User-submitted Reference

There are those who call it 'Maccabeo', a term used - in in collegiate jargon - by French medical students to indicate the corpses/cadavers (As well as the cataract - guardians of the rivers - the nineteenth century saying 'Macab' or 'the drowned'). In the Transalpine region, an ancient French saying 'Ma-cabre', was referred to misfortune. In Arabic 'maqbara' means tomb and 'maqabir' cemetery; in Syrian 'Maquabrey' is the name of the undertaker (or Gravedigger). A curious discovery quite recent: in 1419 a chaplain of the Holy Innocents Church in Paris was called Laurentis Macabre.

Also in France, with the last name of a family of Troyes, French artists of the fifteenth century, who made extensive use, were designated, in fact, similar macabre representations. A rather intricate road, but certainly suggestive, is undertaken by the French scholar Naskidashvili when, finding in the dialects of the Morvan, the Meuse and the Vendôme area the term 'Abre Macabre', it refers to the clouds that fray (v. unravel or become worn) and were popularly compared to the famous Dance.

Taken and translated from Mauro Neri's Bascenis de Averaria: pittori itineranti nel Trentino (1989), pg. 81.