The Fatal Ball

One day in the month of October, 1506, Albrecht Dürer writes a letter from Venice to his friend and sponsor in Nuremberg, Willibald Pirckheimer. It is full of heavy-handed banter, and one of the things that the artist recounts to his friend in Germany is the rather surprising fact that he has undertaken to learn to dance. He has, he says, been to dancing school twice already and pays the maestro one Ducat in return for being taught the fashionable steps of the time.

No more is said regarding these lessons in the often rather severe painter’s correspondence, so we do not know what dances he came to master, nor where he intended to practise them. But it is a nice image to picture; Dürer passing his autumn evenings on the dance floor among Venetian beauties.
 
Thus the leading artist of the German Renaissance is another link in the centuries-long line of earthlings who have all pursued the happy exercise of acquiring dance skills. It is a line that extends through the ages, from the unknown steps of the Stone Age to our own times. Medieval ideas of paradise and heavenly love centred round a lush and lovely garden where men and women danced and played music together. Such idylls are ...