Tallinn Trip – Niguliste Museum (Danse Macabre)
This isn’t just another religious painting, but somewhat of a chilling reminder of our mortality, a medieval ‘memento mori’ that has echoed through the centuries. Fifteenth century Tallinn wasn’t quite the decadent place it is today, with plague, war and general illness leading to a much shorter life expectancy. The Dance of Death emerged as a popular artistic theme, a way to deal with the inevitability of death and the fragility of life whether it was for a peasant or the Pope. Artists depicted skeletons, the ultimate personification of death, leading people from all walks of life in a macabre dance.
Bernt Notke, a renowned Late Gothic artist from Lübeck, was one of the masters of this theme. The well-known Danse Macabre, painted for St. Mary’s Church in Lübeck in 1463, is sadly lost thanks to a British bombing raid during the Second World War. But this sizeable fragment of a very similar work by the same artist survives in Tallinn, although the original was thirty metres in length, and the artwork is still in St. Anthony’s Chapel where it has been since (other than for restoration, war and other distractions) at least 1600 and likely since the 1480s. This fragment, measuring about 7.5 metres long, is a procession of figures, each paired with a gleeful skeleton. It’s the only surviving medieval Danse Macabre painted on canvas and it’s only because they were careful with it during the Second World War that it has survived at all. The missing section of this one is likely down to poor storage over the decades and it got damp and was mostly destroyed. The remaining sections were restored in Moscow in the 1980s, two bits were joined and now it’s back here.
And it didn’t matter how religious you were as you were still going on this dance, so it’s a cheery little number….. These works were very popular in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, but seemed to die away a little (excuse the pun) after this as, to be honest, do people really needed to be reminded of death in quite such a way? Although, it’s certainly a good leveller, a reminder that whether rich or poor, death would still come.
