Füssen dance of death

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The tables of the dance of death
Interior of the St. Anna Chapel with the Dance of Death

The Füssen dance of death in the St. Anna chapel of the former Benedictine monastery Sankt Mang in the Bavarian town of Füssen is the oldest surviving dance of death in Bavaria and is one of the most important monumental dance of death in Europe today.

General and history

The dance of death is a pictorial representation of the violence of death over human life in a number of allegorical groups under the image of the dance, which has emerged since the 14th century . In March 1602 the abbot of the Benedictine monastery of St. Mang , Matthias Schober, commissioned the Füssen painter Jakob Hiebeler to paint a dance of death on the occasion of the restoration of the Anna chapel. At that time the artist mainly focused on the Großbasler Totentanz , the Berner Totentanz and the "Pictures of Death" by Hans Holbein the Elder. J. oriented. The accompanying verses were largely based on one of the printed versions of the Basel model that were widespread at the time. Füssen, with the dance of death representations in the Anna Chapel and the St. Sebastian cemetery church, became a central location for the dance of death iconography alongside Basel , Lübeck , Lucerne and Vienna .

role models

  • H. Holbein the Elder J. - Death and Pope

  • Watercolor copy of the Basel Dance of Death

statement

The motto

"Says Yes Says No, Dancing Must Be"

Under this motto, twenty stalls follow in the Füssen Dance of Death, led by the Pope and Emperor, death, which does not stop at the toddler and the painter himself.

The motif of the dance expresses the ambivalence between lust for life and fear of death and describes life's tightrope walk. The statuses appear hierarchically in individual pictures, according to the social structure of the time: Pope, emperor, bishop, prince, princess, abbot, junker, noblewoman, pastor, bailiff, doctor, merchant, usurer, landlord, farmer, fiend (witch) , Player, virgin, child, painter.

However, this hierarchy is disrupted by the relocation in the course of the baroqueization of the monastery from 1701 today.

Details

  • Death and Pope / Death and Doctor

  • Death and Emperor / Death and Merchant

  • Death and noblewoman / death and virgin

  • Death and Pastor / Death and Child

The artist Jakob Hiebeler

Last picture

In the last picture, death asks the painter: "Jacob Hiebeler let that grind stohn, throw it away you have to."

With his answer, Hiebeler also signs his work, as it were: "I painted the dead tantz, I have to do it in spil too, otherwise we won't have a whole lot."

But in 1602, the year the dance of death painting was completed, the artist did not yet have to follow death. It can be archived until 1618.

Impact history

The Füssen dance of death had a formative influence on a dance of death tradition that first spread to Oberstdorf and later to Breitenwang as well as the Tyrolean Lechtal and Tannheimer valleys .

  • In Füssen itself, in the St. Sebastian cemetery church, an emblematic dance of death from 1746 reminds the viewer of the omnipresence of death. There the Allgäu painter Bartholomäus Stapf painted nine pictures of death in the vaults and on the gallery balustrade, which are completely independent of the Füssen dance of death in the Anna chapel in terms of subject matter and composition, namely: death and maiden, death with hourglass, death with flower stick, death with dying candle, death as a soldier, death with scythe, walking stick and humpback basket, death with crossbow, death with arrows, death as an organist. In these scenes, death does not address a person depicted in the picture, but directly to the viewer. It is noteworthy that the humpback basket (6th picture) contains skulls with tiara, crown, cardinal's hat, miter and beret; as it were as a reminiscence of the class hierarchy common in medieval dances of death.

Contemporary artists repeatedly took up the theme of the Füssen dance of death.

  • Stephan Cosacchi (1903–1986) composed a musical Füssen dance of death as part of the Magnus Oratorio, which was premiered in Füssen in 1950. As a researcher of the macabre dance, Cosacchi combined the idea of ​​the Füssen dance of death with the motif of the nocturnal ghost dance at the Lechfall.
  • The Viennese art professor Herwig Zens (1943–2019) dealt with the Füssen dance of death in the form of expressive ink drawings, etchings and paintings. As a 20-part painting cycle, he created a paraphrase for the Hiebeler dance of death in 1998.
  • Klaus Hack (born 1966) does not take up this in terms of content or presentation in his work on the Füssen dance of death. The hard confrontation between life and death is expressed on a formal level in the black and white of the woodcut. Life and death relate to one another like picture and image, like the sculpture of the printing drum to the printed canvas.

literature

  • Reinhold Böhm: The Füssen dance of death and the continued effect of the dance of death idea in the Ostallgäuer and Ausserferner area . 4th improved edition, Füssen 2005. ISBN 3-928461-00-1 .
  • Hans Georg Wehrens: The dance of death in the Alemannic language area. "I have to do it - and don't know what" . Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg 2012, pp. 173ff. ISBN 978-3-7954-2563-0 .
  • Rolf Paul Dreier: The Dance of Death - a motif of church art as a projection surface for profane messages (1425–1650) , Leiden 2010, ISBN 978-90-90-25111-0 (including CD-Rom: Directory of the Dances of Death , also on www. totentanz.nl). On the dance of death by feet, especially pages 179–216.
  • Central Institute and Museum for Sepulchral Culture (ed.): Dance of the Dead - Death Dance. The monumental dance of death in German-speaking countries. Dettelbach 1998. ISBN 3-89754-128-9 .
  • Museum of the City of Füssen (ed.): 400 years of Füssen dance of death . Füssen 2002. (Leporello)
  • Thomas Riedmiller: Füssener Totentanz: Secured things and hypotheses on the origin and tradition. In: L'ART MACABRE 5; Yearbook of the European Dance of Death Association. Düsseldorf 2004.
  • Thomas Riedmiller on behalf of the city of Füssen: Füssener Totentanz. Kempten 2014.
  • Exhibition catalog: Museum der Stadt Füssen (Ed.): Zens. Füssen dance of death. Fuessen 1998.
  • Exhibition catalog: Gerhard Marcks Haus / Bielefelder Kunstverein (Hrsg.): Totentanz. Sculptures and prints by Klaus Hack. Bremen 2001. ISBN 3-924412-38-3 .
  • Exhibition catalog: Museum of the City of Füssen: Klaus Hack. Füssen dance of death. Füssen 1999.

Web links

Commons : Füssener Totentanz  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Georg Wehrens: The dance of death in the Alemannic language area. "I have to do it - and don't know what" . Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-7954-2563-0 . P. 242f.

Coordinates: 47 ° 33 '59.7 "  N , 10 ° 41' 58.2"  E