Cambridge academic Ulinka Rublack’s new book claims the artist best known as a painter of the Tudor hierarchy had earlier used art to criticise the powerful

The 16th-century artist Hans Holbein the Younger’s series of tiny woodcuts, The Dance of Death, should be viewed as dangerous satire and an early form of political cartoon, according to a Cambridge academic.

The Dance of Death by Hans Holbein review – capering skeletons and ruined churches Read more

Holbein’s series of grisly images, created between 1524 and 1526 and showing the folly of greed and pride, are part of a tradition dating back to the medieval idea of the “danse macabre”, which showed death, in the form of a skeleton, acting as the great leveller to kings and emperors. But in a new Penguin Classics edition collecting the woodcuts, Ulinka Rublack, professor of early modern history at the University of Cambridge, argues that Holbein’s version of the story is more than just another religiously-themed moral tale, and is actually a political statement.

Using contemporary sources including local government records from the period, Rublack found that the young artist known for his later portraits of the Tudors was then struggling to survive financially, and part of a group of subversive artists who were being drawn into the movement for political change in Reformation Europe.

She points to images from The Dance of Death such as one of a pope shown surrounded by little demons, which she said was a “very risky” thing to have done. “For me it is a clear reference to Lutheran criticism which claimed the pope was the antichrist. It is taking up the language used by the Lutherans, which was a dangerous thing to do,” she said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Death and the Abbot, after Hans Holbeins Dance of Death, 1538. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Another image shows death adorned with a cardinal’s face; in another, a nun flirts with her lover. Rublack said she was “surprised” by “how committed [Holbein] seems to have been to issues of social justice. The judges, the notaries, all those who should help poor people, it’s clear [from his woodcuts] that Holbein thought they were open to bribes and dismissive of those they should help.”

“The invisibility comes through of those at the margins of society. I don’t know any other graphic work of the period that does that, that speaks so strongly for the poor, for those who are invisible,” she said.

Rublack is from St John’s College, which described The Dance of Death as the “16th-century Charlie Hebdo”, and said that by “reworking the traditional Dance formula and adding tokens and signifiers that pointed to political concerns specific to its time, Holbein’s Dance was not just a piece for religious meditation but an early form of political cartoon, designed to delight, surprise and offend”.

“What’s striking is how many of his images were about social justice,” added Rublack. “Holbein was part of a movement which was very concerned with radical questions about welfare and reform.

“Looking at it as satire, rather like a publication such as Charlie Hebdo today, is probably the way to think about what he was doing at the time. Criticising the pope and Catholic clergy was dangerous; it could be censored and people could be imprisoned for it. But it’s sobering to think nobody was assassinated for it, which has occurred in response to comparable satire in our own time.”

Holbein produced the work while he was living in the Swiss city of Basle. The Reformation would not arrive there until 1529, but Rublack argues that there was already pressure for reform, and that Holbein, living among artists, would not have been immune to its influence.

“One can only imagine an atmosphere of creative fun and irreverence, which thrived on jokes against monks, priests, the local bishop and popes,” she writes in the new Penguin Classics edition, out this month.

What struck me was how many risks Holbein was taking in pushing these critiques. It was such an exciting time Ulinka Rublack

“I think he was engulfed in these discussions from the start,” Rublack told the Guardian. “What really struck me was how many risks he was taking in pushing these critiques. It was such an exciting time because graphic art became so political and the role of satire merges with an extraordinary movement for change.”

Holbein would go on to work in the Tudor court in England, producing works such as The Ambassadors and his famous portrait of Henry VIII.

“What is impressive is that he could have easily made the decision to give up painting, as so many contemporaries did,” Rublack said. “Instead, he made the very risky decision to pursue painting elsewhere. He seems to have known that he had great works like The Ambassadors in him.”