Mortality

Art that confronts the certainty of death, through skulls, dances of death, deathbed scenes and reminders of how short a life is.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for Mortality are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

The knowledge that life ends has shaped images for as long as people have made them. Late medieval Europe gave it a memorable form in the Dance of Death, in which skeletons lead popes, merchants and peasants alike; Hans Holbein the Younger's woodcut version, published in 1538, carried it across the continent. Holbein also stretched a distorted skull across the floor of The Ambassadors (1533), readable only from an angle. Nicolas Poussin's Et in Arcadia ego (c. 1637–38) shows shepherds finding a tomb in paradise.

Modern artists often brought the subject uncomfortably close. Ferdinand Hodler drew and painted his partner Valentine Godé-Darel through her illness and death in 1914–15, and Paul Cézanne returned to piles of skulls in his last years. Peter Hujar's photograph Candy Darling on Her Deathbed (1973) shows the actress posed among flowers. Look for guttering candles, wilting blooms, clocks and the hollow gaze of the skull.