Danse macabre / Death leads every social rank in a dance
About the work
Imported from the workbook's Full reassessment sheet, revised 7 October 2026 (record ID 99). The assessment below is the workbook's comparative judgment under its stated criteria; source links and limits are retained.
Workbook assessment: Spread only
Date or witness: Literary references by 1376; earliest recorded mural 1424–1425; major 15th-century copying
Region: France and wider Europe
Workbook date-sort bounds: 1376 CE to 1500 CE; these bounds are not automatically invention or disappearance dates.
Description
A repeated visual/textual template has Death take pope, ruler and ordinary people alike. The Morgan's Paris Book of Hours of 1430–35 contains 56 marginal scenes derived from the Paris tradition.
Evidence of adoption or transmission
Death-leading-social-ranks imagery spread through public murals and books.
What remains uncertain
Public accessibility and depiction of common people demonstrate potential reach, not who adopted or drove transmission. Institutional commissions can explain the observed recurrence without grassroots propagation.
Workbook revision note: Reassessed using grassroots criteria