250px in St Maria in Bienno
Macabre
is a quality of certain artistic or literary works, characterized by a grim or ghastly atmosphere. In these works, there is an emphasis on the details and symbols of death. Macabre themes are often preoccupations in the Goth subculture.
|
MACABRE TICKETS
|
History
This quality is often found in
Latin writers, though there are traces of it in
Apuleius and the author of the
Satyricon. The outstanding instances in
English literature are
John Webster,
Robert Louis Stevenson,
Mervyn Peake,
Charles Dickens, and
Cyril Tourneur. In
American literature notable authors include
Edgar Allan Poe and
H. P. Lovecraft. The word has gained its significance from its use in French as
la danse macabre
for the
allegorical representation of the ever-present and universal power of death, known in English as the Dance of Death and in German as
Totentanz
. The typical form which the allegory takes is that of a series of images in which Death appears, either as a dancing
skeleton or as a shrunken shrouded corpse, to people representing every age and condition of life, and leads them all in a dance to the
grave. Of the numerous examples painted or sculptured on the walls of cloisters or church yards through
medieval Europe, few remain except in
woodcuts and
engravings.
The famous series at
Basel, originally at the
Klingenthal, a nunnery in Little Basel, dated from the beginning of the 14th century. In the middle of the 15th century this was moved to the churchyard of the Predigerkloster at Basel, and was restored, probably by Hans Kluber, in 1568. The collapse of the wall in 1805 reduced it to fragments, and only drawings of it remain. A Dance of Death in its simplest form still survives in the Marienkirche at
Lubeck as 15th-century painting on the walls of a chapel. Here there are twenty-four figures in couples, between each is a dancing Death linking the groups by outstretched hands, the whole ring being led by a Death playing on a pipe. At
Dresden there is a sculptured life-size series in the old Neustädter Kirchhoff, moved here from the palace of Duke George in 1701 after a fire. At
Rouen in the cloister of St Maclou there also remains a sculptured
danse macabre
. There was a celebrated fresco of the subject in the cloister of Old St Pauls in London, and another in the now destroyed Hungerford Chapel at
Salisbury, of which only a single woodcut, "Death and the Gallant", remains. Of the many engraved reproductions, the most famous is the series drawn by
Holbein. The theme continued to inspire artists and musicians long after the medieval period,
Schubert's string quartet
Death and the Maiden
(1824) being one example. In the twentieth century,
Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film
The Seventh Seal
has a personified Death, and could thus count as macabre.
The origin of this allegory in painting and sculpture is disputed. It occurs as early as the 14th century, and has often been attributed to the overpowering consciousness of the presence of death due to the
Black Death and the miseries of the
Hundred Years' War. It has also been attributed to a form of the
Morality, a dramatic dialogue between Death and his victims in every station of life, ending in a dance off the stage
[1]. The origin of the peculiar form the allegory has taken has also been found in the dancing skeletons on late Roman
sarcophagi and mural paintings at
Cumae or
Pompeii, and a false connection has been traced with the "The Triumph of Death", attributed to
Orcagna, in the
Campo Santo at
Pisa.
Etymology
The
etymology of the word "macabre" is uncertain. According to
Gaston Paris [2] it first occurs in the form macabre in
Jean le Fèvre's
Respit de la mort
(1376),
Je fis de Macabré la danse
, and he takes this accented form to be the true one, and traces it in the name of the first painter of the subject. The more usual explanation is based on the Latin name,
Machabaeorum chorea
(Dance of
Maccabees). The seven tortured brothers, with their mother and Eleazar
[3] were prominent figures on this hypothesis in the supposed dramatic dialogues.
Other connections have been suggested, as for example with St.
Macarius, or Macaire, the hermit, who, according to
Vasari, is to be identified with the figure pointing to the decaying corpses in the
Pisan
Triumph of Death
, or with an
Arabic word
maqaber
(?????), cemeteries (plural of
maqbara
). Another claim is that the word "Macabre" comes from the two Hebrew words "?? ???? " (Min Hakever), meaning "from the grave".
See also
Notes
- See Du Cange, Gloss., s.v. Machabaeorum chora.
- Romania, xxiv., 131; 1895.
- 2 Macc;vi., vii.
bg:???????
es:Macabro