Macabre (pronounced "mak-
kahb" in the US, and "mak-
kahb-ra" in the UK) is a quality of certain artistic or
literaryLiterature is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means "acquaintance with letters" , and therefore the academic study of literature is known as Letters...
works, characterized by a grim or ghastly atmosphere. In these works, there is an emphasis on the details and symbols of
deathDeath is the termination of the biological functions that define a living organism. It refers to both a particular event and to the condition that results thereby. The true nature of the latter has for millennia been a central concern of the world's religious traditions and of philosophical...
. Macabre themes are often preoccupations in the
Goth subcultureThe goth subculture is a contemporary subculture found in many countries. It began in the United Kingdom during the early 1980s in the gothic rock scene, an offshoot of the post-punk genre. The goth subculture has survived much longer than others of the same era, and has continued to diversify...
.
This quality is often found in
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
writers, though there are traces of it in
ApuleiusLucius Apuleius Platonicus was a Latin prose writer remembered most for his bawdy picaresque novel, the Metamorphoses, otherwise known as The Golden Ass...
and the author of the
SatyriconSatyricon is a Latin work of fiction in a mixture of prose and poetry. It is believed to have been written by Gaius Petronius, though the manuscript tradition identifies the author as a certain Titus Petronius...
.
Macabre (pronounced "mak-
kahb" in the US, and "mak-
kahb-ra" in the UK) is a quality of certain artistic or
literaryLiterature is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means "acquaintance with letters" , and therefore the academic study of literature is known as Letters...
works, characterized by a grim or ghastly atmosphere. In these works, there is an emphasis on the details and symbols of
deathDeath is the termination of the biological functions that define a living organism. It refers to both a particular event and to the condition that results thereby. The true nature of the latter has for millennia been a central concern of the world's religious traditions and of philosophical...
. Macabre themes are often preoccupations in the
Goth subcultureThe goth subculture is a contemporary subculture found in many countries. It began in the United Kingdom during the early 1980s in the gothic rock scene, an offshoot of the post-punk genre. The goth subculture has survived much longer than others of the same era, and has continued to diversify...
.
History
This quality is often found in
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
writers, though there are traces of it in
ApuleiusLucius Apuleius Platonicus was a Latin prose writer remembered most for his bawdy picaresque novel, the Metamorphoses, otherwise known as The Golden Ass...
and the author of the
SatyriconSatyricon is a Latin work of fiction in a mixture of prose and poetry. It is believed to have been written by Gaius Petronius, though the manuscript tradition identifies the author as a certain Titus Petronius...
. The outstanding instances in
English literatureEnglish literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; Joseph Conrad was born in Poland, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, V.S....
are
John WebsterJohn Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. He was a contemporary of William Shakespeare.- Biography :Webster's life is obscure, and the dates of his...
,
Robert Louis StevensonRobert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. Stevenson was greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Schwob, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K...
,
Mervyn PeakeMervyn Laurence Peake was an English modernist writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J...
,
Charles DickensCharles John Huffam Dickens FRSA , pen-name "Boz", was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era and one of the most popular of all time. He created some of literature's most memorable characters. His novels and short stories have never gone out of print...
, and
Cyril TourneurCyril Tourneur was an English dramatist who enjoyed his greatest success during the reign of King James I of England. His best-known work is The Revenger's Tragedy , a play which has alternatively been attributed to Thomas Middleton.-Life:Cyril Tourneur was possibly the son of Captain Richard...
. In
American literatureAmerican literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and Colonial America. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...
notable authors include
Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the...
and
H. P. LovecraftHoward Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, known then simply as weird fiction....
. The word has gained its significance from its use in French as
la danse macabreDance of Death, also variously called Danse Macabre , Danza Macabra , Dança da Morte , or Totentanz , is a late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the dance of death unites all...
for the
allegoricalAllegory is a figurative mode of representation conveying a meaning other than the literal. An allegory is a device that can be presented in literary form, such as a poem or novel, or in visual form, such as in painting or sculpture...
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
skeletonIn biology, a skeleton is a rigid framework that provides protection and structure in many types of animal, particularly those of the phylum Chordata and of the superphylum Ecdysozoa. Exoskeletons are external, as is typical of many invertebrates; they enclose the soft tissues and organs of the...
or as a shrunken shrouded corpse, to people representing every age and condition of life, and leads them all in a dance to the
graveA grave is a location where a dead body is buried. Graves are usually located in special areas set aside for the purpose of burial, such as graveyards or cemeteries....
. Of the numerous examples painted or sculptured on the walls of cloisters or church yards through medieval Europe, few remain except in
woodcutWoodcut — formally known as xylography — is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...
s and
engravingEngraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...
s.
The famous series at
BaselBasel is Switzerland's third most populous city . With 830000 inhabitants in the tri-national metropolitan area , Basel is Switzerland's second-largest urban area....
, originally at the
KlingenthalFor the commune in France famous for swords see Klingenthal, Bas-RhinKlingenthal is a town in the Vogtlandkreis district, in the Free State of Saxony, Germany...
, 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
LubeckThe Hanseatic City of Lübeck is the second largest city in Schleswig-Holstein, in northern Germany, and one of the major ports of Germany. It was for several centuries the "capital" of the Hanseatic League and because of its Brick Gothic architectural heritage is on UNESCO's list of World...
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
DresdenDresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
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
RouenRouen is the historical capital city of Normandy, in northern France on the River Seine, and currently the capital of the Haute-Normandie region. Once one of the largest and most prosperous cities of medieval Europe, Rouen was the seat of the Exchequer of Normandy in the Middle Ages...
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
SalisburySalisbury is a cathedral city in Wiltshire, England. It has also been called New Sarum to distinguish it from the original site of settlement to the north of the city at Old Sarum, but this alternative name is not in common use. Similarly, a native of Salisbury may be known as a "Sarumite", but...
, 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'sFranz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...
string quartet
Death and the Maiden (1824) being one example. In the twentieth century,
Ingmar Bergman'sErnst Ingmar Bergman was a Swedish director, writer and producer for film, stage and television. His influential body of work often dealt with themes such as bleakness and despair, as well as comedy and hope, in his cinematic exploration of the human condition...
1957 film
The Seventh SealThe Seventh Seal is a 1957 Swedish drama film directed by Ingmar Bergman, about the journey of a medieval knight across a plague-ridden landscape, and a monumental game of chess between himself and the personification of Death, who has come to take his life. Bergman developed the film from his...
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 DeathThe Black Death was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, peaking in Europe between 1348 and 1350. It is widely thought to have been an outbreak of bubonic plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, but this view has recently been challenged...
and the miseries of the
Hundred Years' WarThe Hundred Years' War was a prolonged conflict lasting from 1337 to 1453 between two royal houses for the French throne, which was vacant with the extinction of the senior Capetian line of French kings. The two primary contenders were the House of Valois and the House of Plantagenet, also known...
. It has also been attributed to a form of the
MoralityMorality has three principal meanings.In its first, descriptive usage, morality means a code of conduct or belief concerning matters of what is moral or immoral...
, a dramatic dialogue between Death and his victims in every station of life, ending in a dance off the stage. 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
CumaeCumae is an ancient Greek settlement lying to the northwest of Naples in the Italian region of Campania...
or
PompeiiPompeii is a ruined and partially buried Roman town-city near modern Naples in the Italian region of Campania, in the territory of the comune of Pompei...
, and a false connection has been traced with the "The Triumph of Death", attributed to Orcagna, in the Campo Santo at
PisaPisa is a city in Tuscany, central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the Arno River on the Ligurian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...
.
Etymology
The
etymologyEtymology is the study of the history of words and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages, and texts about the languages, to gather knowledge about how words were used at earlier stages, and...
of the word "macabre" is uncertain. According to
Gaston ParisBruno Paulin Gaston Paris , known as Gaston Paris, was a French writer and scholar.-Biography:Paris was born at Avenay...
it first occurs in the form macabre in
Jean le FèvreJean Le Fevre , was a Burgundian chronicler and seigneur of Saint Remy. He is also known as Toison d'or because he served as King of Arms to the Order of the Golden Fleece. Of noble birth, he adopted the profession of arms and with other Burgundians fought in the English ranks at Agincourt...
'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
MaccabeesThe Maccabees were a Jewish rebel army who liberated Judea from the rule of the Seleucid empire...
). The seven tortured brothers, with their mother and Eleazar were prominent figures on this hypothesis in the supposed dramatic dialogues.
Other connections have been suggested, as for example with St.
MacariusMacarius is a Latinized form of the Greek given name Makarios.It name may refer to:*Macarius of Egypt: Egyptian monk and hermit. Also known as Macarius the Elder or St...
, or Macaire, the hermit, who, according to Vasari, is to be identified with the figure pointing to the decaying corpses in the
PisaPisa is a city in Tuscany, central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the Arno River on the Ligurian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...
n
Triumph of Death, or with an
ArabicArabic is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and the Neo-Aramaic languages. In terms of speakers, the Arabic macrolanguage is the largest member of the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million people as...
word
maqaber (مقابر), cemeteries (plural of
maqbaraThe Arabic word Maqbara is derived form the word Qabr that means grave. Though this means all graves of Muslims, it refers especially to the holy graves of sacred human beings or Waliyullahs who spend their entire life for the sake of Islam and to be a true Muslim and train others to follow Islam...
). Another claim is that the word "Macabre" comes from the two Hebrew words "מן הקבר " (Min Hakever), meaning "from the grave".