Elina Gertsman

The Dance of Death in Reval (Tallinn): The Preacher and His Audience

This paper explores text and imagery in the fifteenth-century Dance of Death painted by Bernt Notke located in the Niguliste Church in Tallinn (Estonia). Besides drawing scholarly attention to this important and little studied work of art, often considered to be no more than a pale, provincial cousin of the closely related Lübeck Dance, the essay raises a number of different issues. Examination of the surviving fragment of the painting reveals the complexity of the viewing process, informed by a written text immediately available to literate viewers and by oral discourses available to all. An exploration of the Reval Dance within the context of late medieval piety also provides insight into a type of visual reading necessarily predicated on movement, one which involves the viewer physically. Finally, the analysis of the Reval painting within its social and religious context provides an index to a locality, namely Estonia, that has not received adequate attention in art historical scholarship.

The Facial Gesture: (Mis)Reading Emotion in Gothic Art

Folco’s smile without regret is simultaneously perplexing and encouraging: it signifi es divine forgiveness and dismissal of one’s transgressions; it appears a bit self-mocking but laced with pathos; it is a smile of a weak man directed at an all-powerful God. 2 The complexity of Folco’s facial gesture points to the importance of studying the body as the site of mediated and elicited emotion expressed through somatic symptoms, in this case a smile. In the past few years, the study of emotion in the religious, social, and literary history of the Middle Ages has gained particular importance and urgency under the sensitive scholarly guidance of Barbara Rosenwein. 3 Art historians, too, have addressed a variety of visual signs in their quest to explore medieval emotion, although its sustained history is yet to be written. 4 But can a dependable visual vocabulary of emotion be identifi ed, especially one encoded in a gesture? Some psychologists think so: Paul Ekman, one of the leading researchers in the fi eld of nonverbal communication, argues that facial expressions are universal the facial gesture: (mis)reading emotion in gothic art

THE BERLIN "DANCE OF DEATH" AS THE "LAST JUDGMENT"

Scholarship on the Dance of Death (la danse macabre), an iconographic theme that became popular in Europe in the fif teenth century, has generally focused on the traditional representations of the subject.1 The first Dance, which appeared in 1425 in the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, Paris, became a model for later representations: a long row of men of different classes and ages, hieratically arranged, being led away by jesting corpses or skeletons that punctu ate the procession at regular intervals.2 Most important, laymen and clerics alternate to show the equalizing power of death, which does not discriminate between ecclesiastics