The Danse Macabre
Death dancing with pope and peasant alike.
Ivar Leidus — CC BY-SA 3.0 ee · Diego Delso — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Diego Delso — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Diego Delso — CC BY-SA 3.0
A late fifteenth-century German painter from Lübeck, among the Baltic region's greatest artists; he painted another Danse Macabre in Lübeck that was destroyed in the war — so the Estonian version is the only one of his to survive.
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A Gothic church that became a museum because it could no longer be prayed in: Niguliste was built in the thirteenth century for German merchants, and it survived the iconoclasm of the Reformation when its warden locked the doors and poured lead into the locks — so its altars and art were preserved at the moment when the region's church art was being destroyed entirely. Soviet bombing in March 1944 then wrecked it and it stood ruined, before restoration as a museum of sacred art last century. It holds Estonia's most precious artwork: Bernt Notke's Danse Macabre (about 1500) — a painting once thirty metres long of which only seven survive, showing Death dancing with pope, emperor, cardinal and peasant alike, a reminder that death does not discriminate. It also holds Hermen Rode's gilded altarpiece and merchants' graves in the floor, with organ concerts every weekend on the acoustics of the Gothic vault.
Death dancing with pope and peasant alike.
How the church survived the iconoclasm.
Niguliste 3, Tallinn