[Prev Page][Contents][Next Page]

The Black Death

Art

The tone of despair appears eventually in the art of the times, though not immediately. By the later 1300s, when many parts of Europe had been visited two or three times by the disease, there appears a strain of grisly morbidity that is still compelling.

One striking example can be seen in tomb sculptures. A great lord was buried in a sarcophagus: the body was in a coffin, which in turn was in a larger stone casing that was usually decorated. The sides might be decorated with religious carvings, but the lid of the tomb often held the likeness of the one entombed.

Where previously these sculptures showed the lord in his armor with his sword and shield, or the lady in her best clothes, and both in full bloom of health, around 1400 we begin to see a disturbing change. The sculptures of some (only some -- this was never the dominant style) show half-decomposed bodies with parts of the skeleton clearly visible. The clothes draping the body were rags, and some showed worms and snails burrowing in the rotting flesh.

It was and is a ghastly sight. The knight's tomb is a reassuring denial of death; the face composed and well-featured, the accoutrements of busy life all about. But the cardinal's tomb tells the brutal truth: all flesh is grass. Normally, we prefer to close our eyes to this, but this sculptural style will not let us. It's disturbing to see, but equally disturbing is the thought that such grimness could find a place as an artistic style.

The danse macabre

A similar brutality appeared in paintings, too. Here the style has a name: the danse macabre, the Dance of Death. The motif shows skeletons mingling with living men in daily scenes. We see peasants at a harvest festival, or workmen at a construction site, or hunters in a forests. And in each scene, mingled with the living, are skeletons: skeleton horses carry corpses to the hunt; peasant girls dance with death; a skeleton receives an infant from its baptismal font.

The juxtapositions are shocking, for they catch us at our merriest moments and remind us of horror and loss. It's a cruel sort of art. It is even more striking when you realize that these works were commissioned. These are no paintings wrung out by tortured souls in isolation. These are works specifically requested by churches or monarchs or city councils, and they were displayed in public places. Not only did artists render these frightening images, their patrons paid for them, displayed them, and ordered more.

To me, nothing demonstrates better the effect of the Black Death on Europe than these works of art.