barlow, in his study of Western social dancing,

speaks of the ring dance of the Middle Ages and says: “Superstition attaches to the direction of

circular motions generally, from passing the port to stirring a pot. Clockwise movement (sun-

wise, or in the direction of the sun) is considered proper, propitious, and Christian; proceeding

anti-clockwise (widdershins) brings bad luck and evil.”12 So perhaps, to take this one step further,

it is possible to determine if a painted group of individuals is destined to hell or heaven by the

movement of the dance. Thus, the danse macabre serves not only as a “democratic leveler” but

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10 Thon, Peter. “Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death Reconsidered.” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1968). JSTOR, 291.

11 Rieff, Philip. “The Life and Death of Death: Images of Man and Death.” Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1986). Book Review. JSTOR, 510-511.

12 Barlow, Jeremy. A Dance through Time: Images of Western Social Dancing from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2012, 22.

also prompts a “straightforward meditation on the meaning of life and the uselessness of vanity”13

by calling viewers and readers to reflect on how they are currently living, to decide whether their

current decisions will result in damnation or salvation when the dance is done.

The Dancing Ring of Death in Dante and Bosch

In similar ways then, the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Dante Alighieri caused

audiences to reflect on their lives and the results that would come after death. However, this can

be said of much of the art and literature of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. What is it then

that could connect Dante and Bosch to each other and to the tradition of the danse macabre?

Dante was a Florentine Italian who published the first installment of his Commedia, the Inferno,

sometime between 1304 and 1309.14 Bosch was an early Netherlandish painter who completed

his masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights, sometime between 1490 and 1510 (check this

date in Silver book in order to put a citation). First it must be noted, that their legacies have many

similarities. Early on in his fascinating study on Bosch, art historian Larry Silver sets the scene

for the cultural context from which Bosch emerged. Silver states that Bosch has a “distinctive

combination of form with subject that enables [him] to show his inventiveness even when he still

works with conventional subjects.”15 Silver sees Bosch as creating an amalgamation of

traditional altarpiece and individual devotional imagery with the fantastical marginalia of

illuminated manuscripts (see figure 10a-d). Images that had “formerly been relegated to the

margins of illuminated manuscripts...now were elevated into the main subject of a large panel

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13 Pascale, Enrico De. Death and Resurrection in Art. Trans. Anthony Shugaar. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2009, 232.

14 http://www.worldofdante.org/timeline.html

15 Silver, Larry. Hieronymus Bosch. New York: Abbeville, 2006, 17.

painting”, a “transfiguration” of a lesser known tradition.16 Dante too is combining forms,

inventively drawing on various literary traditions, from love poetry to Scripture, the lives of the

saints to the Book of Hours. More over just as Bosch plays with Netherlandish visual culture,

combining sacred and profane art, Dante also plays with the genres found in Italian literary

culture, asking his readers to both read his text using the framework for scriptural analysis while

at the same time reading a text in the “vulgar tongue” or vernacular, mixing the sacred and

profane of the literary world as well.

Along with these similarities between the legacies of Bosch and Dante, the danse macabre

seems to play a role in connecting these two artistic figures. Dante of course was writing the

Inferno around the same time that the first known danse macabre image was produced. However,

as an Italian, he would have most likely been aware of the theme of the “Triumph of Death”.

Byrne describes this as the idea that held that “Death always wins” but the Christian must be

ready to overcome in the end.17 Often visually this theme shows the violence and suddenness of

death, a theme which Byrne notes was utilized by Petrarch before the onslaught of the Plague and

can be found in frescos like that at Subiaco from the 14th century (figure 11) and Palermo (figure

6).18 However, there are especially two places in the text which point to an added musicality to

this theme of the triumph of death, which perhaps points to a move towards the idea of the the

danse macabre. Music, as noted in an 1895 article published in The Musical Times19, plays an

important role in the entire Commedia. It is especially present in the latter two installments.

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16 Ibid, 26.

17 Byrne, 345.

18 Ibid.

19 “Music in Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’”. The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, Vol. 36, No 629 (1895). JSTOR, 446.

However, music also makes an appearance within the rings of Hell, in a discordant and distorted

form. From a lute-shaped sinner in line forty-nine of canto thirty to a rear-end turned trumpet in

canto twenty-one, Dante presents a perverse musical performance within the rings of hell, which

Hollander connects to the tradition of the “musica diaboli” or “the hellish music that stands in

total contrast with the heavenly music”20 of Paradise.

Canto VII, opens with Plutus’ “raucous voice”21 orchestrating the ring of sinners. Here the

avaricious and prodigal souls “move in their necessary dance”22, “la gente riddi”, which

Hollander makes note specifically as being an intentional word choice on the part of Dante to call

to mind “a popular dance in which the linked participants reverse the direction of their circling

movement with the playing and singing of each new strophe.”23 Instead of dancing to beautiful

folk songs, the sinners dance eternally to the sound of Plutus’ “raucous voice”. Here is an

instance not only of music within Dante’s Inferno but of a dance, a ring dance to be specific. A

ring dance that takes place within the many rings or circles, cerchios, of Hell: “It is to be noted

that the word cerchio, that used commonly for the circles of the terraces, is applied to the paths in

which the dance goes on.”24 All of hell can be seen then as a deathly, demonic dance! Much like

the figures in the images of the danse macabre, here we find sinners chaotically dancing in a

circle, “linked” perhaps arm in arm, not gracefully spinning clockwise but clashing into each

other “just as the waves clash above Charybdis, one breaking on the other when they meet”25 in

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20 Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. Trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. New York: Anchor, 2002, 398.

21 Dante, Inf. VII, 2. Maurice Sendak’s “wild rumpus” comes to mind here, there seems to be some connection between violence, death and music, some tragic and perverted lyricism and musicality.

22 Dante, Inf. VII, 24.

23 Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. Trans. Robert Hollander, 141.

24 Gilbert, Allan. “Can Dante’s Inferno Be Exactly Charted?” PMLA, Vol. 60, No. 2 (1945). JSTOR, 291.

! 25 Dante, Inf. VII, 22-23.

an eternal dance of death. This scene is very performative, with the sinners, as “they crashed into

each other, turned / and beat retreat, shoving their loads and shouting: / ‘Why do you hoard?’ or

‘Why do you squander?’”26, almost feeling like they are on stage yelling in song back and forth to

each other. Dante emphasizes the musicality of their struggle saying: “Thus they proceeded in

their dismal round / on both sides toward the opposite point, / taunting each other with the same

refrain.”27 Towards the end of this Canto Dante describes the sinners exclamations in this way:

“‘Now we are sullen in the black mire.’ / This hymn they gurgle in their gullets / for they cannot

get a word out whole.”28 This is one of only two Cantos in the entire Inferno that ends with a

“hymn” or musical performance, leading to Purgatory and Paradise where each level will be

accompanied by sacred song.29

Much like Dante, Bosch also linked death and music, creating a sense of lyricality in

death. Interestingly, there seems to be no academic scholarship that has linked Dante and Bosch.

However, outside of academia there are some who have connected these two medieval geniuses.

Some claim that Bosch can be considered the “Dante of the painters”30. Other comments

connecting Bosch and Dante are: “Hieronymus Bosch was predominantly a religious painter who

expressed a world view as complex as that of Dante”31, this article on Hell from the BBC also

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26 Ibid. 28-30.

27 Ibid. 31-33.

28 Ibid. 124-125

29 More evidence for Hell as an eternal dance of death can be found in Canto XXI, where the winged demons spread their wings wide and move around with “nimble feet” (line 33) and cry out as they rip up the sinners, “Here you must do your dance / in secret and pilfer--can you?--in the dark”(line 53-54). This canto also ends with a “musical” exclamation that was alluded to earlier in this paper: “Off they set along the left-hand bank, / but first each pressed his tongue between his teeth / to blow a signal to their leader, / and he had made a trumpet of his asshole” (lines 136-139).

30 http://www.philipcoppens.com/bosch.html

31 http://www.escapeintolife.com/essays/hieronymus-bosch-a-window-on-gods-creation/

connects the two: “In the medieval hell explored by Dante and painted by Hieronymus Bosch,

punishments are as varied as sin itself, each one shaped to fit the sin punished”32 and as a final

example a newly published edition of Dante’s Inferno features an introduction by the executive

producer and creative director of the Inferno video game where he too draws the parallel between

the two men. At least on a surface level, Dante and Bosch have been brought together as two men

who have done the most to shape the western conception of Hell. In his triptych, The Garden of

Earthly Delights, Bosch presents viewers with scenes, from left to right, of the harmony of

prelapsarian Eden, the sinfulness of Earth, and the chaos of Hell (figure 12). For the purposes of

this paper, the focus will be primarily on the right panel depicting Hell with a few references to

the other two panels. In looking closely at Bosch’s depiction of Hell (figure 13), it is clear to see

the parallels between he and Dante but it also boggles the mind to think of the type of imagination

that could have produced this image. In the painting, the harmony or joy that can be found in the

first two scenes is gone. Bodies are chaotically splayed, being tormented in all sorts of ways.

Curiously though, music too is part of Bosch’s Hell (figure 14). Large instruments, a lute and

harp for example, dwarf the figures. They are transformed from objects of pleasure and beauty to

those of torture and damnation. Sinners are crucified and piked to these man-made musical

crosses. However, the spot in hell that is of most interest here, and that draws us back to the

danse macabre is to be found right in the center of Hell. Here there is a white and ghostly pale

man, known by scholars as the “tree man”33 (figure 15). On his head is a large, pink bagpipe. A

closer look reveals (figure 16) that another ring dance is taking place in this depiction of Hell as

well. Encircling the bagpipe are paired figures, naked humans led by large demon/hybrid figures,

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32 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22512160

33 Silver, 58.

dancing, going round and round in an eternal dance to the sound of the hellish, almost body

organ-like bagpipes. Their dance is not one of joy, there is no question as to how this dance of

death will end. These dancers have entered the dance of final death, going around anti-clockwise,

cementing to the viewer that they have no hope but are now damned. It is clear that Bosch wishes

his viewer to draw meaning from the direction of the dance. For in the central panel, the wild

rumpus of the earthly men on horses, a dance not with death yet, but with sin, also goes anti-

clockwise (figure 17)34. However, in Eden, while death is present amongst the dark animals35

found at the bottom of the panel emerging from the cesspool, Adam, Christ and Eve perform their

own dance (figure 18a,b), a dance of life, which goes clockwise as evidenced by the direction of

their glances.

One criticism of trying to find elements of the danse macabre in both Bosch and Dante

could be the fact that there are indeed no skeletons in either of the works. However, there are

demonic and fantastical figures that stand in where perhaps the skeletons should be. Typically the

danse is something that takes place on earth before the sinner has died. In Bosch and Dante’s

scenes, the dancing sinners have already reached their final destinations. In fact, it might be

argued that these figures are the same as the skeletons, but are now fully fleshed out and in their

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34 In his book, Silver discusses the debate on whether the central panel depicts the pleasures and joys of Earth in a positive way, or whether the image is already an indictment on the fallen, sinful ways of man, “a failure or an inversion of the divine plan...as laid out in Eden” (56). I found the latter more convincing. This image of the ring of riding men encircling the women in water is also interesting to think about in relation to the Chorea Mundi image in figure 7 earlier in the paper. In the works of Silver, Byrne and Barlow, a point is made about the potential erotic nature of the danse macabre since it is linked to ring dances that were linked to men seducing a woman at the center, such as the Morris Ring Dance.

35 In finding death already present in a clearly pre-fallen Eden, I was curious to know if death of any sort was present in Eden, as in Bosch we see a cat/leopard eating a rat, a dead frog etc. In looking into this, I found that in his Summa, Thomas Aquinas says the following: “In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man’s sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon” (Question 96, Article 1). According to Aquinas, death did exist then, but not for humankind, and there was no death for the rational soul. He also states that man would not have needed animals for food just plants.

full form, as they are not visiting the living on earth, but in their natural habitat in the pits of Hell.

While the sinners suffer this endless, torturous dance, the demons are in their element. There is

no time for repentance now, and death has truly won in the case of these sinners.

Conclusion: Death Dances On

While the sinners in Dante and Bosch’s works are without hope, we the viewers can relish

in the hope that we still have. Dante’s poem and Bosch’s triptych function as reminders and

essentially as complex presentations of the theme of memento mori. Ultimately the most

important element of the danse macabre is its presentation of the universality and suddenness of

death that affects each living person. It expresses this by presenting a lyrical side of death, and

shows that “From pope to emperor to peasant, child and field hand, everyone joins the dance.”36

The influence of the danse macabre has persisted, even if the Western views towards death have

shifted since the Middle Ages as pointed out by Philip Aries. Elements of the danse macabre can

be seen well outside the Medieval world, from the various engravings of Alfred Rethel such as

Death as a Friend (figure 19), in which you can here the bells toll, the dove’s song and the horn’s

coming blare and Death as a Cutthroat (figure 20) in which death is at center stage playing a

fiddle made of bones, to Jose Posada’s calavera, or skeleton, prints (figure 21) which functioned

politically as critiques but also to prove that in the end we all dance the dance of death, and even

to the present with Markus Zusak’s novel The Book Thief in which music and storytelling are as

pervasive as death (figure 22). Thus, Dante and Bosch enter this tradition in their integration of

death and music, reflecting on the line between harmony and dissonance, and also showing that

death comes for all, and so it is best to repent while you can.

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36 Byrne, 99.

Appendix

Figure 1: Hunting scene, Caves of Lascaux, France, 13,000 BC

Figure 2: British cover of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Figure 3: Totentanz (Dance of Death), by Bernt Notke, St. Nicholas’ Church, Tallinn, Estonia, 1463.

Figure 4, a-c: Dance of Death, three selections from Hans Holbein the Younger’s wood engravings, ca. 1520s.

Figure 5: Triumph of Death, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1560s (there is debate on the actual date).

Figure 7: Chorea Mundi, by Johannes Baptista Vrints, c. 1600.

Figure 8: Danse Macabre, Michael Wolgemut, 1493.

Figure 6: Triumph of Death, fresco by unknown Italian master, c. 1446, Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo, Italy.

Figure 9: Danse Macabre, by Vincent of Kastav, chapel of Sv. Marija na Škrilinama, Croatia,

Figures 10a,b: Are marginalia found in the Summer Volume of the Breviary of Renaud & Marguerite de Bar, Metz, France, 1302-1305.

Figures 10c,d: Are marginalia found in the Rutland Psalter, 1296, England.

Figure 11: Triumph of Death, fresco, 14th century, Subiaco, Italy.

Figure 12: The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch, 1503-1504.

Figure 13: detail of Hell panel

Figure 14: detail of musical elements in Hell panel.

Figure 15: detail of the Tree-man.

Figure 16: detail of the ring dance in Hell.

Figure 18a,b: detail of Adam, Christ, and Eve in Eden.

Figure 17: detail of the ring of riding men.

Figure 20: Death as a Cutthroat by Alfred Rethel, 1851.

Figure 19: Death as a Friend by Alfred Rethel, 1850.

Figure 21: Calaveras Bailando (Skeletons Dancing), by Jose Posada, could not find the date, but Posada lived from 1852 to 1913

Figure 22: Still from the film adaptation of The Book Thief, with a quote from the novel.