Paradoxically, death is always present in life. Throughout our existence we come into contact with it in multiple ways, and we face its inevitable arrival as we can or as we have been taught to face it.
In art, death has been expressed in different ways, depending on the time in which the works were made, and also according to the artist’s own ideas and feelings. In this article we will briefly review 10 works of art in which the idea of death has been captured
In the Middle Ages and the Modern Era, the serious demographic crises and the high mortality rate made the population very aware of the concept of memento mori, “remember that you are going to die.” The calls macabre dances and the vanitas They proliferated in artistic manifestations, and death was represented, with few exceptions, as something atrocious, repulsive and, above all, unifying. Nobody escapes from it.
Later, Romanticism contributed a kind of morbid taste for death, and already in the last decades of the 19th century, and following Freud’s theories, the Thanatos merges with him Eros and death is eroticized.
Of course, it is unthinkable to carry out an in-depth analysis of the topic in so few lines; There are many works of art that tell us about death. Below, we present some of the most representative ones.
1. Macabre dance from the Church of Saint Nicholas in Tallinn, by Bert Notke (1475-99)
This canvas of colossal dimensions (160 x 750 cm) is one of the most forceful plastic expressions of the macabre dancea recurring motif at the end of the Middle Ages and much of the Modern Era.
What are the macabre dances? They are based on the idea of death as a great unifier, since it reaches all human beings regardless of their social status or wealth. The iconography of these macabre dances maintains common characteristics throughout the final centuries of the Middle Ages: a series of dead people, represented as skeletons or transids, that is, corpses in a state of decomposition, join the living in a macabre dance. . In reality, and as Herbert González Zymla (Complutense University of Madrid) maintains in his essay The macabre danceonly the dead dance; the living remain as if petrified at the vision of what awaits them
In Notke’s work, the concept of death as a unifier is very clear. On the canvas we can see, in a row and facing the viewer, a series of corpses that approach various characters and invite them to join the dance. Among the characters we can see a pope, an emperor and a high-born lady. Everyone will invariably die, regardless of their status.
2. The triumph of Deathby Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1562-63)
The triumph of Death It is another of the best-known works of art about death. Direct heir to the traditions of the medieval danse macabre, this impressive painting does not offer any kind of hope. All the living are doomed. In a desolate landscape, painted with reddish and yellow tones that accentuate the sensation of aridity, Death enters riding a scrawny horse and carrying his characteristic hoe in his hand With her an army of the dead comes to earth, represented as skeletons, who reap the lives of the living and push them towards a large coffin that opens on the right side of the table.
Brueghel took many of his images from his predecessor, Hieronymus Bosch. Like him, his paintings have a strong moralizing charge, also inherited from medieval danses macabre. It doesn’t matter what you have, in the end we will all end up in the same place.
The truly chilling thing about this Brueghel painting is its absolute lack of hope. God does not appear anywhere, nor does Christ. There is no promise of redemption. Death fills everything, terrible and powerful.
3. The final judgementby Jan van Eyck (ca. 1440-41)
This panel is part of a diptych, consisting of the Last Judgment, on the right side, and the Crucifixion of Christ, on the left. Unlike The triumph of Death by Brueghel, in this work the Flemish master presents to the faithful the hope of salvation The table is clearly divided into three parts: in the lower part, an infernal abyss opens, where the damned fall; an enormous winged skeleton serves to separate this space from the rest of the composition. Above him, the archangel Saint Michael raises his sword, in the midst of the fight against evil.
In the central part, on the left, we can see the deceased rising from their graves. As a backdrop, we contemplate a colossal fire, the remains of the Apocalypse. Higher up, we find the resurrected ones awaiting judgment and, already at the top of the composition, Christ showing his wounds surrounded by the Virgin, Saint John the Baptist and several angels playing trumpets.
4. The three ages and Deathby Hans Baldung (1541-44)
Closely linked to the medieval danse macabre we find in the Modern Age the idea of memento mori, that is, “remember that you will die.” Is about a constant concept in the artistic representations of the 16th century and, especially, the 17th century to which is added the idea of vanitas: It doesn’t matter if you are handsome or beautiful, youth and beauty disappear over time and, above all, with death.
In this table, Baldung (incidentally, a disciple of Dürer), presents the three stages of life: childhood, represented by the baby lying asleep on the ground, in the foreground; youth, personified in the beautiful young woman on the left, and old age, represented by the old woman who pulls her. The passage of time is clearly reflected in the aging of the old woman’s body and, above all, in the hourglass that the fourth character, death, holds. In her painful passage, the older woman tries to take the girl away, who turns away disdainfully and a few tears flow from her eyes.
5. Deathby Gil de Ronza (1522)
Gil de Ronza made this sculpture for the group that was to decorate one of the funerary chapels of the convent of San Francisco de Zamora. The title of the work is quite clear: the artist is not representing a dead person in particular, but rather Death as an allegorical figure. Gil de Ronza materializes it as a skeleton or, rather, a transide, executed with astonishing realism. If we look, we can still see the hanging shreds of flesh; The feeling of putrefaction is evident. In his left hand, death carries one of the trumpets of the final judgment ready to wake the dead.
6. Finis Gloriae Mundiby Juan Valdez Leal (1670-72)
This is one of the two works commissioned by Miguel Mañara, a Sevillian intellectual, which can be found in the lower choir of the Hospital de la Caridad in Seville. It is framed in the context of the Baroque, during which the idea of the memento mori and vanitas. Furthermore, during the 17th century a terrible plague broke out in Seville that magnified the idea of death and the work of the hospital.
The stark vision of death, together with the naturalistic execution so characteristic of Baroque works, results in a chilling painting, in which two corpses are represented, simply and plainly. The naturalism of the Baroque is evident in the swollen flesh and in the insects and worms that appear through the remains of the meat. Despite this very realistic representation, the message remains the same, since The bodies correspond to a bishop and a knight of Calatrava Death comes to us all.
7. The kiss of the deathby Jaume Barba or Joan Fontbernat (1930)
Of disputed authorship, this beautiful sculpture stands over one of the tombs in the Poblenou Cemetery, in Barcelona. We see death disembodied, represented as a skeleton with wings; However, the sensation it evokes is very different from the work of Gil de Ronza. Here the Grim Reaper does not appear as something frightening, but as an almost sweet being, who lovingly takes the deceased and places a soft kiss on his head. The sweetness of the gesture contrasts with the gloomy aspect of the representation
Leaving aside the author’s personal conception, it is evident that we are no longer faced with the same concept of death as the one we had at the end of the Middle Ages and in the Modern Era. During the 19th century and part of the 20th, there were many representations of death as something inevitable and unwanted, true, but identified rather with a beatific and consoling dream.
This oil painting by Domenico Morelli (on the cover) is another clear example of the representation of death as something “sweet” and “peaceful” In a strange landscape, painted with violet hues, a beautiful angel dressed in red bends down and kisses a young woman who has just died. The girl’s face, which has not yet entered a state of decomposition, is beautiful despite the pale color that death gives it. On her head she wears a garland of white flowers, a symbol of purity.
The feeling of placidity is reinforced by the gesture of the angel, who gently covers the young woman with a sheet, as if tucking her in to sleep. Once again we find the simile, so typical of the 19th century, of death as a dream, and the figure of the angel as the guide of the soul to immortality.
9. The young woman and deathby Henry Lévy (1900)
Since ancient times, humans have considered a relationship, often disturbing, between Death (Thanatos) and love (Eros). We find evidence of this connection in some works from the 16th century, such as Death and lustby Hans Baldung, where a skeleton, the personification of death, lasciviously grabs a young woman and bites her face. Behind this is the idea of death as something greedy that always takes what it wants
The young woman and death de Lévy also has a strong erotic charge. As is common in the 19th century, death is personified by an angel, who descends from above and takes a naked young woman in his arms. But, unlike Baldung’s painting, which conveys obvious violence (the girl resists the onslaught of death), in Lévy’s she practically falls into her arms, as if fainted or asleep. The angel’s hands, one gently taking the young woman’s waist and the other touching her breast, increase the erotic sensation of the work.
10. Death and lifeby Gustav Klimt (1910)
Is one of the most famous and also most disturbing works of the symbolist painter The canvas is divided into two parts: on the right is Life, symbolized by a series of bodies that twist, embrace and fold; To the left, a skeleton covered by a dark cloak full of crosses (Death) grabs a club with his gnarled hands, as if to deliver the fatal blow at any moment. The empty gaze of Death, which observes with curiosity and malice the bustle of Life, is the only point of union between the two worlds.
The characters that make up the Life They seem unaware of the stalking of Death: a mother cradles her son in her arms, a young woman merges with the figure of an old woman and two lovers intertwine their arms. Everyone is immersed in their world; Only the girl next to the mother looks up and directs her eyes to the viewer.
