Spotlight: Dances of Death

Explore Oxford has a couple of gruesome objects in its collection - such as a copy of Oliver Cromwell’s death mask. One other such object is the three panels showing part of the Dances of Death cycle. Originally these panels would have been part of a cycle of 40 images.

Our panels were rescued from 46, Broad Street, Oxford, the old home of the antiquarian William Fletcher (c.1738-1826) before its demolition in 1937. They depict Death dancing with a Canon, a Lawyer and a Physician and alongside the other panels would have decorated the walls of Alderman Fletcher’s property.

The Dances of Death - also known as the Danse Macabre - encompasses an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death. No matter your station in life the Dances of Death illustrated the equalising and inevitable power of death. This concept was expressed in poetry, music, and visual arts across western Europe in the Late Medieval Ages. Officially the Dances of Death are a representation of a dance between both living and dead figures, the living arranged in order of their rank – from the Pope and Emperors all the way down to the child and common Peddler. The Encyclopaedia Britannica suggests that this rather macabre artistic type gained popularity in the Middle Ages as a result of the Black Death followed by the Hundred Years’ War. 

Our panels date from slightly later; based on a 16^th century cycle they were created in the 18^th century. Did you know that our near neighbour the Ashmolean Museum are lucky enough to have another panel in this series? This image shows Death dancing with a pagan woman; a panel which would come relatively late in the cycle due to the low status of the living figure.

Do pop into Explore Oxford to give these pieces of history a gander!

To see a-forne the sodeyne

Violence Of cruel dethe

that ben so wyse and sage

Whiche sleeth allas

by stroke of pestilence

Bothe yonge and olde

of low and hie parage.

From John Lydgate’s The Dance of Death