Dance of Death

Woodcut, second half of the 17th century, unsigned and without printing details.

It belongs to a particular French editorial tradition, which developed in the city of Troyes.

The first dance macabre was painted on the walls of the mass grave of the cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris in 1424. The printing press invented by Gutenberg in 1454 did not take long to spread it, first in France and then throughout Europe, as in 1485 the Parisian publisher Guyot Marchant reproduced the macabre dance of the Holy Innocents on paper with the text in French. Other publishers also published death dances, notably Lerouge, a printer around 1500 in Chablis in the Yonne region who moved to Troyes in 1510. After the last edition by Nicolas Le Rouge (1531), there is no trace of the Danse macabre in Troyes until it appears in some booksellers' inventories in 1623. The earliest surviving edition by a peddler dates from 1641. After this date, the Danse macabre was constantly republished by the two great rival printing families of the Bibliothèque bleue, the Oudots and the Garniers, and by their successor Baudot, until 1840. Although the text was gradually retouched and the plates replaced as they became unusable, the initial model remained virtually unchanged for nearly four centuries. Women, excluded from the first danse macabre, appeared during the 16th century and even had their own danse macabre, reproduced in Lerouge's work. Dances of death were painted on church walls using these books as models.