the fantastic La Danse Macabre				1 23 4
syllabus  unit one unit two unit three Phobia Le Monde à l'Envers La Danse Macabre Le Grotesque Bestiary		Danse macabre,  Dance of Death, Todtentanz: a grim saraband of skeletons coming to take you away. Momento mori: remember that you must die. The middle ages preached this lesson ceaselessy. Graphic artists—Hans Holbein most memorably— responded to its urgency and power with scenes in which a dancing, skeletal Death came for the archibishop and the servant, the judge and the doctor, the mother and the child. In the nineteenth century the motif is re-energized by revolution and social upheaval, and takes its place in the social fantastic with Rethel’s great series, Auch ein todtentanz.. Book illustrators shown here are Martin van Maele, for a World War I era edition of Poe; Heinrich Vogel in a series of plates in 1902-1903 for the corrosive satirical journal L’Assiette au beurre, and Joseph Sattler, whose Ein Moderne Todtentanz is one of the most powerful revisionings of the theme in the fin de siècle period.
Skidmore College Foreign Language Department			web site design by Jennifer Conklin '98	revised July 1998