self portrait with vanitas symbols essay

my daily art display

A daily dip into the world of art

Vanitas Still-life with a Portrait of a Young Painter by David Bailly

Vanitas is an explicit genre of art in which the artist uses gloomy and moody symbolic objects in order that the viewer becomes very aware of the brevity of life and the inevibility of death.   The origins of the term vanitas can be traced back to the Latin biblical adage from the Book of Ecclesiastes (1:2):

“…vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas…”

which when translated means:

“…vanity of vanities; all is vanity…”

This specific artistic genre was very popular in the 16 th and 17 th century especially in the Netherlands, Flanders and France.

My Daily Art Display blog today looks at one of the works by the great Dutch still life and vanitas painter David Bailly.   Bailly was born in Leiden in 1584.  His father, Pieter, a Flemish immigrant from Antwerp, was a writing master.  Being a practicing Protestant he had fled from the Catholic Spanish rule of his homeland to the safer, more tolerant Northern Netherlands, eventually settling in the town of Leiden.  It was whilst living here that he married Willempgen Wolphaertsdr. and the couple went on to have four children, Anthony,  Anna, Neeltgen and David.  In 1592 David’s father took up the position as writing master at the University of Leiden.  He remained there until 1597 at which time he changed careers and became fencing master at a school run by the mathematician Ludolph van Cuelen, which was an establishment set up to train aspiring army officers in the various facets of warfare.

David’s initial training in drawing came from his father and in 1597, at the age of thirteen, he trained at the Leiden studio of the Dutch draughtsman and copper engraver, Jacques de Gheyn II.  David Bailly soon came to believe that his future did not lie as a draughtsman but as a painter and he was somewhat fortunate to live in the town of Leiden which was the home of many established and aspiring artists.  The leading artist in Leiden at the time was Isaac van Swanenburgh, who with his three sons, had set up a thriving studio in the town.  However it was not to this family concern that young David sort employment and tuition but instead his father arranged his son to become an apprentice to the painter and surgeon, Adriaen Verburgh.   In 1602 David moved to Amsterdam and became an apprentice in the city studio of the very successful portraitist and art dealer, Cornelius van der Voort. 

At the end of 1608, then aged twenty-four, David Bailly, now a journeyman painter, set off on his own Grand Tour, all the time seeking out commissions.  He travelled around Europe visiting a number of German cities such as Frankfurt, Nuremburg and Augsburg before crossing the Tyrolean Alps into Italy where he visited Venice and Rome.  In all, his journey lasted five years and it was not until 1613 that he returned to the Netherlands.

Once back home his work concentrated on drawing and painting portraits and vanitas still-life works and would often, as is the case in today’s featured work, combine the two genres.  His portraiture at the time consisted of many works featuring some of the students and professors of the University of Leiden.  He built up a very illustrious clientele which was testament to his artistic ability.  Bailly also had a number of pupils, two of whom were his nephews Harmen and Pieter van Steenwyck, who rank amongst the best still-life Dutch Golden Age painters.  In 1642 David Bailly married Agneta van Swanenburgh.  The couple did not have any children.  In 1648, he along with other artists including Gabriel Metsu, Gerard Dou, and Jan Steen founded the Leidse Sint Lucasgilde  – Leiden Guild of St Luke.  David Bailly died in Leiden in October 1657, aged73.

The painting I am featuring today is entitled Vanitas Still Life with a Portrait of a Young Painter which was completed by David Bailly in 1651 when he was sixty-six years of age and six years before he died.  It is now housed in the Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden .     It is a fascinating painting full of symbolism.  To the left of the painting we have, what some believe, is a self-portrait of the artist himself, but of course as we know Bailly’s age when he painted the work we know this was a depiction of himself as a young man in his early twenties.    In his right hand he holds a maulstick, or mahlstick, which is a stick with a soft leather or padded head, used by painters to support the hand that holds the brush.  In his other hand he holds upright on the table a framed oval portrait of himself as he was at the time of painting this work.  So in fact the man sitting on the left of the painting and the man in the frame are one and the same and the inclusion of both images in the painting simply reminds us of the transience of life.    

Behind the framed self-portrait we have another oval painting, that of a young woman and this has always interested art historians.  It is believed to be a portrait of his wife Agneta in her younger days.  However at the time the painting was completed Bailly’s wife was gravely ill, in fact, it could well be that she had already died.  Look closely at the wall in the right background, just behind the half empty fluted glass, can you make out a ghost-like portrait of a woman, en grisaille , painted on it, across which drifts the smoke from the extinguished candle?  This is another classic vanitas symbolisation.  This could well be alluding to the fact that his wife had died from contracting the plague.  On the table we also see a standing figure of Saint Stephen bound to a tree, pierced with arrows.  So what is the connection with St Stephen and the other objects on the table?   One theory is that there was a link between Saint Stephen and the plague, which killed so many people in Europe, including Bailly’s wife.     The infections produced by the bubonic plague caused people to compare the “random attacks” of the plague with attacks by arrows and these folk desperately sort out a saint who was martyred by arrows, to intercede on their behalf and so prayers were offered up to St Stephen for him to intercede.   

This is a vanitas still-life painting and we see the usual vanitas symbolism amongst the objects depicted in the work of art.   Vanitas works allude to the transience of life.  Time passes.  It cannot be halted.  We all must eventually die.  Look at the background of the painting.  Look at the angle of the wall as it vertically divides the painting.  To the left, the painting is brightly lit and we have the young man, the aspiring artist, with his unused artist’s palettes hanging on the wall.  To the right of the vertical divide, the room is in shadow and we have the portrait of the old artist.  On the vertical line we have a bubble, which is a classic metaphor for the impermanence and fragility of life. 

There are many other items to note.   On the wall we see a print of Franz Hals 1626 painting, The Lute Player .  There is a plethora of objects on the table including a picture of a bearded man which could have been a portrait of Bailly’s father or maybe one of his teachers.  On the table, there are also many noteworthy items indicating death such as the skull, the extinguished candle, the tipped-over Roemer glass, the grains of sand of an hour glass running down and the wilting flowers.  There are also reminders of the luxuries of life which are of little use to us once we are dead, such as the coins and the pearls as well as items that have once helped us to relax and add to our enjoyment such as the pipe and the book, as well as the art in the form of paintings and sculpture. Sadly, pleasure and wealth are short-lived and ultimately unimportant.   This is about the temporality of life.    Overhanging the table in the foreground is a scroll with the words:

VANITAS VANIT(AT)VM

ET OMNIA VANITAS

which remind us of the words from the  book of Ecclesiastes I quoted at the start of this blog.

So the next time you decide to have somebody take your photograph, think carefully what you would place by your side or on a nearby table so as to convey a subtle and symbolic message to the people who will view the photograph in years to come.

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Author: jonathan5485

Just someone who is interested and loves art. I am neither an artist nor art historian but I am fascinated with the interpretaion and symbolism used in paintings and love to read about the life of the artists and their subjects. View all posts by jonathan5485

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Hello! Thank you for this awesome page, it helped me alot.

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Memento Mori and Vanitas

Summary of Memento Mori and Vanitas

The idea of the "Memento Mori" - a Latin phrase meaning "remember that you must die" - is a fertile theme in art than can be traced back to the Ancient Egyptians. But as a defined genre its beginning is connected specifically with the period of Roman Antiquity (hence the Latin title). Although the purpose of Memento Mori is always to remind the viewer of their own mortality, it is not necessarily presented as an ominous warning. Rather, viewers have been either encouraged to consider each day as a gift to be prized, or, artfully reminded that any chance of a blissful heavenly afterlife is contingent on how one conducts themself while here on earth. The theme of Memento Mori has grown into sub-genres, most notably the "Danse Macabre" and "Vanitas" tendencies. Contemporary artists, who have been much less exposed to death to those of earlier eras, work within the range of time-honored symbolic motifs - skeletons, skulls, flowers, fruit, candles, clocks, hourglasses, and so on - but artists in the modern age tend to treat the Memento Mori theme in a more self-conscious or playful way.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• While the Stoic philosophers promoted the idea that the inevitability of death should act as a reminder to "seize the day", and to live one's life in the present, in early Christianity the Memento Mori acted rather as a reminder that with death comes the possibility of one's soul ascending to heaven. The role of Memento Mori was thus to bring ideas about heaven, hell, and salvation of the soul to the forefront of the worshippers' consciousness. This was achieved through a combination of scripture, and funerary art, such as mosaics and sculpture, which worshippers encountered on display in churches, graveyards, and ossuaries.
• Vanitas images are associated initially with the Dutch Golden Age and its great tradition of still life painting. They are closely related to Memento Mori in that their aim was to remind viewers of their own mortality. But Vanitas went further by condemning the "empty and vain" pursuit of material wealth during one's life on earth. Vanitas images - featuring iconography that symbolized the transience of time/life such as wilting flowers, hourglasses, skulls, candles, watches, and decaying fruit - were thus a means of encouraging viewers to resist the lure of luxurious possessions, to accept their fate, and to devote their day-to-day existence to leading a pure and humble life.
• The ghoulish tradition of the "Danse Macabre" ("dance of death") was a direct response to the devastating effects of the plagues and wars that blighted the Late Middle Ages. The Danse Macabre was represented in the visual art, drama, poetry, and music, and presented death as a dance that joined the living and the dead (typically represented a skeletons). The dances, which cojoined figures from all walks of human life - royals to peasants - were not represented as joyful events (although they were hugely popular with audiences) but rather a reminder to all that death was the "great leveller".
• The 19 th Century saw the birth of photography; a medium well suited to expanding the long tradition of still-life Vanitas compositions. But the birth of the Daguerreotype (and, soon after, less expensive systems) gave rise to a positively macabre photographic genre: the "post-mortem portrait". For many living through the disease-ravaged Victorian era, the new technology presented an opportunity to capture a permanent (and very often - the only) image of a deceased loved one. An uncanny peculiarity of the post-mortem portrait was that an exact likeness of the deceased "sitter" was in fact easier to capture on film than to photograph living relatives who found it hard to sit or stand motionless for the duration of long exposure times.

Overview of Memento Mori and Vanitas

The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote: "Remember how precious is the privilege of living, breathing, being happy. The perfection of our conduct consists in using each day we live as if it were our last, and in never having impatience, languor, or falseness. We must feed the soul with the wisdom that comes from accepting death".

The Important Artists and Works of Memento Mori and Vanitas

Memento Mori

Artist: Unknown artist

This small mosaic, discovered at the ancient Italian resort city of Pompeii (the site of one of the most famous natural disasters recorded in human history when it was engulfed by lava following the eruption of the volcanic mount Vesuvius in 79 AD) dates back to the early medieval age. At the top of the image are balancing and measuring tools (a libella and plumb line) that support the skull (curiously, with ears), that itself sits atop a butterfly, that sits atop a wheel. The butterfly is a symbol of the living soul of the dead, while the "wheel of fortune" ( rota fortunae ), was believed to belong to the goddess Fortuna, who would spin it at random, causing some to prosper; others to suffer. On the left, supporting the libella, is a scepter wrapped in purple fabric representing wealth, while on the right, a wooden stick wrapped in brown fabric, represents poverty. Archaeologist Stefano De Caro writes, the image is "striking for the clarity of its allegorical representation. The topic is Hellenistic in origin and presents death as the great leveller who cancels out all differences of wealth and class [and] was intended to remind diners of the fleeting nature of earthly fortunes". The message "remember you will die" is particularly poignant given that it was discovered (during excavations in 1874) buried under three meters of rubble, debris, and volcanic ash. It is especially interesting to note that the mosaic was sitting atop a dining table in a triclinium (formal dining room), thereby underscoring the belief that, for the ancients, reminders of death were not so much moralizing messages, but more a justification to eat, drink, and make the most of life. As archaeologist Vivian van Heekeren notes, "the Carpe Diem or 'Seize the Day' theme took a central place" in Roman society. Similar Memento Mori mosaics have been found in other triclinium around Pompeii, such as one in the House of the Faun showing skeletons carrying wine jugs, and others showing dancing skeletons with cups at the villas in the nearby town of Boscoreale (which was also buried by the eruption).

Mosaic - Pompeii, Italy (now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli)

Danse Macabre (Dance of Death)

Artist: Bernt Notke

Danse Macabre ("Dance of Death") images typically feature living people accompanied by allegories or personifications of Death (usually skeletons or decaying corpses) dancing close to a grave. The living typically appear somber, whereas the dead appear more animated, even gleeful or giddy with joy. This example, by late Gothic artist Bernt Notke (who was active in the Baltic region), is the only surviving medieval Dance Macabre in the world painted on canvas, and is, as art historian Krista Andreson notes "undoubtedly the most famous medieval work of art in Estonia". It is believed to be based on another Danse Macabre that Notke painted for St. Mary's Church in Lübeck, Northern Germany, which was finished in 1463, and has unfortunately since been lost. Only a fragment (twenty-five feet in length) of the Tallinn version survives, but it is believed to have been 100 feet long with about fifty figures (with equal numbers of dead and living figures). What we see in the surviving fragment are thirteen figures, including the Dead playing bagpipes and carrying coffins, and living figures such as the Pope, the Emperor, the Empress, the Cardinal, and the King. As was typical of Danse Macabre images, the living figures are arranged by social status, with the richest and most powerful at the front of the procession. Despite this implied hierarchy, the overriding message of these images was that all become equal in death, and worldly attributes, like material possessions or noble rank, cease to matter. In many Danse Macabre images, text accompanies the picture narrative, serving as a sort of dialogue between the dead and the living. In this example the text, in Low German (a dialect native to Northern Germany), sits on a scroll below the parade of figures. The verses alternate between the living attempting to complain about or avoid death (in a pleading tone), and the dead figures summoning them and sarcastically telling them of death's inevitability. For instance, the Empress says "I know, Death means me! I was never terrified so greatly! [...] after all, I am young and also an empress. I thought I had a lot of power, I had not thought of him or that anybody could do something against me. Oh, let me live on, this I implore you!", to which Death replies, "Empress, highly presumptuous, methinks you have forgotten me. Fall in! It is now time. You thought I should let you off? No way!". Historian Marie-Madeleine Renauld adds that "Later, the theme was taken out of its religious context, and artists used it to criticize the ideas of their time and to comment on politics. For instance, the Danse Macabre strongly appealed to artists of the Romantic movement".

Oil on canvas - St. Nicholas Church, Tallinn, Estonia

Moving into the 16 th and 17 th centuries, as arts writer Allyssia Alleyne explains, small ivory Memento Mori objects, such as this rosary, became "part of a larger cultural moment that emphasized humility, reflection and moral obligation. Traveling preachers would deliver sermons on mortality to peasants in Paris cemeteries, the working class would buy prints on the theme [...] and the rich had their ivory carvings. [...] It seems inevitable - if ironic - that the ivory devotionals would become the very luxury items they were designed to warn against". Art historian Stephen Perkinson notes, too, that ivory Memento Mori were "sold directly to wealthy collectors, rather than being commissioned by the church [and therefore] should be considered through a secular lens [they were] more about invoking other sorts of moralizing notions of the time that aren't paraliturgical". In this example, each ivory segment features an image of a living person on one side, and a skeletal figure on the reverse. The ivory beads at either end also feature an image of a living human head on one side, and a skull on the other, with a vertical division through the middle. Religious writer Menachem Wecker notes that, because of their small size and fine detail, objects like this "were a beloved part of collectors' kunstkammers, or curiosity cabinets, which were all the rage in Europe at the time", and examples like this one, "which do not bear evidence of use or wear, were more likely intended purely for display purposes rather than being used for prayer". Wecker also observes that many of these works featured tiny pinpricks above and below the eyes, which are "foramina: anatomical features on the skull that allow for vein and nerve passage", exemplifying the way in which medieval medical researchers were "increasingly dissecting and studying corpses". Perkinson states that these ivory objects are among many examples that show that in the Middle Ages, "people were fixated on this idea that your individual identity is conveyed through your face and your appearance - your costume, your heraldry and your insignia of office [so the] message that, in the end, everybody is indistinguishable and the same on some level, social differences are erased, is a pretty powerful one".

Ivory, silver, and partially gilded mounts - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

The Abbot (from, The Dance of Death series)

Artist: Hans Holbein the Younger

Germany came relatively late to the Renaissance. Indeed, as Italy was moving into the period of High (or Late) Renaissance, Germany was just beginning to move on from the dominant Gothic style. As Germany's artists began to travel into neighboring European countries, their work evolved accordingly and their interest in the human anatomy and representing the human form more naturalistically followed. Yet even in light of these new influences, Germanic art developed in a way that retained a uniquely national element. Germany became known for its woodcuts and engravings, and with the creation of the printing press, it produced cheap, mass produced, art that could be disseminated amongst the public. Early German printmaking was characterized by themes of superstition and Christian and pagan myth which came with a reminder of the certainty of death and damnation, and chief amongst its practitioners, was Hans Holbein the Younger. Historian Ted Pennant-Rea describes Holbein's The Dance of Death as "a great, grim triumph of Renaissance woodblock printing. In a series of action-packed scenes Death intrudes on the everyday lives of thirty-four people from various levels of society - from pope to physician to ploughman [...] The year before he began The Dance, he had illustrated Martin Luther's influential translation of the New Testament into German. So Holbein was working close to the heart of the accelerating movement for Church reform. It comes as little surprise, then, that Death reserves particularly grim treatment for members of the Catholic clergy. It drags off a fat abbot by his cassock [as seen in this example], leads an abbess away by the habit as though she were an animal, and takes the form of two skeletons and two demons to see to the pope himself". The Dance series was an adaptation of the Danse Macabre and, as such, Death typically appears in the guise of a skeleton. Historian Stephanie Buck argues that "What makes [Holbein's Death vignettes] particularly interesting are the varying reactions of the doomed figures, whom Holbein depicts with vivid gestures and facial expressions". Pennant-Rae adds, "In Holbein's series no one is actually engaged in a dance with Death. This removes an element of comic catharsis found in the mutuality of earlier dances. Holbein's more static figures respond to Death realistically". He concludes that "Reproductions obscure just how tiny the wooden blocks were - no bigger than four postage stamps arranged in a rectangle. The blocks were cut by Hans Lützelburger, a frequent and highly skilled collaborator of Holbein's. Lützelburger had cut forty-one blocks and had ten remaining when Death surprised him too. The blocks were then sold to creditors, and eventually printed and published for the first time in Lyons in 1538 as Les simulachres and historiees faces de la mort. Since the book's great success Holbein's series has been consistently in print, inspiring writers and artists from Rubens in Flanders, to Millet in France, and Dickens in England".

Woodcut - Kunstmuseum Basel

Still Life with Dead Hare and Birds

Artist: Jan Fyt (Jan Fijt)

17 th -century Flemish Baroque painter Jan Fyt (or Jan Fijt) produced several still lives of game depicted as hunting trophies, including this image of a dead hare and birds. The creatures have yet to have their fur and feathers plucked. They lay piled on stones, and thorny vines are visible around them. The animals here serve as a clear reminder of death. As still-life painting was dominant in Northern Europe at the time, the Memento Mori message was often conveyed through depictions of dead animals, wilting flowers, and rotting fruit. Works like this can also be understood as a Vanitas, a genre that carried an added symbolic warning against focusing one's life on the pursuit of luxuries. As curator Axel Vécsey says, "Hunting has long been entertainment for the privileged. No wonder then that the genre of painted hunting trophies flourished most in Flanders in Rubens's time, which more than any other era was in the sway of the cult of heaving plenty and worldly extravagance. Surprisingly, though obviously not coincidentally, in the other half of the Netherlands, newly seceded Protestant Holland, an art of the most puritan approach sprang up simultaneously". Vécsey adds that, after a visit to Holland in 1642, the tone of Fyt's work "changed considerably [...] into the triumphant uproar of brazen Baroque there crept more muted, melancholy chords. The magnificent spread of the kill of game here is more a lament to mortality, than an invitation to a vain banquet. The message is completed with a symbol aptly Dutch in its directness: thorns referring to the passion of Christ". Arts writer Fraser Hibbitt pointed to an innate paradox with Vanitas like these when he wrote, "Vanitas subsisted during the seventeenth century to guide the mind to the contemplation of death and the vanities of living. Yet it was borne from a contradiction that the act of painting itself, creating a beautiful artifact, was vanity itself. Vanitas paintings became objects of earthly value, something it was trying to denounce".

Oil on canvas - Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary

Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle

Artist: Arnold Böcklin

There has long existed a tradition of artists creating self-portraits with Memento Mori imagery, such as English painter Thomas Smith's, Self Portrait (c. 1680), and Dutch Golden Age painter David Bailly's, Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols (1651). In this 19 th century example, Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin looks out past the viewer, appearing to be listening as much as looking, with a paintbrush in his right hand and a paint palette in his left. Death is personified as a grinning skeleton standing over his left shoulder, playing a single-stringed violin. The image, which references the concepts of both Memento Mori and Danse Macabre, is strikingly similar to, and likely influenced by, a 16 th century portrait of British nobleman, Sir Brian Tuke, by an anonymous painter (on display at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich where Böcklin lived at the time), in which a skeleton looms behind the subject holding what appears to be the neck of a stringed instrument in its left hand, while pointing at an hourglass with its right hand. Böcklin was all too familiar with death. He was in Paris during the February Revolution of 1848, and was witness, through his bedroom window, to countless prisoners being transported to execution. His first wife died just a year after their marriage (in 1850), and though he remarried a few years later, seven of the couple's fourteen children died during infancy. In this painting, Böcklin seems to have become blasé towards death, or perhaps he believed that, even after his own passing, he would live on through his art (represented here by the brush and palette). Legend has it (though this was never confirmed) that Böcklin only added the skeleton after his friends saw the self-portrait and, puzzled by his expression, asked what he was listening to. Alma Mahler, wife of the composer Gustav Mahler, explained how her husband was inspired by Böcklin's painting to add a violin solo to his Fourth Symphony (1899-1900). Musicologist Maureen Buja explains that "The second movement is generally described as a Totendanz (Dance of Death). [...] The violin presents the character 'Freund Hein' (Friend Henry) who is a German medieval personification of Death. [...] Originally, Mahler had headed this movement: 'Death strikes up the dance for us; she scrapes her fiddle bizarrely and leads us up to heaven'". Meanwhile, the Memento Mori self-portrait tradition has continued after Böcklin, with works as diverse as Norwegian expressionist artist Edvard Munch's, Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm (1895), and the Young British Artist (YBA) Sarah Lucas's, Self Portrait with Skull (1997).

Oil on canvas - Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Deceased child with flowers

The rise of commercial photography in the mid 19 th century provided new opportunities for creating Memento Mori images. While British pioneers such as Thomas Richard Williams created photographs in the tradition of Vanitas paintings (his Sands of Time (1850-52), for instance, features a human skull, an hour glass, an open book and discarded reading glasses), the birth of the Daguerreotype gave rise to a more macabre photographic genre: the "post-mortem portrait" (or the "Victorian Death Portrait"). As the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning said of this new phenomenon, "It is not merely the likeness which is precious, but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing ... the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever!". Victorian England was witness to high mortality rates, especially amongst infants. Diseases like measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, rubella, cholera, and typhoid were widespread. The death of a family relative, often a child, was a trigger to having a photographic portrait made in the first place. Post-mortem photography was popular amongst all classes thanks to the affordability (when compared to painted portraits) of the silver-plated Daguerreotype and, in time, less expensive glass- or paper-based alternatives. In 1860, renowned letter-writer Jane Carlyle (wife of Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle) exclaimed "Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has cast up in my time or is like to -- this art by which even the poor can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones". The historian Genevieve Carlton writes, "Unlike many portraits, which were taken in photo studios, post-mortem photos were usually taken at home. As the trend of death portraits took hold, families put effort into preparing their deceased relatives for the photoshoot. That could mean styling the subject's hair or their clothes. Some relatives opened the dead person's eyes. Photographers and family members sometimes decorated the scene to make the purpose of the photograph clear. In some images, flowers surround the deceased. In others, symbols of death and time - like an hourglass or a clock - mark the portrait as a post-mortem photograph".

Calavera Catrina (The Garbancera Skull)

Artist: José Guadalupe Posada Aguilar

Mexican illustrator, cartoonist, and lithographer José Guadalupe Posada Aguilar once declared: "Todos somos calaveras - We are all skeletons". Posada created satirical political images, and illustrations that accompanied "literary calaveras" which, as culture writer Isabel Carrasco explains, are short, "irreverent verses (or poems) that tackle death with irony, satire, and just plain good humor". Drawing on the way in which skeleton figures in Danse Macabre images had typically mocked the living, literary calaveras, as Mexican culture writer Dale Hoty Palfrey adds, were "written to poke fun at living friends, politicians and celebrities, pointing to incidents and personal foibles that single them out for imagined selection by the Grim Reaper". The most iconic of Posada's works is his creation, Calavera Catrina , an upper-class woman who may have lived in the lap of luxury, but, as indicated by her skeletal form, was doomed to die just like every other mortal. Curator Susanna Brooks writes, "Her stylish appearance and amusing, naïve sensibility endeared her to the disgruntled masses. She quickly became a satirical emblem of the sins of vanity and greed and the folly of government corruption. La Calavera Catrina was among the first of many animated skeleton characters Posada created to populate his tongue-in-cheek, pro-revolutionary illustrations. She was also the most popular and enduring. The chic, chapeau-wearing lady skull became a kind of national folk icon". Posada died in poverty in 1913. He was by then largely forgotten and was even buried in an unmarked grave. Given, moreover, that they were only to be found printed in daily newspapers, there are few extant Posada works. But, as historian Philip Kennedy writes, "thankfully, he found veneration through a number of other artists that emerged in Mexico after the revolution. They recognised his contribution to the art of engraving, and saw how he had shaped the visual language of Mexican art and illustration". Calavera Catrina was perhaps most famously reworked by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in his 1947 mural Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon along Central Alameda) . Kennedy concludes that "In many ways, Posada was a revolutionary. He helped to establish a national art that was independent of European tradition and that was built around a language of indigenous symbols and motifs. Today humorous political cartoons and satirical comic strips are incredibly popular in Mexico and, for many, Posada is often considered to be the founding father of the genre". Indeed, Catrina has become one of the most iconic symbols of "Mexicanidad" (Mexican-ness), and no trip to Mexico is considered complete without the purchase of a decorative Calavera souvenir.

Zinc etching

Marilyn (Vanitas)

Artist: Audrey Flack

Audrey Flack is an American artist who made her name as a Photorealist painter. Before Flack, Photorealist artists addressed what she called the "unemotional and banal" (often featuring cars, motorcycles, aeroplanes, and bland urban scenery). Flack was inspired (amongst other things) by the Dutch and Spanish Vanitas traditions and produced still lifes that addressed the themes of life and death, as well-as ideas about femininity. Archivist Lily Hopkins writes "Flack incorporated both everyday feminine ephemera as well as items of a macabre nature to create vibrant, complex, and emotional still life images that stood in stark contrast to their male-driven counterparts. These works, which garnered a considerable amount of attention and helped to pioneer the Photorealist movement as it is known today, began with detailed photographic still lifes from which the artist drew inspiration". Flack's Vanitas are brought into the 20 th century through the introduction of modern day objects and photographic imagery, producing what she termed "narrative still lives". For Marilyn Flack created what resembles a shop-window shrine to the actress and pop culture icon (Marilyn Monroe) who died in tragic circumstances aged 36 (in 1962). The two Marilyn portraits are black and white and, with the childhood photograph of Flack and her brother that sits between them, contrast sharply with the intense colors that saturate the other objects that complete the shrine. These images are painted with a level of exaggerated realism (or hyperrealism): the various textures of delicate rose petals, shiny fruit and transparent glass meticulously copied here from still-life photographs. Behind the two portraits of Marilyn, we see a page from a biography that tells of her sexual allure and how "through the power of make-up" a woman could "paint oneself into an instrument of one's own will". Given the faded monochrome photographs, the melting candle, the draining hourglass and the over-ripened fruit, Flack's Marilyn possess a symbolic lament to the waning of memory, and given that portraits of Monroe seem to predate her rise to the rank of Hollywood sex symbol, very possibly the loss of innocence.

Oil over acrylic on canvas - University of Arizona Art Museum, Tucson

For the Love of God

Artist: Damien Hirst

This sculpture, by British conceptual artist Damien Hirst, is an 18 th -century human skull (purchased from a London taxidermist), still containing the deceased's teeth, and encrusted with 8601 flawless diamonds attached to 32 platinum plates. Hirst took the title from his mother who, when told of what he was planning to do, exclaimed, "For the love of god, what are you going to do next!". The artist himself said of the work, "Every artwork that's ever interested me is about death. I thought, well what's the maximum you could pit against death, and diamonds came to mind". Thought to be the most expensive work of art by a living artist at the time, the materials themselves cost tens of millions of dollars. The sculpture serves thus, not only as a Memento Mori (since the skull patently reminds the viewer of death), but also as an ironic Vanitas, given what it implies about anyone with enough wealth to purchase such an extravagant ornamental item and who will ultimately meet the same end (death) as the most impoverished pauper. Art dealer Celine Fraser called For the Love of God "the ultimate expression of [...] material overindulgence". Hirst was particularly inspired by the Mexican Día de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and the British Museum's collection of Aztec skulls. Early in his career, Hirst produced a photograph of himself titled With Dead Head (1991), in which he is pictured, aged sixteen, half-grinning, half-grimacing, and posing next to a severed human head he came across at the county morgue in Leeds. He later explained, "I was doing anatomy drawing. I took some photos when I shouldn't have done. [...] But I just suddenly thought [...] to me, the smile and everything seemed to sum up this problem between life and death. It was such a ridiculous way of [...] being at the point of trying to come to terms with it, especially being sixteen and everything: this is life and this is death. And I'm trying to work it out". Since then, Hirst has dealt with death in other controversial ways, perhaps most famously in his sculptural vitrines, like The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Somebody Living (1991). In these works, Hirst, a leading member of the YBA (Young British Artists) movement, took dead animals (some of them bisected) and placed them in glass tanks filled with formaldehyde. For the artist, these types of works encourage the modern viewer, who is usually cushioned from the realities of death through the luxuries of modern living, to reflect perhaps on their own mortality. He stated that the use of precious stones in For the Love of God was not to glamorize diamonds, but rather to make a statement about death: "[diamonds] bring out the best and the worst in people ... people kill for diamonds. They kill each other".

Platinum, diamond, human teeth - White Cube Gallery, London, England

Memento Mori in the Age of Antiquity

The custom of acknowledging the certainty of death dates back to the Ancient Egyptian civilization. In his essay, "That to Study Philosophy is to learn to Die" (1580), for instance, the French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote about the Egyptian ritual at which a death feast was concluded with the raising of a skeleton to the chant of, "Drink and be merry, for such shalt thou be when thou are dead". However, the idea of "Memento Mori" - Latin for "remember you must die" - is generally agreed to have originated with the school of Stoicism, a Hellenistic philosophy that flourished in Ancient Greece and Rome. Stoicism proposed to treat each day as a gift and not to waste time on trifling and vain matters. Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher exiled in Rome, told his students that to fear death was tantamount to cowardice, "discipline yourself against such fear", he warned, "direct all your thinking, exercises, and reading this way - and you will know the only path to human freedom". The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca also advised, "let us compose our thoughts as if we've reached the end. Let us postpone nothing. Let's settle our accounts with life every day".

Epictetus would illustrate his argument with the telling of a fabled story of Roman military heroism. Following a key military victory, a group of jubilant military generals organized a day-long street parade. The military general, idolized by his own men and the cheering public, led the parade in a chariot drawn by four horses. However, also riding in the chariot, was a slave. His sole responsibility was to remind the general of his mortality by continuously whispering in the general's ear: "Respice post te. Hominem te esse memento. Memento mori!" ("Look behind. Remember thou art mortal. Remember you must die!"). Epictetus impressed on his students that they too should remain humble, conscientious, and mindful of the passing of all earthly things. At the same time philosophers like Epictetus and Seneca were musing upon the nature of death, so too were visual artists. The preferred Memento Mori symbols of the ancient artists - such as skulls and skeletons, coffins, and hourglasses - would be passed down through the ages.

Memento Mori and Christianity

While the philosophy of Stoicism saw the inevitability of death as a reminder to seek growth and fulfillment in everyday life, in early Christianity Memento Mori took on a more cautionary tone. The fall of the Roman empire in the fifth century gave rise to a confused and disorderly period from which the Catholic Church emerged as the most powerful institutional body. Emperors and leaders soon learned that the best way to exert and retain power was through forming close allegiances with the Church (hence the widespread building of grand cathedrals and churches). Places of worship housed funerary art that compelled the faithful to reflect on God's gift of life (however fleeting that may be). In the Bible, Psalm 90, Moses prays to God (on behalf of himself and his followers) "to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom"; Isaiah 40:7 states that "The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the LORD blows on it; surely the people are grass"; and Ecclesiasticus 7:40 reads "in all thy works be mindful of thy last end and thou wilt never sin". Believers were, then, left in no doubt that when they die they will face judgement at the gates of Heaven, and if they wished for a divine afterlife, they must take heed of these words and the associated artworks.

Author René Ostberg writes that "Memento mori was also used in Christianity as an artistic expression that was intended to inspire piety. In architecture, ossuaries, or 'bone churches,' lined with human bones functioned both as memento mori and places for storage if a cemetery became too crowded". Some notable ossuaries include the 15 th -century Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic, and the 16 th -century Capela dos Ossos in Portugal, whose entrance features the warning "We bones, lying here bare, await yours". In the late Middle Ages (around the 1300s) cadaver tombs, or transi , began to be created, which featured a sculpted representation of the deceased person's body, usually in the process of decomposing, atop the tomb. Theologian Christina Welch writes that the cadavers tombs "were a form of memento mori sculpture reminding all who looked on them that death was inevitable and thus the afterlife should be at the centre of one's earthly thoughts and deeds".

Danse Macabre

The "Danse Macabre" ("dance of death") is a ghoulish tradition that emerged in Europe during the Late Middle Ages as a response to numerous diseases, disasters, and wars. The great famine (1314-22), the Black Death (that killed over 25 million Europeans between 1346-51), and the Hundreds' Years war (1337-1453) all contributed to a life expectancy at around 35-40 years of age. The Danse Macabre, which was represented in the visual art, drama, poetry, and music, typically denoted death as a circular dance joining the living and the dead. It did not discriminate between rich and poor; male and female, young and old, with death being understood by allcomers as the "great leveller". Danse Macabre carried a satirical element, too, in the way it mocked the perils of human vice. Indeed, the dances were not represented as a joyous occasion at all, but rather as a penance. In the past, dancing had been dismissed by Christians as an amoral pagan ritual, but this prejudice was now starting to dissolve with dancing allowed in churches or cemeteries during Christian festivals and ceremonies.

Historian Marie-Madeleine Renauld writes "According to the journal of a Parisian bourgeois, a Danse Macabre was painted in 1424 in the Holy Innocents' Cemetery in Paris, making it the first known pictorial representation of the subject in Europe. The Holy Innocents' Cemetery was an important place located at the center of medieval Parisian life. Over the years, over 10 million bodies were buried or piled up in mass graves. In medieval tradition, it was not a quiet place but was actually quite lively. People could cut across and meet in cemeteries, buy food or goods from salesmen, or enjoy actors' performances there. Although a sacred place, the cemetery acted as a center for everyday life. Jehan of Orléans, the painter of Charles VI, King of France, and his brother Louis I, Duke of Orléans, supposedly painted the scene on an arcade wall bordering one of the cemetery's mass graves. Jehan portrayed delegates of the royal and religious powers, majestically dancing among skeletons and corpses". The Holy Innocents Cemetery was destroyed in 1669, but other Danse Macabre images from this period include Giacomo Borlone's The Triumph of Death (1485) at the Disciplini Oratory in Clusone, Lombardy, Italy, and Michael Wolgemut's The Dance of Death (1493) in his illustrated encyclopedia The Nuremberg Chronicle . Many later artists also produced Danse Macabre imagery, including Hans Holbein the Younger for his Dance of Death woodcut illustration series (1523-25), and Jakob von Wyl's, Dance of Death (1610-15), at the Ritterscher Palace, Lucerne, Switzerland.

Vanitas in the Netherlands

The Protestant Reformation in the 16 th century effectively divided Christian Europe between Catholicism and Protestantism. The latter fostered a more individualistic approach to devotion (when compared with the grand ceremonial leanings of Catholicism). "Vanitas" emerged as a distinct protestant genre in the Netherlands at the same time the country was breaking away from Catholic Spanish rule. The idea that images could serve as aids to spiritual contemplation was at the root of Vanitas (Latin for emptiness or vanity), a sub-genre of the still life. Vanitas (the title is drawn from a passage in The Bible (Ecclesiastes 1:2; 12:8): "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity") were thus closely associated with the emergence of the Dutch Republic, and initially, with the municipality of Leiden (40 kms north of Amsterdam). As arts writer Fraser Hibbitt notes, "There are several motifs integral to Vanitas. The Dutch Master paintings emphasized different motifs depending on their geographical location as certain regions preferred different motifs [...] the city of Leiden preferred images of books, being a university town". Artists such as Harmen Steenwijck, David Bailly, and Pieter Claesz are today considered the genre's chief practitioners.

Vanitas images are closely related to Memento Mori in that their aim was to remind viewers of their own mortality. But Vanitas went further by condemning the "empty and vain" accumulation of material wealth during one's life on earth. Vanitas images were conceived of as a means of encouraging viewers to turn away from the pursuit of luxurious possessions and focus their energies on accepting a humble, more pious, daily existence. Vanitas were highly detailed still lifes and associated with representing the reality of earthly things (rather than the dramatic Biblical vignettes preferred by Catholic worshippers). Hibbitt goes on, "Vanitas paintings differ from standard still-life paintings by the fact that they are symbolic. It is not to showcase objects, or as an aesthetic display of an artist's skill - though both traits show themselves in a Vanitas painting [...] Vanitas is a variety of the still-life form [...] The most common motifs are representations of wealth: gold, purses, and jewellery; representations of knowledge: books, spyglass, maps, and pens; representations of pleasure: food, wine cups, and fabrics. Lastly, representations of decay; skulls, flowers, candles, and hourglasses [...] It is not that it consists of these objects that makes it important but that the attention and focus of the painting are these objects alone".

Vanitas in Spain

The Spanish Vanitas was heavily influenced by the thematic and stylistic traits of the Dutch example (finely detailed still lifes that carried the message that all earthly riches are meaningless in the face of death). But they were produced at a time when the Spanish Golden Age was nearing its end, and the paintings reflected this decline too. The Spanish Golden Age was a period of prosperity and renewal in art and literature that lasted roughly between the late 15 th and the end of the Franco-Spanish War (1635-59) with the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees (between Spain and France). It also coincided with the demise of the devoutly Catholic Habsburg dynasty that had dominated Europe politically and militarily. The most notable difference between the Dutch and Spanish Vanitas is that, while both focused on still lifes, the latter would accommodate a living presence, such as devout religious figures (including angels, knights, and bishops) or even animate skeletons.

Historian Anisia Iacob writes "A very well-known work of this genre of vanitas still-life is that of Antonio de Pereda, entitled Allegory of Transience , which depicts precisely the fall of the Spanish Habsburgs. In the painting, an angel holds in their hand a cameo portrait of Emperor Charles V, gesturing with the other hand to the globe nearby to express the once-great expansion of the Habsburg Empire, which, almost a century after the emperor's death, is divided and on the brink of ruin. Skulls surround the lavish armor and sophisticated weapons on the table to indicate that military endeavors are pointless. Even if one builds an empire of the great extent and influence as that of the Spanish emperors, it will be ruined one day and disappear eventually, as all earthly things do. As it can be seen, this still life is deeply rooted in the Spanish political situation of the time, expressing both a particular lesson and a more universal one. If an empire can't last, the lives and projects of individuals are even less likely to last".

Memento Mori - Charms and Trinkets

By the turn of the 15 th -16 th century, Memento Mori, rendered through ivory carvings and handheld pieces (what curator Stephen Perkinson calls, "miniature masterpieces"), were the height of fashion. Journalist Allyssia Alleyne (in conversation with Perkinson) writes that at a time of "relative social and political stability, ivory memento mori were part of a larger cultural moment that emphasized humility, reflection and moral obligation. Traveling preachers would deliver sermons on mortality to peasants in Paris cemeteries, the working class would buy prints on the theme [...] and the rich had their ivory carvings". Perkinson adds that they were "a response to the fact that people might (have been getting) distracted from their faith, from their moral duties. They might be distracted into obsessing over luxury goods and treasures instead of remembering the fragility of life".

Although the use of mourning rings dates back to the 14 th century, the wearing of rings and lockets in memory of a passed loved one became popular during the 17 th century. London's vintage jewellery traders, Berganza , writes, "Generally the name and dates of the loved one would be engraved on a ground of black enamel with some embellishments. These rings or brooches would have been expensive and the money was traditionally left in a will for the express purpose of having a piece of jewellery made. There was a massive surge in the amount of mourning rings being made in the 1660's as a direct result of the Black Death. The motifs remain constant throughout the centuries although the styles change. They would include, primarily, a skull and cross-bones, a skeleton, sometimes an hour-glass to remind people of the short span of life or even a spade in some cases, this was usually coupled with the legend 'Memento Mori'". Later still, during the 19 th century Regency and Victorian eras, Britain was witness to some of the highest infant mortality rates in history. This desperate situation gave rise to a macabre new fashion for so-called "post-mortem portraits" (the practice of photographing recently deceased loved ones as a way of memorializing them) and the mass production of Memento Mori rings but cast in cheaper materials such as enamel and hard, black vulcanized rubber. The rings would often feature a photograph of the deceased, and sometimes contain a lock of hair. Like post-mortem portraiture, the rings were soon seen as tasteless and had fallen out of fashion by the end of the century.

Concepts and Styles

Skulls and skeletons.

Memento Mori employed many metaphors to evoke the inevitability of death. The human skull and/or skeleton are physical fragments of a life once lived and rank therefore as the most ubiquitous and long-standing symbols of mortality. Examples are legion throughout the history of art: from the tabletop mosaics discovered at the ancient ruins of Pompeii, throughout the Vanitas traditions of the Netherlands and Spain, to the work of the Romantic painters and poets such as William Blake ( Skeleton of Urizen (1794) for example). However, by the late 19 th century, skulls and skeleton bones have been treated with a more individual, less portentous, tone by some of the greatest modern and postmodern artists. Well known examples include: Vincent van Gogh ( Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette (c. 1885-86)), Paul Cézanne ( Pyramid of Skulls (1901)), Salvador Dalí ( Women Forming a Skull (1951)), Jean-Michel Basquiat ( Untitled (Scull/Skull) (1981)), and Gerhard Richter ( Schädel (Skull) (1988)).

Others, such as, Georgia O'Keeffe , have turned their artistic attentions from human to animal skulls. With works such as, Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue (1931), O'Keeffe drew upon the hundreds of cattle skulls she happened upon in the New Mexico desert to effectively reverse the symbolism associated historically with the human skull. She called her cow skulls "as beautiful as anything I know" and presented them as symbols, not of death, but rather as emblems of longevity and American strength and resilience during the years when the great depression and drought were threatening the very future of the nation. Perhaps the contemporary artist who became most consistently engaged with the image of the human skull (since 2001) was South African artist, Steven Gregory. His decorative art skulls (which often feature precast eyes) such as, Beyond Suspicion (2007), are at once humorous and profound. Gregory said of his skulls that they force the viewer to confront the idea that "art only exists because death exists" while adding that he had "always felt bones were less morbid and more beautiful".

The theme of death is also addressed in more circuitous ways (than skeletons and skulls). Timepieces are a long-standing motif in Memento Mori art with hourglasses, pocket watches and clocks representing the passage of time. During the 16 th century, watches in particular were all but unattainable for the peasant classes. Watches, much like crowns and coins, becoming a symbol of wealth in Vanitas and were thus presented as reminders that there was no value attached to such items in the afterlife. So-called "Form Watches" also rose in popularity during the 16 th century. Form Watches were in fact handheld clocks shaped in the likeness of other things, including skulls and animals. Even Mary, Queen of Scots, gifted a Form Watch in the shape of a skull to her companion from chilhood (and future nun) Mary Seton. The watch also carried engravings of figures representing death and Adam and Eve, and served as reminder/warning to her friend of the inevitable "the fall of man".

The symbol of the watch/clock has passed down through the ages and featured in the work of Francis Bacon , a figurative artist who complained that people seemed to drop dead "around me like flies", and for whom mortality and death became a recurring theme. His, Study for Self-Portrait (1971), was painted shortly after the suicide of his lover and partner, George Dyer. Bacon painted himself with a typically tortured expression, his twisted head resting on his hand, giving pictorial and symbolic prominence to his wristwatch. Commenting on Félix González-Torres's , Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , meanwhile, historian Rhonda Riche writes, "This powerful piece, produced between 1987-1990 and 1991, consists of a pair of Seth Thomas clocks set to the same time and eventually fall out of sync. [...] González-Torres was a Cuban-born American process artist [Process art is when the creative process itself is the most significant element of the finished piece] who died at a tragically young age due to complications from AIDS. [...] While Untitled (Perfect Lovers) deals with the subject of death, it could also be read as a tribute to love. After his partner, Ross Laycock, died in 1991, González-Torres revisited this work to help cope with the loss. More than a meditation on mortality, the clocks became a reflection on their relationship and the time they spent together. Recently critics have suggested that the work representing the continuation of life with the possibility of regeneration - life goes on as gallerists must conserve the piece (and replace the batteries)".

Butterflies

The butterfly, an insect whose lifespan typically last just a few weeks between spring and early summer, has come to symbolize the fragility of life and the eternal nature of a soul which lives on after death. They appear in the earliest Memento Mori mosaics and are a feature in Dutch Vanitas. Maria van Oosterwyck, for instance, was well known for her fondness for butterflies, and in particular, her love of Red Admirals (Vanessa atalanta), which are seen in her meticulously detailed still lifes. Perhaps her best known work, Vanitas - Still Life (1668), features several symbolic objects common to Dutch Vanitas, not least a skull, an hourglass, and wilting flora. But through the placing of the astrological globe and the butterfly, van Oosterwyck draws her viewers' attention to the theme of the transcendence from earth to heaven. Indeed, her Red Admiral is symbolic of that journey, with the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a cocoon, before emerging as a butterfly, embodying the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus himself.

The symbolic potency of the butterfly is not restricted to Western art. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama depicted butterflies in an array of colour and in simple monochromatic black and white. Her art, that embodies her strong spiritual beliefs while simultaneously honouring ancient Japanese tradition and culture, treats the butterfly as the carrier of mortal souls (as they depart the living realm). Each of Kusama's butterflies has of its own shape, colours, and patterns thereby representing the individuality of every human being. The art critic Matthew Wilson argues, meanwhile, that "Maybe the most famous contemporary practitioner to use butterflies in their art is Damien Hirst . Also aware of the traditional symbolism of butterflies, Hirst has been using them since the beginning of his career in the early 90s but his culminating works deployed butterflies on an epic scale. I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds (2006) is a kaleidoscopic composition which used 2,700 real sets of butterfly wings. They strobe across a 5m-long canvas creating a cinematic and sublime spectacle. Death is disconcertingly electrified into a thing of great beauty".

Later Developments

Hibbitt notes that "Vanitas painting lost its commercial popularity by the end of the Dutch Golden Age [c.1672]. The meaning behind Vanitas lost its potency with the spirit of the combative reformation losing its momentum. Vanitas subsisted during the seventeenth century to guide the mind to the contemplation of death and the vanities of living. Yet it was borne from a contradiction that the act of painting itself, creating a beautiful artifact, was vanity itself. Vanitas paintings became objects of earthly value, something it was trying to denounce". In the modern era, artists were apt to approach the theme of Memento Mori from a more personal and/or more analytical, angle. For example, Vincent van Gogh's , Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette (1885), represented a break with his vividly colored Post-Impressionist paintings in favor of a satirical irony, grey and beige "smoking skeleton" that amounted to a critique of Belgium's Royal Academy of Fine Art where he became "bored to death" in classes devoted to documenting the human anatomy.

In his crayon and ink still life lithograph, Black Jug and Skull (1946), meanwhile, Pablo Picasso depicted a jug, a skull, and an open book on a table. As the Tate Museum describes, "the book traditionally alludes to excessive pride through learning and the wine jug to the transitoriness of worldly pleasures. The skull is a memento mori, a reminder of the inevitable approach of death. Picasso was superstitious about death, kept a skull in his studio and had included human or animal skulls in his work as early as 1908 [ Composition with Skull ]". Given its date, Picasso's Cubist Vanitas would also appear to reflect the enormity of the death and suffering during the Second World War. Moving into the second half of the 20 th century, Pop artist Andy Warhol's images of skulls (such as Skulls (1976)) sought to address (without moral judgement) the caprices of consumer and celebrity culture. Arts writer Sukayna Powell, comments, "For a man obsessed with replication, identity and eternal life through material beauty, the memento mori [was] both a challenge and a motivating force" for the artist.

Mexican Art

The concept of Memento Mori finds unique expression in Mexican art, literature, and cultural practices, particularly in relation to the national, Día de los Muertos (or Day of the Dead ). On this day, (actually two days, November 1-2, when the souls of children are believed to return on the 1st, and adults on the 2nd), Mexicans visit the graves of deceased relatives, and/or gather in their homes or public spaces where they erect temporary altars ( ofrendas ) to their ancestors. The altars feature photographs of the deceased, as well as skull sculptures ( calaveras ) and orange marigold flowers ( cempazúchitl ). Relatives place the favorite foods and drinks of the deceased on their graves/altars in the belief that the souls of the dead come back to commune with the living. Author Don Winslow remarks, "The Mexicans, they don't mind talking about death. [...] They don't try to keep it at arm's length. They're tight with death, intimate with it. They keep their dead close to them".

The custom of Día de los Muertos carried over into Mexican art, most notably in the Calavera Catrina figure who was first drawn around 1910-12 by Mexican illustrator and lithographer José Guadalupe Posada. Curator Susanna Brooks writes, "A wide-eyed lady skeleton donning a large, lace brimmed hat festooned with flowers and feathers flashes a broad toothy grin. The smiling dandified dame is [...] a corpse with a lively aristocratic air and fashionable dress to match. Oblivious to the current state of her demise, she clutches nonchalantly to her long lost human existence". Catrina crossed over into iconic Mexican works, such as muralist Diego Rivera's , Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon along Central Alameda) (1947), while skeletal imagery featured in works by Frida Kahlo , including Girl With a Death Mask (1938), and The Dream, The Bed (1940). As well as being a motif in Mexican art, it features widely in the works of American Chicano artists, such as Carlos Almaraz, Chaz Bojórquez, Yreina Cervántez, and Magú, who took inspiration from the Mexican Muralists , pre-Columbian art, and everyday Memento Mori symbols such as calendars.

Photography

Two hugely influential texts on the relationship between photography and death emerged in the 1970s. In 1973 the American essayist and critic, Susan Sontag, published, On Photography . In it she wrote, "All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt". It was a sentiment her partner of 15 years, American photographer Annie Leibovitz , took to heat when she controversially published a photograph of Sontag's corpse soon after her passing (in 2004). In 1980, France's most famous philosopher and literary critic, Roland Barthes, took up the same theme in his book, Camera Lucida (1980). Barthes also read the photograph as a relic of the dead, in his case an early photograph of his beloved mother. Through her picture Barthes introduced the idea of the "punctum", an element that was wholly unique to photography: "The punctum of a photograph is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)", he wrote. Andy Grundberg of The New York Times wrote '''Camera Lucida' is, in a sad and almost tragic way, a record of [Barthes's] attempts to come to terms with grief. His fascination with the portrait of his mother [as a child], leading to the discovery that the ultimate punctum is death, is the fascination of a man who is seeking, like Proust, to recover a life that has vanished".

In photographic practice, meanwhile, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum held an exhibition titled The Illumination of Life by Death: Memento Mori & Photography in 2022. The exhibition aimed to explore "how people have lived robustly while facing death through approximately 150 photographic works, stimulating the imagination to live positively through difficult times". The exhibition featured works of photographers as wide ranging as Robert Capa , Walker Evans , Lee Friedlander , Robert Frank , William Eggleston , Diane Arbus , Araki , and Eugène Atget . Contemporary photographers, such as the Britain's Nick Knight, have continued to mine the Memento Mori tradition through images of dripping roses (such as Rose IV (2012)). As he explained, "roses are this sort of most poetic moment of life and death. The rose blooms and blossoms and it's most incredible, but you know it's incredible because it's going to die, and that makes the rose more poignant than any other flower in a way, because you have this incredible beauty, [but] it's announcing its own death". Another British photographer, Peter Mitchell, expanded upon the Memento Mori theme through manmade structures. In his 2016 series, Memento Mori , he photographed derelict, or "condemned" (soon-to-be-demolished) buildings in the Quarry Hill area of his hometown of Leeds in Northern England. He intended for the series to serve as a reminder "to the power of photography, to those who engineered and built the Flats, to the people who lived and died in the Flats and to the city of Leeds itself".

Contemporary Art and Design

The theme of the Memento Mori has shown remarkable longevity. One of the most direct heirs to the vanitas genre is the American photorealist artist, Audrey Flack , who produced her titled Vanitas series during the mid-to-late 1970s. As Curatorial Consultant, Robert R. Shane, explained, "Flack's recurring themes - life and death, luxury and consumption [are symbolized] using traditional iconography from 17 th -century Dutch vanitas still life as a starting point. [Her vanitas often feature] fruit and flowers, which, while luxurious, show signs of decay and the vanity of life. In addition to incorporating personal objects and cosmetics, Flack gave this genre a 20 th -century update by mirroring the spectacle of contemporary consumer culture through glittering light that sparkles among mirrored and glass objects". Flack's contemporary, the Conceptual artist Jenny Holzer , argued that it was "unsurprising that art which can be seen as the descendant of the memento mori genre, remains one of the ways to explore and express feelings of doubt and alienation surrounding human mortality". In her own series, Living (1980-82), for instance, Holzer posted bronze plaques in public spaces featuring text such as: " You realise you're shedding parts of the body and leaving mementos everywhere ".

Bringing the theme of Memento Mori into the 21st century was Steve Jobs, designer, inventor, and pioneer of the personal computer revolution, and co-founder (with Steve Wozniak) of the global Apple empire. Jobs recognized that by accepting his own mortality he was liberated to take creative risks and to think innovatively. Indeed, one of Jobs's most famous quotes demonstrates that the topic of Memento Mori is as pertinent today as it was during the days of the ancient Stoics. It went as follows: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart". Jobs died in 2011, aged 56 (from complications brought on by pancreatic cancer), having first transformed the way the world experiences music, movies, and digital communications.

Useful Resources on Memento Mori and Vanitas

• Hans Holbein der Jungere (Masters of German art) By Stephanie Buck
• Memento Mori in Contemporary Art Our Pick By Taylor Worley
• Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience By Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter
• Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c.1500 - c.1800 Our Pick By Nigel Llewellyn
• Women and the Material Culture of Death By Beth Fowkes Tobin
• Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art By John B. Ravenal
• Photographing Death: Representations of Death in Memorial and Art Photography in Victorian Britain By Jannie Uhre Kongsgaard
• The Vision of Death: Wax Sculpture in the Seventeenth Century By Davide Stefanacci
• The Dance of Death Our Pick By Hans Holbein and Ulinka Rublack
• John Lydgate, the Dance of Death, and Its Model, the French Danse Macabre By Clifford Davidson and Sophie Oosterwijk
• The Dance of Death: A Graphic Commentary on the Danse Macabre Through the Centuries By Fritz Eichenberg
• Art and Death By Chris Townsend
• Butterflies: The ultimate icon of our fragility By Matthew Wilson / BBC Culture / September 16, 2021
• Watching The Watches: Taking A Look at Timepieces In Contemporary Art By Rhonda Riche / Watchonista
• Art Only Exists Because Death Exists. Skulls in Art By Candy Bedworth / Daily Art / November 2, 2022
• José Guadalupe Posada Aguilar: Skulls, Skeletons and Macabre Mischief By Philip Kennedy / Illustration Chronicles
• Victorian Death Photos - And the Disturbing History Behind Them By Genevieve Carlton / ATI / July 20, 2021
• La Calavera Catrina: Mexico's Eternal Feminine Muse By Susanna Brooks / Whatcom Museum
• Fruit Soup By Lilly Hopkins / University Art Museum, University at Albany / January 25 - April 2, 2022
• Vanitas By Adam Augustyn / Britannica.com
• Death in the Photograph By Andy Grundberg / The New York Times / August 23, 1981
• Pablo Picasso, Black Jug and Skull 1946 Tate Museum
• Danse Macabre: The Allegorical Representation of Death By Marie-Madeleine Renauld / TheCollector.com / November 20, 2021
• Antique Engagement Rings & Vintage Jewellery Berganza Vintage Jewellers, Hatton Garden, London
• How a macabre reminder of death became a Renaissance status symbol By Allyssia Alleyne / CNN / October 31, 2017
• Hans Holbein's Dance of Death (1523-5) By Ted Pennant-Rea / The Public Domain Review / April 17, 2018
• Macabre Themes in German Renaissance Printwork Talking Objects / April 24, 2007
• History of Memento Mori The Daily Stoic
• The Art of Dying - Memento Mori Paintings Through Art History By Balasz Takac / Widewalls / January 10, 2022
• Memento Mori: Life and Death in Western Art from Skulls to Still Life By Jessica Stewart / My Modern Met / June 23, 2019
• Vanitas Painting or Memento Mori: What are the Differences? Our Pick By Anisia Iacob / The Collector / November 17, 2022
• 7 Ways of Looking at the Memento Mori, Art History's Spookiest - and Most Misunderstood - Genre Our Pick By Menachem Wecker / Artnet News / September 14, 2017
• Vanitas: Dutch Master Paintings Explained Our Pick By Fraser Hibbitt / The Collector / July 14, 2020
• The Fascinating Traits of Spanish Vanitas Paintings Our Pick By Anisia Iacob / The Collector / January 3, 2023
• Vanitas: Paintings by the Dutch Old Masters Inspired by Life and Death By Madeleine Muzdakis / My Modern Met / February 12, 2022
• A Method and an Object: An Art Historical Approach Applied to the 'Memento-Mori' Mosaic from Pompeii, Italy By Vivian van Heekeren / International Journal of Student Research in Archaeology / March 2016
• Danse Macabre: The Allegorical Representation of Death By Marie-Madeleine Renauld / The Collector / November 20, 2021
• The Skull, the Butterfly and God: Damien Hirst on Death & Religion By Lucie Howie / MyArtBroker
• Arnold Böcklin, Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle Smart History
• Art 101: What is a Memento Mori? P.S. You are going to die CBC Arts
• Decorating with Death: The Morbid World of VANITAS Paintings Our Pick Empire of the Mind
• How Vanitas Is Secretly Uplifting Our Pick Zox
• Memento Mori and The Macabre Allure of Michaelina Wautier Sotheby's
• Hidden Symbols of Still Live Paintings: Vanitas! Our Pick Informe
• Memento Mori: The Personification of Death - Dean Cantù Our Pick TEDx Talks
• Memento Mori: The Importance of Remembering Mortality Reading the Past
• Memento Mori Imagery and the Limits of the Self in Late Medieval Europe Our Pick The Courtauld
• Death in Arnold Bocklin's Art The Canvas
• In Conversation: Memento Mori - Art & Fashion Forum by Grażyna Kulczyk Our Pick SHOWstudio

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Content compiled and written by Alexandra Duncan

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Antony Todd

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• The Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols by David Bailly

The Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols by David Bailly - Essay Example

• Subject: Visual Arts & Film Studies
• Type: Essay
• Level: Ph.D.
• Pages: 3 (750 words)
• Downloads: 36
• Author: garryfeil

Extract of sample "The Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols by David Bailly"

As much space is given to the objects as the subject of the painting, which is, ostensibly, the young man sitting beside the table. The interesting thing to note is that the young man (the painter himself) is not the only person in this ‘self-portrait’; he is holding a miniature painting in his hand with the depiction of a much older person in it. So, can this really be called a self-portrait?             It would be implausible to consider that the objects in the painting exist in isolation.

These symbols of ‘vanitas’ have been selected to illustrate a uniform theme of the “swift passage of time and the terrible instability of life” (Duffy, 2012) in the painting. A style of painting popular in the 16th and 17th century, vanitas paintings were also known by another name of ‘memento mori' (remember death). All the symbols in the painting are objects in a transient state of life, all of them together acting as a metaphor for life itself which is always in a state of motion bound towards a certain end.

Lighted up candles eventually lose their flame; flowers wilt, soap bubbles can be broken even by a speck of dust. The skull, the pearls, and coins represent the changing nature of life and wealth and prestige respectively. These can be lost due to a number of circumstances and within the blink of an eye. Nothing is permanent, especially the movement of time which is aptly embodied here by the hourglass.             This idea about the temporary state of bringing us back to the subject of the painting.

The young man is the artist himself but a cursory check lets the viewer know that that this, not the artist as he was at the time the painting was made. Bailly painted the portrait when he was 67 years old, indicating that while the young man is how the artist used to be some years prior, the ‘real’ portrait is the miniature the man is holding (Kosara, 2007). That painting within the painting shows Bailly in the state he was at the time. The contrast between young and old is striking and this contrast not only magnifies the theme intended for the painting but adds another layer of meaning and possible interpretation to the whole setting.

            The young man looks contemplative; possibly, the painting in his hand was made to portray his own vision about his future self. His older self is decaying, without the energy and drive of youth and this natural, inevitable process of change is not something that any man looks forward to with pleasure. Surrounded by symbols of vanitas, his imagination would be further encouraged to think in terms of the transiency of life and all things associated with it.

It is a sobering thought. And yet it can be hard for the human psyche to adequately grasp the implications of this as relating to self. The young man is in contemplation but not in throes of despair.               Thinking of the perspective of the painter at the age of 67, however, we can decipher the painting in a different light. Though everything in the painting shows the passing of time and the changes that are brought with it, the subtle indication is that there is one thing that is unaffected by this natural process- the soul of the artist.

The artist’s body might be aged now and his physical appearance has changed but his perception of himself is still that of a young man. Time has not affected the vitality of his thoughts or the strength of his passions- in nature, he is the same the young man at his peak and will remain so till the very end of his life. After all, even as the body decays the mind remains unmarked for a much longer time. Our own perception of self can be much more important than what the world sees and this importance is shown through the prominent presence of the younger self over the older (real) self.

This is the artist’s true self-portrait if time had not impacted his life so.

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Vanitas Painting

Why Artists Paint Skulls in a Still Life

• Art History
• Architecture

A vanitas painting is a particular style of still life that was immensely popular in the Netherlands beginning in the 17th century. The style often includes with worldly objects such as books and wine and you will find quite a few skulls on the still life table. Its intent is to remind viewers of their own mortality and the futility of worldly pursuits.

Vanitas Reminds Us of Vanities

The word  vanitas  is Latin for "vanity" and that is the idea behind a vanitas painting. They were created to remind us that our vanity or material possessions and pursuits do not preclude us from death, which is inevitable.

The phrase comes to us courtesy of a biblical passage in Ecclesiastes. In the King James Version ("Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity,") the Hebrew word "hevel" was incorrectly translated to mean "vanity of vanities," when it means "pointless, meaningless, futile." But for this slight mistranslation, vanitas would rightfully be known as a "meaningless painting," which is far from the intent of the makers.

The Symbolism of Vanitas Paintings

A vanitas painting, while possibly containing lovely objects, always included some reference to man's mortality. Most often, this is a human skull (with or without other bones), but items like burning candles, soap bubbles and decaying flowers may be used for this purpose as well.

Other objects are placed in the still life to symbolize the various types of worldly pursuits that tempt humans. For example, secular knowledge like that found in the arts and sciences may be depicted by books, maps, or instruments. Wealth and power have symbols like gold, jewelry, and precious trinkets while fabrics, goblets, and pipes might represent earthly pleasures.

Beyond the skull to depict impermanence, a vanitas painting may also include references to time, such as a watch or hourglass. It may use decaying flowers or rotting food for the purpose as well. In some paintings, the idea of the resurrection is included as well, represented as sprigs of ivy and laurel or ears of corn.

To add to the symbolism, you will find vanitas paintings with the subjects placed in disarray compared to other, very tidy, still life art. This is designed to represent the chaos that materialism can add to a pious life.

Vanitas is very similar to another type of still life painting, known as memento mori . Latin for "remember you must die," this style tended to include only those objects that remind us of death and refrained from using the materialistic symbols.

A Religious Reminder

Vanitas paintings were meant not only as works of art, they also carried an important moral message. They were designed to remind us that the trivial pleasures of life are abruptly and permanently wiped out by death. 

It is doubtful that this genre would have been popular had the Counter-Reformation and Calvinism not propelled it into the limelight. Both movements—one Catholic, the other Protestant—occurred at the same time as vanitas paintings were becoming popular, and scholars today interpret them as warning against the vanities of life and the representation of the Calvinist morality of the day.

Like the symbolic art, the two religious efforts emphasized the devaluing of possessions and success in this world. They instead, focused believers on their relationship with God in preparation for the afterlife.

The Vanitas Painters

The primary period of vanitas paintings lasted from 1550 to around 1650. They began as still lifes painted on the backside of portraits as an explicit warning to the subject, and evolved into featured works of art. The movement was centered around the Dutch city of Leiden, a Protestant stronghold, though it was popular throughout the Netherlands and in parts of France and Spain.

In the beginning of the movement, the work was very dark and gloomy. Toward the end of the period, however, it did lighten up a bit. The message in vanitas paintings became that although the world is indifferent to human life, the beauty of the world can be enjoyed and contemplated.

Considered a signature genre in Dutch Baroque art, a number of artists were famous for their vanitas work. These include Dutch painters like David Bailly (1584–1657), Harmen van Steenwyck (1612–1656), and Willem Claesz Heda (1594–1681). Some French painters worked in vanitas as well, the best-known of which was Jean Chardin (1699–1779).

Many of these vanitas paintings are considered great works of art today. You can also find a number of modern artists working in this style. Yet, many people wonder at the popularity of vanitas paintings by collectors. After all, doesn't the painting itself become a symbol of vanitas?

Memento Mori Art – Symbolic Meditations on Death

Memento mori is a philosophical reminder of the inevitable nature of death. In Latin, it translates to “remember that you will die”. The term arose from the minds of the great thinkers of classical antiquity, and memento mori symbols have been found in architecture and funeral art as far back as the medieval period. Memento mori art ranges from skull paintings to rotten fruit paintings, as well as other macabre symbols of death in art.

Table of Contents

• 1.1 Memento Mori Art in Medieval and Victorian Europe
• 1.2 Memento Mori Art in the Americas
• 2.1 The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut
• 2.2 Vanitas Still Life (1625) by Pieter Claesz
• 2.3 Young Man with a Skull (1626) by Frans Hals
• 2.4 Still Life, An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life (1640) by Harmen Steenwijck
• 2.5 Self-Portrait With Vanitas Symbols (1651) by David Bailly
• 2.6 Vanitas Still Life (1668) by Maria van Oosterwijck
• 2.7 Still-Life with a Skull (1671) by Philippe de Champaigne
• 2.8 Sceleti et Musculorum Corporis Humani (1749) by Bernhard Siegfried Albinus
• 2.9 Skull with Burning Cigarette (1885) by Vincent van Gogh
• 2.10 Pyramid of Skulls (c. 1901) by Paul Cézanne
• 3.1 Was Memento Mori an Art Movement?
• 3.2 What Does Vanitas Mean?

Memento Mori Philosophy and History

The philosophers of classic antiquity had a deep desire to understand the intricacies of human life, as well as the inevitable end chapter that we all must eventually experience: death. In his book Phaedo , Plato said that philosophy is about “nothing but being dead and dying”. Democritus, another philosopher, went into solitude by visiting tombs as training. The Stoic school and its followers also practiced this discipline, for whom it was a necessary meditation to contemplate death. They were reminded to always keep the temporary nature of existence in their minds so they may appreciate life more.

Memento Mori Art in Medieval and Victorian Europe

The reaction of those in classic antiquity to the concept of memento mori was to live life to the fullest, as death was around the corner. The era of Christianity however, ushered in the repurposing of what memento mori represented. For Christians, death was something that was seen as a salvation from the burdens of earthly pleasures and a step towards the heavenly afterlife.

For the people of classic antiquity, death was a reason to celebrate life, whereas for Christians, it was a reminder not to sin in fear of being rejected at the Pearly Gates.

The most evident places to look for memento mori symbols are in architecture and funeral art. Cadaver tombs were a 15th-century practice among the wealthy, where the tomb of the deceased would have the effigy of a decaying corpse displayed on it. Later Protestant tombstones in the United States would often depict skeletons and skulls. The Capuchin Crypt in Rome or the Chapel of Bones in Portugal are two examples of “memento mori architecture” that can be found in Europe, the walls of which are covered with human bones and skulls.

Clocks and other timepieces are also common objects from this period that would contain memento mori symbols, as they represent the passing of time in its never-ending and persistent countdown to death. In some of the public clocks in Augsburg in Germany, it is death who rings the hour hand. In the early 17th century, memento mori artists would create jewelry such as pendants, mourning rings, and lockets that portrayed motifs of coffins, skulls, and bones. In Holland, an artistic movement known as Vanitas was popular for its famous paintings of death, which were painted with various symbolic objects combined into a skull still life.

As early examples of memento mori paintings, these works were created with combinations of skulls, dying flowers, butterflies, and hourglasses, together representing the impermanence of human life and the marching on of time.

Memento Mori Art in the Americas

The Puritan Protestant community in the 17th century had a large influence on Colonial American art, leading to a rise in the use of memento mori paintings. Puritans believed that art drew man away from God and toward the Devil. Portraits, however, were considered historical documents that recorded their lineage and were therefore allowed.

Not many famous paintings of death exist from this period, but portraits that were done by Puritan artists such as Thomas Smith often contained memento mori symbols, portraying his inevitable death as a soldier by painting a skull under his hand in his self-portrait.

Skull painting is also a common theme in the Mexican festival, the Day of the Dead, where Mexicans create skull-shaped candles and bread made to look like bones in order to celebrate the life of those that have passed. José Guadalupe Posada was a Mexican engraver that was famous for his depictions of famous people as skeletons. Another form of memento mori can be found in the Calavera, which is a kind of poem recited to the living as if they had already died.

Memento Mori Art and Artists

Memento mori is more of a philosophy than a movement bound to a certain period, meaning that examples of memento mori symbolism can be found in the works of artists of many genres, as death is a common experience shared by all people throughout time. Let us look at some of these famous paintings of death.

The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut

Michael Wolgemut was a printmaker and painter born in 1434 in Nuremberg, Germany. He is not only remembered for his artwork but also for the huge contribution that his workshops had in producing and developing artistic talent such as Albrecht Dürer .

Wolgemut was a prominent figure among artists that were then reviving the old tradition of German woodcuts. Wolgemut would design the woodcuts which would then be used to print illustrations for book publishers in Nuremberg, and the best of these were sold as artworks separately. In a personal capacity, he was known for his various commissioned artwork done for places such as the Church of St. Mary in Zwickau, the Church of the Augustinian Friars at Nuremberg, and the town hall of Goslar.

The Dance of Death is a sub-genre of memento mori art. It became popular during the Renaissance but had its origins in the late medieval period.

During those early years of the style’s development, death was a common theme in people’s lives as epidemics raged frequently through populations. Wolgemut’s version of this theme, also titled The Dance of Death, is an illustration taken from the 1493 edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle, which documented the contemporary times and lives of those living in Nuremberg. The picture depicts the dead rising from their graves and engaged in a wild dance. Three skeletons dance hand in hand on the right, while another plays the flute on the left. Another skeleton seems to be moved by the music as it rises out of the grave.

With fatal diseases being a constant threat to the population, the image of death was always in the back of people’s minds, and memento mori artists were able to reflect that grim fascination with death back to the public.

Vanitas Still Life (1625) by Pieter Claesz

Pieter Claesz was a Dutch Golden Age painter born in Berchem, Belgium in 1597. In 1621, at the age of 24, he became a professional artist and settled in Harlem. His specialization was painting Vanitas and breakfast still lifes. He was chiefly known for his monochrome still-life paintings from 1630 onwards, but before this period, his paintings still contained colorful themes, such as can be seen in his still-life from 1625, entitled Vanitas Still Life .

In this painting, there remain colorful elements from his older style, such as the blue of the silk ribbon or the anemone with its vivid red and white coloring. The anemone had been used because it exists for such a short time, one of several constant reminders in famous paintings of death of the temporary existence of life. Other symbolic reminders of death can be seen in the placement of a skull, a watch, and a melting candle throughout the composition.

Young Man with a Skull (1626) by Frans Hals

Frans Hels the Elder was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1582. Living mostly in Harlem, he painted mostly portraits and was a Dutch Golden Age painter , renowned for his role in the development of portraiture in the 17th century. His portraits included paintings of high society citizens such as Isaac Massa and Pieter van den Broeke. He also created group paintings of health workers in the hospitals and for the local civic guard. Through his paintings, historians can catch a glimpse at the various levels of society that existed in Hals’ time, as he painted everyone from tavern heroes to mayors, fishwives to clerks.

His style became admired and replicated due to its radically free approach to realism. He was able to capture the essence of the character and moment in the expressions and poses of his subjects.

Hals painted Young man with a Skull in 1626, which was for a time thought to portray the skull of Yorick from Shakespeare’s Hamlet . It is now, however, thought to be a memento mori painting or Vanitas, a reminder of the fleeting and temporary nature of existence. The famous painting of death portrays a youngish man, robed in a cloak and wearing a red feathered bonnet on his head. In his left hand, he holds a skull, and with his right hand, he gestures towards the observer.

The idea that the painting portrayed Hamlet was put into question by the fact that many portraits from that period contained skulls and none were a reference to Shakespeare’s work. It was also highly improbable as Shakespeare’s work was not known in the Northern Netherlands in the 1620s.

Still Life, An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life (1640) by Harmen Steenwijck

Harmen Steenwijck was a Dutch Golden Age painter born in Delft in the Netherlands in 1612. His father sent him and his brother to study under their uncle, David Bailly. It was Bailly who inspired Harmen to start painting art in the Vanitas style. He then became a consistently active artist from 1628 to 1633 in Leiden, after which he returned to Delft in 1633. He is most well-remembered for his painting An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life , which he painted in 1640. It was essentially a religious sermon in the guise of a still life painting and is a prime example of the Dutch Vanitas painting style.

As with all Vanitas art, the skull still life composition was rich with memento mori symbols, depicting the earthly pitfalls that stand between man and salvation from damnation and the eternity of death.

Therefore, the skull has been positioned as the focal point of the composition, the universal symbol of death. The oil lamp and pocket watch mark the passing of time, marching towards an inevitable outcome, as no lamp can burn forever. The specific shell used in this memento mori painting is a representation of wealth, as it came from a far-off land and was highly polished. Books and musical instruments can also be seen in the composition, representing knowledge as well as luxurious indulgences. Being the most expensive color dye, the purple silk cloth is a symbol of material wealth and luxury.

Self-Portrait With Vanitas Symbols (1651) by David Bailly

David Bailly was a Dutch Golden Age painter born in Leiden in the Dutch Republic in 1584. Bailly was a student of Jacques de Gheyn, a copper engraver, and his father Peter Bailly, a calligrapher. Afterward, he apprenticed with the Dutch portrait painter Cornelius van der Voort. In 1608, while working as a journeyman, he went on his Grand Tour, which was a tradition where upper-class men would travel around Europe. He traveled to Nuremberg, Augsburg, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, and then on to Venice and Rome, working for several princes during his return voyage. In 1613, upon his return to the Netherlands, he began painting portraits and still-life paintings.

He became known for his Vanitas-style paintings, which included memento mori symbols of impermanence such as half-burnt candles, wilting flowers, and skulls.

In Self-Portrait With Vanitas Symbols , the memento mori artist has blurred the lines between the two styles of portraiture and still-life painting. There are several portraits within the portrait, as well as coins, a skull, a timepiece, a rose, an extinguished candle, a sculpture, a pearl necklace, and other symbols of transience, such as the bubbles floating across the canvas.

Another feature that adds a new dimension to the artwork is the fact that the artist had painted himself several decades younger than he was at the time of creating the painting. However, his 67-year-old version can still be seen looking out at the viewer from one of the smaller portraits within the painting.

By changing the references of time, the painting suggests that the young artist awaits his future age in anticipation, a mixture of time frames that are meant to nudge the viewer into contemplating the nature of time and permanence.

Vanitas Still Life (1668) by Maria van Oosterwijck

Maria van Oosterwijck was born on the 20th of August, 1630 in Nootdorp, the Netherlands. At a young age, van Oosterwijck’s father took her to see a still-life painter, the masterful Jan Davidsz de Heem. His work greatly influenced her and she became his student, soon developing her talent as a painter of realistic floral artworks.

For a while, she worked with de Heem, and after he moved to Antwerp she began to focus on her independent paintings. Her work soon became renowned in Holland as well as in Germany, where patrons included Roman Emperor Leopold I, Louis XIV from France, William III from England, and the King of Poland. Despite all her success as a Memento Mori artist, she was never granted access to the painter’s guild, as women were not allowed to attain membership.

Maria van Oosterwijck’s artworks (such as her Vanitas skull still lifes) were deeply symbolic and allegorical, a style that was highly sought after in Europe during this era.

Her use of extremely dark backgrounds and vivid foreground colors led to her being regarded as one of the most eminent painters of the Netherlands and surrounding areas. Her use of light and shadow were used to great effect, employing the technique of chiaroscuro – the dramatic interplay between light and dark. By incorporating allegorical elements, her work reflects themes such as impermanence, the vanity of man, and the moral obligation to meditate on one’s devotion to the Divine. Her paintings make use of objects that impart a sense of the transient nature of time, such as wilting flowers, skulls, and hourglasses.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, her work offered some respite from the gloominess of death by incorporating objects that represented resurrection and rebirth.

Still-Life with a Skull (1671) by Philippe de Champaigne

Philippe de Champaigne was born in Brussels in 1602. He moved to Paris in 1621 and became a prominent figure of the Baroque era in France. He created a huge number of paintings, including portraits and religious works. Philippe de Champaigne was initially influenced by Rubens at the start of his art career, but later, his style became more grim and austere. His work is highly regarded thanks to its stern compositional strength and the vividness of his color palette. He painted portraits of royalty, governmental officials, and high nobility.

When portraying their faces, he sought to capture the characteristic essence of the person instead of transitional expressions.

The skull painting Still-Life with a Skull by de Champaigne is termed a Vanitas – a picture that encouraged one to reflect on the temporary nature of life and the seemingly worthless pursuits therein. It portrays three traditional memento mori symbols of doom and impermanence.

A skull to symbolize the inevitability of death, a tulip to symbolize the briefness of glory, and an hourglass to symbolize the never-ending march of time that waits for no man.

The various objects are positioned evenly spaced on a large stone block. Central to the composition and staring directly at the viewer is a skull, reflecting one’s mortality at the observer. A tulip rests in a small bowl of water to the left. The flower was once a bud, which then bloomed forth for a brief second of magnificence before beginning to wilt away into nothing. The hourglass reminds one that time is limited for each of us, and the sand can be seen counting the passing of time with the drop of each grain.

Sceleti et Musculorum Corporis Human i (1749) by Bernhard Siegfried Albinus

Bernhard Siegfried Albinus was a German-born Dutch professor and anatomist. He was born on the 24th of February, 1697 in Frankfurt, Germany. After his father moved the family to the Netherlands to take up residence at Leiden University as the chair of medicine, Bernhard began his studies with Boerhaave, considered the father of physiology, at the age of 12. After years of studying anatomy in Paris under various tutors, he returned to Leiden to take up a position at the university as a lecturer of surgery and anatomy.

He is most well-remembered for his work with Jan Wandelaar, a tablature known as Sceleti et Musculorum Corporis Humani . Wandelaar was an engraver, and together with Albinus, they created pictures that were renowned for their artistic beauty as well as scientific accuracy. To ensure correct proportionality and accurate anatomic representation, they would overlay a mesh grid while sketching the drawings . Wandelaar would then add detailed backgrounds to create a sense of realism.

Bernhard Siegfried published the beautifully illustrated volume mostly at his own expense, and although many people criticized Wanderlaar’s whimsical treatment of the volume’s scientific subject matter, he was strongly defended by its co-creator.

Skull with Burning Cigarette (1885) by Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on the 30th March 1853 in Zundert in the Netherlands.  He was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who only after his death was recognized as one of the most influential artists in the history of western art. He created more than 2,100 artworks in the last decade of his life, including 860 oil paintings, many of which were said to have been painted in the last two years of his life.

These include still-lifes, self-portraits, and landscape paintings characterized by their dramatic and bold colors and expressive brushstrokes, all of which influenced the art movement for many decades well into the present day.

Skull with Burning Cigarette was painted with oil on canvas in 1885 and is now housed at the Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation.) Painted while van Gogh was studying art at the academy in Antwerp, Skull with Burning Cigarette was initially created as a juvenile joke. However, it still shows a decent understanding of anatomy and composition. It was a standard exercise to sketch skeletons at the academy, but it was not part of the curriculum to paint them, so it is assumed that van Gogh must have created this work after the day’s studies or perhaps during lessons solely for his enjoyment.

Pyramid of Skulls (c. 1901) by Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was a French Post-Impressionist painter whose art helped mark the transition from 19th to 20th-century concepts and aesthetics. In the last decade of Paul Cézanne’s life, he worked in isolation and often hinted at his feelings towards his mortality in his letters to friends.

He is said to have had a slight fascination with death and mortality since the 1870s, but it would be more than another 20 years before he started to implement the concept of death in art form. Around the time he started adding memento mori symbolism into his art, his health began to rapidly decline. His ongoing preoccupation with the subject of death can be identified in a number of his skull paintings that he produced in 1898 and 1905.

Paul Cézanne’s paintings from this period were produced in watercolor as well as oils and offered a subtler version of the traditional Vanitas theme.

Painted in around 1901 with oil on canvas, Pyramid of Skulls is composed of three skulls portrayed under a pale light, lit against a dark background. It was perhaps not only his concerns over mortality that led to the use of skulls in his paintings. He was said to have appreciated the shape of the human skull and may have used them for the quality of their volumetric form as he did with vases and fruit. Reminiscent of his portraits, the skulls stare at the viewer in a confrontationally head-on pose. He could also have incorporated skulls as they were common objects in the houses of Catholics, Catholicism being a religion he was a devout follower of.

Today, we have learned about the intriguingly dark topic of memento mori. We have discussed how a philosophy on the inevitable nature of death has affected artists throughout the centuries to create works of art that reflect their contemplations on the impermanence of life, the fruitless pursuit of happiness in worldly things, and the abandonment of sin, all in return for the chance of salvation from the pitfalls of human existence.

Take a look at our art memento mori webstory here!

Frequently Asked Questions

Was memento mori an art movement.

Memento mori was more of a philosophy of thought than a movement of artists. Yet the symbolism of memento mori can be found in the art of many painters from a multitude of art styles. Death is a common theme for many artists and something that everyone will one day have to experience, so it makes sense that the concept of morality is a theme that surpasses genre or style and can be discovered almost everywhere in art.

What Does Vanitas Mean?

Vanitas paintings are a specific type of art representing death and the impermanence of life through still-life paintings. These still-life paintings are usually composed of objects that are highly charged with symbolism, specifically with regard to death. The most common objects painted by memento mori artists in Vanitas include skulls, timepieces such as clocks or hourglasses, wilting flowers, or rotting fruit. Many objects could be used to symbolically mark the passage of time and represent the temporary nature of life.

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Memento Mori Art – Symbolic Meditations on Death.” Art in Context. August 24, 2021. URL: https://artincontext.org/memento-mori-art/

Meyer, I. (2021, 24 August). Memento Mori Art – Symbolic Meditations on Death. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/memento-mori-art/

Meyer, Isabella. “Memento Mori Art – Symbolic Meditations on Death.” Art in Context , August 24, 2021. https://artincontext.org/memento-mori-art/ .

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Still life with vanitas symbols (after David Bailly), 2008

By kevin best.

National Photographic Portrait Prize 2009 Finalist

Mark Twain said 'History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme'. The masters of the Dutch 'Golden Age' lived in a time of extreme wealth and fear. They feared: eternal damnation, plagues, religious genocide and the guilt associated with exploitation. Sound familiar? David Bailly (1584-1657) summed it all up in his 'Self portrait with vanitas symbols'. Mine is a rhyme. The references to plague have been replaced with references to global warming and instead of Bailly's double self portrait, I have left the frame empty, for our future is less certain.

National Photographic Portrait Prize 2009 ( More information , View all 56 photos )

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Portraiture in renaissance and baroque europe.

Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece)

Workshop of Robert Campin

Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement

Fra Filippo Lippi

Portrait of a Carthusian

Petrus Christus

Tommaso di Folco Portinari (1428–1501); Maria Portinari (Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, born 1456)

Hans Memling

Erasmus of Rotterdam

Albrecht Dürer

François I (1494–1547), King of France

Girolamo della Robbia , or

Portrait of a Young Man

Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano)

Hermann von Wedigh III (died 1560)

Hans Holbein the Younger

Brother Gregorio Belo of Vicenza

Lorenzo Lotto

Filippo Archinto (born about 1500, died 1558), Archbishop of Milan

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio)

Alessandro Vittoria (1525–1608)

Paolo Veronese (Paolo Caliari)

Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino (1514–1574), With his Armor by Filippo Negroli

Portrait of a Young Man, Probably Robert Devereux (1566–1601), Second Earl of Essex

Nicholas Hilliard

Princess Elizabeth (1596–1662), Later Queen of Bohemia

Robert Peake the Elder

• Self-Portrait

Anthony van Dyck

Portrait of a Woman, Probably Susanna Lunden (Susanna Fourment, 1599–1628)

Peter Paul Rubens

Portrait of Charlotte Duchesne

Philippe de Champaigne

The Artist's Mother: Head and Bust, Three-Quarters Right

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn)

The Fortune-Teller

Georges de La Tour

James Stuart (1612–1655), Duke of Richmond and Lennox

Don Gaspar de Guzmán (1587–1645), Count-Duke of Olivares

Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo

Rubens, Helena Fourment (1614–1673), and Their Son Frans (1633–1678)

Herman Doomer (ca. 1595–1650)

Juan de Pareja (ca. 1608–1670)

Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez)

The Jabach Family

Charles Le Brun

Jean Sorabella Independent Scholar

August 2007

A portrait is typically defined as a representation of a specific individual, such as the artist might meet in life. A portrait does not merely record someone’s features, however, but says something about who he or she is, offering a vivid sense of a real person’s presence.

The traditions of portraiture in the West extend back to antiquity and particularly to ancient Greece and Rome, where lifelike depictions of distinguished men and women appeared in sculpture and on coins. After many centuries in which generic representation had been the norm, distinctive portrait likenesses began to reappear in Europe in the fifteenth century. This change reflected a new growth of interest in everyday life and individual identity as well as a revival of Greco-Roman custom. The resurgence of portraiture was thus a significant manifestation of the Renaissance in Europe.

The earliest Renaissance portraits were not paintings in their own right, but rather important inclusions in pictures of Christian subjects. In medieval art , donors were frequently portrayed in the altarpieces or wall paintings that they commissioned, and in the fifteenth century painters began to depict such donors with distinctive features presumably studied from life. An example is Robert Campin’s Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece) ( 56.70 ) of about 1427–32, in which the man and woman in the left wing have the specificity characteristic of portraiture. Hans Memling’s portraits of Tommaso and Maria Portinari ( 14.40.626-27 ), painted around 1470, were also probably meant to flank the image of a saint in a small triptych, yet each likeness fills a whole panel and has the emphasis of a portrait in its own right.

One of the hallmarks of European portraiture is a sense of reality, an apparent intention to depict the unique appearance of a particular person. Each portrait is thus meant to express individual identity, but as Erwin Panofsky recognized, it also “seeks to bring out whatever the sitter has in common with the rest of humanity” (quoted in Shearer West, Portraiture [Oxford, 2004], p. 24). This second aspect of portraiture comes across in the considerable conservatism of the genre: most portraits produced in Renaissance and Baroque Europe follow one of a very small range of conventional formats. The profile view, which was favored in ancient coins, was frequently adopted in the fifteenth century, for instance, in Fra Filippo Lippi’s picture of a woman at a window, with a young man peeking in ( 89.15.19 ). The three-quarter face, which allows for greater engagement between sitter and viewer, was also widely favored. Petrus Christus used this format in his portrait of a Carthusian monk ( 49.7.19 ), which places the sitter in a simply characterized interior, with a horizontal element like a windowsill at the bottom and a glow of light in the left background. Italian painters at the turn of the sixteenth century embraced and refined this formula. Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated portrait of Mona Lisa (ca. 1503–5; Musée du Louvre, Paris), for instance, increases the sense of connection between sitter and viewer by placing the hands on the window ledge; the enigmatic smile departs from the perfect composure seen elsewhere. Raphael’s widely imitated portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (ca. 1514; Louvre) uses the half-length format seen in the Mona Lisa but tightens the focus on the sitter by highlighting his lively face against a softly lit gray backdrop.

Mannerist artists adjusted these conventions to produce works like Bronzino’s portrait of a young man ( 29.100.16 ) painted in the 1530s: the figure again appears half-length, but the expression is aloof rather than serene, curious pieces of furniture replace the barrier along the lower border, and the hands—the right fingering the pages of a book and the left fixed on the hip—suggest momentary action and bravado rather than quiet dignity. The hand in the book confers an air of learned nonchalance on sitters both like and unlike Bronzino’s fashionable young man: it occurs, for instance, in Titian’s sensitive portrait of the aged archbishop Filippo Archinto, painted in the 1550s ( 14.40.650 ). The hand on hip frequently appears in portraits of rulers or would-be rulers, as in Van Dyck’s splendid likeness of James Stuart , painted around 1635 ( 89.15.16 ). The full-length format, always a costly and grandiose option, increases the sitter’s air of power and self-possession. Even greater magnificence is implicit in equestrian portraits, which also had Greco-Roman associations and were much favored in Renaissance and Baroque courts ( 52.125 ).

The conventional aspects of portraiture ensure that each example will bear some resemblance to the next, and yet this general similarity makes the distinctive qualities of each one the more salient. Sometimes the sitter’s beauty or demeanor is emphasized, as in Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature portrait of a young man ( 35.89.4 ) with luxuriant curls and a straightforward gaze. In other examples, a magnificent costume highlights the sitter’s wealth and fashionable taste ( 51.194.1 ). Other portraits suggest a sitter’s profession or interests by including possessions and attributes that characterize him as, for example, a humanist author ( 19.73.120 ), an accomplished sculptor ( 46.31 ), or an impassioned preacher ( 65.117 ). In addition to these rather public aspects of identity, portraits may also suggest the sitter’s inner psychology or state of mind. Hints of personality are especially evident in seventeenth-century portrayals of less exalted persons, such as Rembrandt’s portrait of the craftsman Herman Doomer ( 29.100.1 ), Velázquez’s picture of his assistant Juan de Pareja ( 1971.86 ), and Rubens’ seductive likeness of a woman who may have been his sister-in-law ( 1976.218 ).

In addition to recording appearances, portraits served a variety of social and practical functions in Renaissance and Baroque Europe. Miniatures were given as gifts of intimate remembrance, while portraits of rulers asserted their majesty in places from which they were absent. In courtly settings, portraits often had diplomatic significance. For instance, Jan van Eyck traveled to make portraits (now lost) of potential wives for his patron, Philip the Good of Burgundy , and Girolamo della Robbia made a ceramic portrait of Francis I ( 41.100.245 ) to adorn the residence of one of his comrades in arms. A portrait was often commissioned at a significant moment in someone’s life, such as betrothal , marriage , or elevation to an office. The making of a portrait typically involved a simple arrangement between artist and patron, but artists also worked on their own initiative, particularly when portraying friends and family ( 18.72 ; 1981.238 ; 1994.7 ). These portraits sometimes display a sense of affection, informality, or experimentation unusual in commissioned works. Finally, artists captured their own likenesses in self-portraits ( 49.7.25 ; 14.40.618 ), where they freely pursued their own ends, whether to claim elevated status, to showcase technical mastery, or to seek frank self-reflection.

Sorabella, Jean. “Portraiture in Renaissance and Baroque Europe.” In  Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/port/hd_port.htm (August 2007)

Further Reading

Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Pope-Hennessy, John. The Portrait in the Renaissance . New York: Pantheon, 1966.

West, Shearer. Portraiture . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Additional Essays by Jean Sorabella

• Sorabella, Jean. “ Pilgrimage in Medieval Europe .” (April 2011)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Venetian Color and Florentine Design .” (October 2002)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Art of the Roman Provinces, 1–500 A.D. .” (May 2010)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Nude in Baroque and Later Art .” (January 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Nude in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance .” (January 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Nude in Western Art and Its Beginnings in Antiquity .” (January 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Monasticism in Western Medieval Europe .” (originally published October 2001, last revised March 2013)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Interior Design in England, 1600–1800 .” (October 2003)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Vikings (780–1100) .” (October 2002)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Painting the Life of Christ in Medieval and Renaissance Italy .” (June 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Birth and Infancy of Christ in Italian Painting .” (June 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Crucifixion and Passion of Christ in Italian Painting .” (June 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Carolingian Art .” (December 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Ottonian Art .” (September 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Ballet .” (October 2004)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Baroque Rome .” (October 2003)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Opera .” (October 2004)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Grand Tour .” (October 2003)

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• France, 1400–1600 A.D.
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• Iberian Peninsula
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• Northern Italy
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• Oil on Canvas
• Preparatory Study
• Printmaking
• Relief Sculpture
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• Southern Italy

Artist or Maker

• Andrea del Sarto
• Campin, Robert
• Christus, Petrus
• Coypel, Charles Antoine
• De Champaigne, Philippe
• Della Robbia, Andrea
• Della Robbia, Girolamo
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• Le Brun, Charles
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• Lotto, Lorenzo
• Martínez del Mazo, Juan Bautista
• Memling, Hans
• Parmigianino
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• Stuart, Gilbert
• Van Dyck, Anthony
• Van Eyck, Jan
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An Analysis of Vincenzo Campi's The Kitchen

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Melanie King

Cultural and Religious Studies

Liana Cheney

 In Dutch vanitas imagery of Homo bulla est there is a sad child (homo) holding a scalloped shell filled with soap and water. Although the child is amused and playing with the formation of beautiful transparent water circles, his expression is mischievous and melancholic. Blooming flowers and dead trees, burning urns, and cloudy landscapes also accompany this gloomy imagery, which alludes to a warning about moral behavior. The first part of this essay deals with a brief history about the symbolism of the skull in vanitas imagery (1590-1630). And the second part of the essay focuses on two prints by the Dutch artist and printmaker from Haarlem, Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617), who honored this proverb Homo bulla est in Allegory of Transience as a remembrance of the brevity of life.

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David Bailly

Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols , 1651

Oil on wood

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critic’s notebook

A Shock of Red for a Royal Portrait

A new portrait of King Charles III is bathed in symbolism.

By Vanessa Friedman

Royal portraits, as a rule, tend to be fairly staid, predictable affairs. Full of symbolism, sure, but generally symbolism of the traditional, establishment kind: symbols of state, of office, of pomp and lineage.

Which is why the new official portrait of King Charles III by Jonathan Yeo, the first since the king’s coronation, has created such a controversy.

A larger-than-life (7.5 foot-by-5.5 foot) canvas, the portrait shows the king standing in his Welsh Guards uniform, hands on the hilt of his sword, a half-smile on his face, with a butterfly hovering just over his right shoulder. His entire body is bathed in a sea of crimson, so his face appears to be floating.

Though the butterfly was apparently the key piece of semiology — meant, Mr. Yeo told the BBC , to represent Charles’s metamorphosis from prince to sovereign and his longstanding love of the environment — it was the painting’s primary color that almost instantaneously gave new meaning to the idea of “seeing red.” It was practically begging for interpretation.

“To me it gives the message the monarchy is going up in flames or the king is burning in hell,” one commentator wrote under the royal family’s Instagram post when the portrait was unveiled.

“It looks like he’s bathing in blood,” another wrote. Someone else raised the idea of “colonial bloodshed.” There were comparisons to the devil. And so on. There was even a mention of the Tampax affair , a reference to an infamous comment by Charles revealed when his phone was hacked during the demise of his marriage to Diana, Princess of Wales.

It turns out that red is a trigger color for almost everyone — especially given the somewhat meta endeavor that is royal portraiture: a representation of a representation, made for posterity.

In his interview with the BBC, Mr. Yeo noted that when the king first saw the painting, he was “initially mildly surprised by the strong color,” which may be an understatement. Mr. Yeo said his goal was to produce a more modern royal portrait, reflecting Charles’s desire to be a more modern monarch, reducing the number of working royals and scaling back the pageantry of the coronation (all things being relative).

Still, the choice of shade seems particularly fraught given the … well, firestorm the king has endured since his ascension to the throne.

Consider, for example, the continued falling out with his second son, Prince Harry, and the publication of Harry’s memoir, with its allegations of royal racism ; the related calls for an end to the monarchy; Charles’s cancer diagnosis; and the furor over the mystery about Catherine, Princess of Wales , whose own cancer diagnosis was revealed only after increasingly unhinged speculation about her disappearance from public life.

Queen Camilla, who has been through her own ring of flames, reportedly told the artist, “You’ve got him.”

It’s hard to imagine Mr. Yeo didn’t anticipate some of the reaction to the portrait, especially in the context of his past work, including portraits of Prince Philip, the king’s father, and Queen Camilla, which are more traditional depictions. Indeed, the last time a royal portraitist attempted a more abstract, contemporary interpretation of their subject — a 1998 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II by Justin Mortimer, which depicted the queen against a neon yellow background with a splash of yellow bisecting her neck — it produced a similar public outcry. The Daily Mail accused the artist of cutting off the queen’s head.

The portrait of King Charles will remain on display at the Philip Mould Gallery until mid-June, when it will move to Drapers’ Hall in London. (It was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Drapers, a medieval guild turned philanthropy, to reside among hundreds of other, more orthodox royal portraits.)

In that setting, Mr. Yeo’s work may be especially telling: reflective of not just a monarch, but also the evolution of the role itself, the conflicts around the job and a king captured forevermore in what very much looks like the hot seat.

Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014. More about Vanessa Friedman