Workshop of Bernt Notke (c. 1435–1508), Danse Macabre, after 1493, Oil on canvas, 160x750cm (original work estimated over 30 metres), the Chapel of St Anthony, Niguliste church , Tallinn
This large fragment is the only surviving workshop version after a lost prototype by the master himself. Bernt Notke from Lübeck was one of the foremost artists to translate this widely popular yet now largely vanished theme into monumental visual art.
In this surviving fragment, human life is staged as an unstoppable dance toward death. Figures — the preacher, Death I, Death II, the pope, Death III, the emperor, Death IV, the empress, Death V, the cardinal, Death VI, the king, and Death VII — are linked hand in hand with animated personifications of Death. Each speaks in turn, offering protests or appeals, only to be met with Death’s cold insistence.
Influential theologians of the era, such as Jean Gerson (1363–1429) — particularly in his ‘De Arte Moriendi’ — emphasised that meditation on death was essential not to induce terror but to lead the soul toward humility and repentance. Within this theological framework, death was not merely the end but the decisive moment of judgement toward which the entire life should be consciously directed.
Notke’s iconography reinforces this theological lesson through the physicality of the dance. The figures are not static; they are pulled, staggered, and twisted, suggesting that death is not a distant threat but a force already moving through the course of life itself. The implied musicality of the dance — a dark parody of earthly celebrations — deepens the warning: those who ‘dance’ through life heedlessly are already surrendering to death’s rhythm.
Yet for those who live in awareness and humility, death need not mean despair. The ideal of peaceful acceptance, celebrated in medieval spirituality as part of the ars moriendi — the ‘art of dying well’ — taught that a good death crowns a life of repentance, charity, and inward preparation.
