Art History I / Death, Transcendence and the Human Condition
Practice question · True or false

The danse macabre orders its figures by social rank in order to dissolve the ranking.

Hints
  1. Ask why the sequence begins with the pope and ends with the labourer.
  2. Death takes each in turn regardless of position.
Show the answer

True

Why

True, and the ordering is the argument. Beginning with the pope and emperor and ending with the labourer stages the hierarchy precisely so that death can be shown to ignore it, a social claim with a religious warrant, made in a form that would have been dangerous to state directly.

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