The legend was made the subject of a fresco, painted about 1350, by the eminent Italian painter and architect, Orcagna, upon the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa,—­which some readers may be glad to be reminded was a cemetery, so called because it was covered with earth brought from the Holy Land.  It is remarkable, however, that in this work the artist embodied Death not in the form commonly used in his day, but in the old Etruscan figure before mentioned.  Orcagna’s Death is a female, winged like a bat, and with terrible claws.  Armed with a scythe, she swoops down upon the earth and reaps a promiscuous harvest of popes, emperors, kings, queens, churchmen, and noblemen.  In the rude manner of the time, Orcagna has divided his picture into compartments.  In one of these we see St. Macarius, one of the first Christian hermits, an Egyptian, sitting at the foot of a mountain; before him are three kings, who have returned from the chase accompanied by a gay train of attendants.  The Saint calls the attention of the kings to three sepulchres in which lie the bodies of three other kings, one of which is much decomposed.  The three living kings are struck with horror; but the painter has much diminished the moral effect of his work, for this century, at least, by making one of them hold his nose;—­which is regarded by Mr. Ruskin as an evidence of Orcagna’s devotion to the truth; but in this case that brilliant writer, but most unsafe critical guide, commits an error of a kind not uncommon with him.  The representation of so homely an action, in such a composition, merely shows that the painter had not arrived at a just appreciation of the relative value of the actual,—­and that he failed to see that by introducing this unessential incident he diverted attention from his higher purpose, dragged his picture from a moral to a material plane, and went at a bound far over the narrow limit between the horrible and the ludicrous.

St. Macarius is frequently introduced in the pictures of this subject; and some antiquaries suppose that hence the Dance of Death derived the name, Dance Macabre, by which it used to be generally known.  Others derive it from the Arabic mac-bourah,—­a cemetery.  Neither derivation is improbable; but it is of little consequence to us which is correct.

It may seem strange that such a legend as this of “The Three Dead and the Three Living,” with such a moral, should become the origin of a dance.  But we should remember that in many countries dancing has been a religious ceremony.  It was so with the Greeks and Romans, and also with the Hebrews, among whom, however, saltatory worship seems, on most occasions, to have been performed spontaneously, and by volunteers.  All will remember the case of Miriam, who thus danced to the sound of her timbrel after the passage of the Red Sea; and who that has read it can forget the account of the dance which King David executed before the ark, dancing with all his might, and girded only with a linen ephod?