The fullest account of the album is given by Professor Held: 'In his Teutsche Academie (Nuremberg, 1675, 252) Joachim von Sandrart reported that he has it from Rubens himself (whom he accompanied on a boat trip from Utrecht to Amsterdam) that as a youth he had copied Holbein's book of the 'Todten-Tanz' (as well as one by Stimmer,...) . While the copies after Stimmer have been scattered and many are lost, of the forty-six copies after Holbein which were bound in a small volume in the eighteenth century, forty-two are still together and have been rendered in facsimile in Regteren Altena's publication of 1977. Rubens' drawings are slightly larger than Holbein's woodcuts; they also differ in many small, but significant ways, from their models. Spatial relationship which the 'Formschneider' (Hans Lützelburger) could not always completely clarify are more explicit, and physiognomic details made more subtle. These and other observations justified Regteren Altena in giving these drawings, which in the earlier literature had been attributed to Holbein himself, to the youthful Rubens. Is it anybody's guess at what age Rubens drew them. Since Regteren Altena was surely justified in calling them the earliest drawings preserved by the master, I see no reason why one cannot put them to the years 1591-92, when Rubens was entering the studio of his first teacher at the age of fourteen. Regteren Altena, however, followed Burchard-d'Hulst in placing the London Costume book.... into the same period, an opinion which is clearly untenable....
There is ... one unmistakable echo of his copies of the Dance of Death in one of his paintings for the ceilings of the Antwerp Jesuit church, known today only from an oil sketch in the Národní Galerie in Prague .... As Adam and Eve are expelled from Paradise, a skeletal figure of Death, drawn in a most dramatic pose, grabs Adam's arm with his right hand and Eve's hair with his left. Although not directly copied from Holbein, that figure was clearly inspired by the viciously attacking skeletons in such woodcuts as Der Ritter ..., Der Edelmann, or Der Krämer in Holbein's series. One may ask, too, whether Rubens - among other sources - also had the print of the Noblewoman in mind ... when he planned the pair walking at the left in his Garden of Love ..'(J.S. Held, op.cit., p. 64)