The Dance of Death in Bleibach

"The sound of my trumpet brings joy or sorrow forever"

Tne dance ends with a
"parchment scroll".

The dance in Bleibach is one of the few remaining monumental dances of death. The 34 scenes and the texts are still fully preserved.

The 33 dancing couples are distributed on the four walls of the small chapel / ossuary. Above the dancers is a six man band of dead.

The dance starts on the south wall, and somewhat unusually, the first dancer is the child, who otherwise tends to end the dances of death.

Then come five ecclesiastical men, from pope to priest; They are followed by no less than 19 secular men from emperor to old man. Finally come the women — of whom there are eight — including the unusual participant: the pilgrim.

After the last dancer — at the end of the east wall — a sort of "parchment scroll" has been painted with a text than could be interpreted as either a summary or an introduction:

Anno 1723

This introductory (or concluding) exhortation ends: »Anno 1723«. This fits well with the fact that the chapel / charnel house was built in 1720, when the cemetery lacked space for new customers and therefore needed somewhere to store the old bones.

The builder was parochial vicar Johann Martin Schill, who was pastor in Bleibach from 1715 to 1728, and it was almost certainly he who commissioned the painting. The only artist who comes to mind is Johann Jakob Winter (1663-1746), who in the same year painted a scene with a deathbed on the south wall of the chapel.

The dance is therefore almost 300 years younger than the medieval dances in Paris, London, Lübeck and Tallinn, Berlin, Basel and Bern, and this can be seen, among other things, by the fact that now — long after the Reformation — the number of clerical participants has been drastically reduced, so that there are only five.

Popular anatomy anno 1526

Popular anatomy anno 1650

You can also see the young age of the painting in the pictures themselves. This applies not only to the more modern fashion of the customes, but also to Death himself.

In the medieval dances of death, Death and his helpers were depicted as muscleless mummies, and artists of the time had an astonishingly poor knowledge of basic anatomy. Just look at how Holbein depict Death with a double bone in the upper arm (as a lover of bad puns I find this too humerus), and how Hollar draws Death with two thigh bones (to the right).

In Bleibach, on the other hand, the Deaths are shown as anatomically correct skeletons.

The human verses

THe dance in Bleibach. Death's speeches are written above the dancers.

Death's speech to each dancer is written above the individual scenes (pictured left). Normally Death's victims are allowed to respond, so that a dialogue occurs, but this does not happen in Bleibach. This may of course be due to lack of space because of the five windows and the door.

Yet response verses do exist. These were never part of the painting and have been thought for centuries to be a later addition.

On the other hand, Hermann Trenkle (see external link) writes that the latest research has shown that it was the same author who wrote all the texts: the introduction, the calls of Death and the answers of the humans. This was stated in a prayer book entitled "Zu Ehren der Muttergottes v. Hörnleberg" published by the vicar of Bleibach, Wilhelm Störk, in 1884. Apparently the poet was an Austrian nobleman named von Scherer, who at this time was working in Bleibach as a teacher.

But regardless of what Pastor Störk has or has not written in 1884, the human verses still appear to be of a very secondary nature. Death's speeches are largely inspired by the dance in Basel, but the human responses seem mostly inspired by Death's lines.

We can use the pope as a glaring example. The author has found Death's remarks about the pope's "triple crown" and "double cross" in Basel, where he has also found the general idea of Death tearing the headdress off his victims. The Pope's response, on the other hand, is largely just a repetition of Death's words, where the Pope has swapped "you" and "I".

Resources and External links

• Der Totentanz in der Beinhauskapelle in Bleibach. By Hermann Trenkle
• Breisgauer Sonntagsblatt, 11^th November 1934
• Bleibacher Totentanz (German Wikipedia)
• Der Totentanz im alemannischen Sprachraum af Hans Georg Wehrens, 2012, pp. 234-239.
• Der Bleibacher Totentanz by Wilhelm Fladt in "Mein Heimatland - Badische Blätter für Volkskunde […]", 1932, pp. 269-283,
• The images are from Wikipedia, © Jörgens.Mi/Wikipedia.
• The texts on this page are created by comparing the various sources — in particular the painting itself. The text as presented here is meant to be exactly as in the painting, except for u/v and i/j.
• The human's responses are only published in two sources (Sonntagsblatt and Heimatland). Fortunately they are pretty much identical apart from the spelling and since I can't compare them to the painting (where these verses are not included), I mainly use the Breisgauer Sonntagsblatt.

Orchestra

Child

Pope

Cardinal

Bishop

Abbot

Priest

Emperor

King

Duke

Nobleman

Mayor

Lawyer

Physician

Rich man

Merchant

Citizen

Young man

Soldier

Peddler

Cook

Peasant

Day laborer

Minstrel

Blind man

Old man

Maid

Empress

Abbess

Noblewoman

City woman

Peasant woman

Pilgrim

Old woman

Dances of death Bleibach