Contemporaries
Comparative diagram showing lifetime of great, famous and well-known people throughout history — cognitive and interesting enough, because everybody knows all these names, but you might have never realized that for example Petrarch and Chaucer lived during Black Death pandemic, Jeanne d’Arc was a contemporary of Andrei Rublev, while Shakespeare and Cervantes not only were contemporaries but contrived to die on the same day.
Diagram in all its beauty (5000×2800 px – 1,9 MB)
First of all, we recollect as many famous names as possible, then make a table in Excel and fill it in with precision of ±10 years. We write down all the names that come to mind: painters, philosophers, composers, writers, scientists, royal persons…
The most of names are from XVIII and XIX centuries, so we’ll have to clean the list later in order to be not too huge:
Moreover, we decided not to include anyone who was born after 1900 — everybody knows that while Elizabeth II rules Great Britain, a lot of people from Stalin to Gorbachev had time to sit on Soviet “throne”, then USSR fell apart, and Germany united.
Well, let’s begin:
During the process of making, a funny fact reveals — these two died on the same day without any agreement:
And we’ll add several well-known events for comaparison and more interest:
And of course, the sacred:
