Implications of Text and Visuals in Late Medieval Paris: A Case Study of the Danse Macabre in the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents

Believed by many to be a model for Dance of Death illustrations appearing throughout Europe in and after the fifteenth century, I argue the ​Danse Macabre,​ as it once existed in the Cemetery of Innocents, was a work of art inspired by a series of conditions specific to Late Medieval Parisian society. I aim to demonstrate how retrospective consideration of the context in which the ​Danse Macabre​ was created, received, and utilized at the Cemetery of Innocents illuminates its potential ​in situ​ purposes. Didactic and macabre in nature, I position the ​Danse ​as a program used to outrightly promote agendas of the Church and implicitly present beliefs central to the University of Paris. Once contextualized in terms of the cemetery’s history and the period’s religious and cultural beliefs surrounding death, I argue the ​Danse Macabre​ met various spiritual needs of Parisians in the Late Medieval Period, becoming a type of evaluative moral object and enabling its onlookers to reflect upon their own future deaths. In being understood as an object for religious introspection, I also suggest the ​Danse​ sanctioned viewers to imagine false realities in order to accommodate their burial needs. This paper is primarily visually informed by Guyot Marchant's Danse Macabre prints. While I do not equate the prints and the Danse Macabre at the Cemetery of Innocents, I rely on Marchant's prints to visually inform the now, non-existent mural.Bachelor of Art