Minneapolis Institute of Art
Danse Macabre
Marcel RouxLinkedCulture matchlcp-5aa92a5cceea
- Date
- 1904
- Medium
- Etching
- Department
- European Art
- Institution
- Minneapolis Institute of Art
- Object ID
- 128196
From LinkedCulture
A skeleton swings two hammers to ring a bell, announcing a demon's arrival as it carries a shrouded woman to a bone-strewn tower high above a burning city. Marcel Roux's 1904 etching Danse Macabre turns the medieval Dance of Death into something far darker - a coordinated, relentless harvest of souls playing out across a night sky filled with winged figures. The fine intaglio lines build a suffocating atmosphere that makes this print feel less like a historical allegory and more like a waking nightmare.
Written by LinkedCulture for its video on this object. Machine-generated (claude-sonnet-4-6), not yet reviewed by a person. It is not part of the museum’s record.
What the image shows
A winged figure carries a person on its back through a dark, eerie landscape.
Generated by LinkedCulture from the photograph alone, without the museum’s catalogue text (Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct), and not yet reviewed by a person. It describes the picture, not the object’s history, and it is not part of the museum’s record.
From the Minneapolis Institute of Art record
Marcel Roux places us, his viewers, in a ghoulish bell tower festooned with human remains. A giant scythe serves as a banner for the title and signature. The tower overlooks a river city. A winged demon brings a lifeless woman wrapped in a shroud—or perhaps in the sheet from her deathbed—to the tower as a shrouded skeleton announces his compatriot’s successful mission by swinging two hammers to strike a bell. In the distance we see two more demons bringing their prey and further ones flying through the night sky. Roux had studied with artists inclined toward Christian mysticism, but instead of expressing his own spirituality by decorating church interiors, he obsessed over death, Hell, and Satan. France, Europe
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Provenance & credit
As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.
- Credit line
- Anonymous gift honoring the contributions of Eric Gustav Carlson
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