Den Sorte Død som afspejlet i skandinavisk arkitektur og kunst

Resumé

The Black Death as reflected in Scandinavian Art and Architecture
By Ebbe Nyborg

There is a saying among architectural historians that a cathedral that had not been completed by the middle of the 14th century was at risk of never being finished at all. As it is well known this was the case in Cologne. The same almost total stop of building activities between ca. 1350 and the late 19th century is seen at Trondheim Cathedral in Norway (fig. 1-2). And in Denmark the works at Odense Cathedral and the nearby Cistercian church in Holme (fig. 3-4) came to a standstill ca. 1350 and were not resumed until well into the 15th century. Furthermore the buildings were only finished according to substantially reduced plans. The plague would have been at least partially responsible for this. Much would indicate that the plague especially affected Norway, where the whole stone-building tradition dwindled until the 16th century, and in Jutland (Western Denmark) where quite a number of deserted churches can be mapped (fig. 5). In the countryside only the rich Swedish island of Gotland had substantial building activity during the 14th century. But many of the works obviously came to a standstill without ever being resumed (fig. 6-7). Dendrochronology may link some of these standstills to the plague, whereas others would surely have had other (immediate) courses. In Scandinavia the macabre pictorial culture is widely represented by hundreds of crucifixes of pain (crucifixi dolorosi)(fig. 8) of which, however, a large number seems to antedate the plague. Classical memento mori scenes, such as the Dance of Death, the Wheel of Fortune (fig. 9), Frau Welt and the apocalyptic horsemen (fig. 10) can mostly be seen in the wealthier parts of Southern Scandinavia where a tradition of wall-paintings persisted. So-called transigraves with a life-size representation of the dead person lying as a worm-eaten body are not known until the 16th century (fig. 11) testifying to the long-reaching impact of the macabre culture.