On the Question of Pictorial 'Evidence' for Fifteenth-Century Dance Technique

Abstract

The reconstruction of early dance is rapidly becoming a boom industry, in both amateur and professional circles. Whilst there is, of course, a positive side to this development, it also carries evident dangers as reconstructors cast their nets ever wider in the search for information about dance technique and practices. This is particularly true in the field of fifteenth-century dance. Sound textual evidence for dance technique during this period is scarce; there are few surviving texts and those which we do have are often difficult to interpret, not least because they use no dance notation but describe the dance movements verbally, in terms of which the precise meaning is largely lost to us. Faced with this state of affairs there is inevitably a temptation for both students and teachers of dance to look for other sources of 'evidence' and particularly to contemporary painting. However, in spite of the apparent richness of paintings in this respect, the attempt to use them as a source of information for performance practice is a dangerous and highly unsatisfactory venture, one which, at best, runs the risk of total circularity. The object of this article is to point out, from the viewpoint of an art historian, some of the problems involved in this kind of venture and to explain why, as far as dance practice goes, paintings are inadmissable as evidence.