The Tuscan death personification of the trecento is generally acknowledged as the very first iconographic motif in the pictorial arts of the West to present the audiences with a figure of Death in a more concrete, humanlike form. Armed and depicted in various stages of decomposition, the ghastly apparition triggers the viewer's emotional response even after almost seven centuries. Her rather clearly expressed messages regarding the vanity of man and the anxieties upon awaiting her arrival are, unfortunately only at first glance, well paired with extant historiographical theses on the Black Death, which, with the help of demographical and epidemiological approaches, reveal certain regions' striking mortality of over 50%, a much higher percentage than the usual assessments give (2030%). In older literature, the appearance of macabre iconography is consensually attributed to the Black Death, which is essentially one of many conservative beliefs about the roots of death personifications, the aforementioned theses tend to emphasize even more. With the help of the remaining examples depicting death personified, we will try to explain how the Black Death itself definitely was not the decisive factor in creating the iconographic motif, for it has appeared more than a decade before the arrival of the first epidemic, although isolated behind monastery walls. The Black Death is not unimportant when studying the iconographic motif of the death personification, for it was the very plague that made a smooth transition of the motif from ascetic ecclesiastic circles to wider, even lay audiences, possible, since they too have started identifying with it. We will focus on how the motif started appearing in the decades before the plague and the ways in which the epidemic had changed it, while at the same time changing core beliefs and rituals surrounding death and dying. Help will be drawn from both demographic or epidemiologic studies and contemporary literary texts and chronicles alike.
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