AA. VV. - Danse Macabre - 1862

THE DANCE OF THE SKELETONS, LAUGHING AT THE POWER OF KINGS, POPES AND EMPERORS
Among the most famous illustrated books of late medieval Europe, the Danse Macabre represents one of the most powerful meditations on the fragility of the human condition ever entrusted to print. Born in 15th-century France and consecrated by the celebrated edition of Guyot Marchant, the work stages a universal procession in which Death calls men and women from every social rank, reminding us that every earthly power is destined to dissolve. Through an extraordinary blend of moral poetry, Christian spirituality, and images of shattering effectiveness, the Danse Macabre became one of the most influential cultural phenomena of Renaissance Europe. Its woodcuts fixed for centuries the Western imagination of death, while the text continued to be read, reprinted, and reinterpreted up to the modern age.
MARKET VALUE
The editions of the Danse Macabre are among the most sought-after works in the entire French illustrated output. Complete ancient copies, especially those derived from the tradition inaugurated by Guyot Marchant, enjoy constant interest from collectors, institutions, and scholars of medieval culture. This nineteenth-century reprint, philologically impeccable, is valued between 800 and 1,200 euros.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION AND CONDITION
Volume containing one of the most famous redactions of the French Danse Macabre. Typographic title page with ornamental figure. Good-quality paper with typical signs of time. Contemporary half-leather binding. Overall good preservation. 72 pages.
In old books, with a multi-century history, a few imperfections may be present, not always noted in the description.

FULL TITLE AND AUTHOR
La Grande Danse Macabre des Hommes et des Femmes.
Précédée du Dict des Trois Morts et des Trois Vifs, du Débat du Corps et de l'Âme et de la Complainte de l'Âme Damnée.
Anonymous French 15th-century text.
Lille, printed by Horemans for Baillieu, about 1862.

PRINTING HISTORY AND CIRCULATION
The work constitutes a rare antiquarian re-edition produced around 1862 by the bookseller-publisher Baillieu. The editorial project arose from the desire to bring back to life one of the most famous illustrated works of late medieval French culture by using the ancient woodblocks preserved in the Troyes printing tradition, believed to derive from the iconographic models of the 15th-century Danse Macabre.
Baillieu deliberately sought to reproduce the look of the old French editions, preserving layout, images, and the typographic atmosphere. Printing was done in Lille at Horemans’s workshop on laid paper, with numerous woodcuts interspersed in the text.
The reference model remains the famous Paris edition published by Guyot Marchant in 1485 and expanded in 1486 with the Danse Macabre des Femmes. Those editions constitute the true progenitors of the editorial tradition of the Dance of Death and represent one of the absolute peaks of European incunabula woodcut. The images reproduced in the Baillieu edition attest to the remarkable survival of this iconographic heritage across nearly four centuries of book history.

CONTEXT AND SIGNIFICANCE
Although printed in the nineteenth century, this edition is philologically impeccable. It represents indeed one of the most significant attempts to recover the French medieval imaginary during the Romantic and historicalist era. Through the reproduction of ancient woodcuts, the volume allows access to the famous Danse Macabre that adorned the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris, destroyed at the end of the eighteenth century.
According to tradition, the great Parisian mural cycle was created in the early 15th century and quickly became one of the most famous images of European culture. From it derived the Guyot Marchant editions and, indirectly, the entire Western iconography of the Dance of Death. The Baillieu edition thus constitutes a precious link between medieval culture and the Romantic rediscovery of the Middle Ages.

BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
The work is attributed to an anonymous French author of the 15th century. Its extraordinary editorial and iconographic fortune, however, has surpassed the identity of the compiler, turning the Danse Macabre into a collective heritage of European civilization. The text sits within the great tradition of late medieval moral literature and constitutes one of the highest expressions of religious and symbolic sensibility in 15th-century France.

PRINTING HISTORY AND CIRCULATION
The Danse Macabre reached its most famous form with the illustrated edition published by Guyot Marchant in Paris in 1485, followed in 1486 by the Danse Macabre des Femmes. These editions represent one of the absolute peaks of French incunabula and the history of European woodcut illustration.
The work enjoyed extraordinary diffusion already at the end of the 15th century, being rapidly reprinted and imitated in numerous European countries. Its images became the fundamental iconographic model for subsequent representations of death and profoundly influenced artists, engravers, writers, and preachers. The Danse Macabre remains today one of the most famous testimonies of late medieval figurative and spiritual culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
GW 8220-8227.
ISTC id00362000.
Brunet, Manuel du Libraire, II, pp. 487-489.
Graesse, Trésor de Livres Rares et Précieux, II, pp. 339-341.
Douce, Francis, The Dance of Death, London, 1833.
Huizinga, Johan, L'Autunno del Medioevo, chapters on the spirituality of death.
Rosenfeld, Hellmut, The Dance of Death in Western Art.
Hind, Arthur M., An Introduction to a History of Woodcut.
BnF, Réserve des Incunables, Guyot Marchant editions of the Danse Macabre.
ISTC, Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, entries relating to the Paris editions of 1485 and 1486.
GW, Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, Guyot Marchant, Danse Macabre.
ICCU / OPAC SBN, catalogs of copies held in Italian libraries.
WorldCat, international bibliographic records of the major historical editions of the Danse Macabre.