Well, this happened. My own piece of Memento Mori – Remember Death – permanently on me. At all times reminding me that this life is finite. Use it well. Do good. Take naps.
Skulls have a long history in art as reminders to the viewer that death is inevitable. We cannot escape it so live life well. What ‘well’ looked like depended on time, place, societal expectations. The Dutch Golden age was when Memento Mori art was taken to new levels. Memento Mori or Vanitas paintings were popular with wealthy Dutch merchants who wanted to spend their money without looking like they had money, so they commissioned religious works for their homes. Wealthy and pious, a 17th C winning combination. Images with skulls, mirrors, hourglasses, flower arrangements in different states of decomposition, bread, or a watch or clock all symbolised the temporality of our existence.
The skull in combination with other symbols created detailed reminders of how to live a good life, and die well. For example, place a skull, as symbol of mortality, and a carnation, emblem of the hope for eternal life, together in a work, such as found in Dirck Jacobsz’s portrait of Pompeius Occo. This banker, merchant and humanist was reminded that living a pious life meant being rewarded in the afterlife. A candle and a skull reminded the viewer, versed in Christian symbolism of the day, that life was short and death comes to all.
The Romans borrowed from the Egyptians the use of symbols as “representing man’s corporeal state after death” (Janson 423) but rather than a mummy the Romans used a skeleton. Early Christians only used the skeleton in artworks to represent the grave of Adam and it was placed beneath the cross of the crucified Christ. They also used the skeleton in the Vision of Ezekiel (37:1-8), where Ezekiel resurrects the dead. Sometime around the 12th C the full skeleton was reduced to a skull (presumed by viewers to represent Adam) and a handful of bones. By the Middle Ages the skeleton was still in use, but not as a reminder of salvation through Christ, but to use the horrors of death and the corruption of the body to “evoke greater piety” (Janson 427). The human skull was condensed and abstracted by the Renaissance Italians into what became a universal symbol of death.
However, Michael Kearl thoroughly outlined a confluence of cultural trends racing towards the Millennium that emptied the symbolic reminder of our mortality. By the 1990’s the skull had been eroticised, politicized and commodified. The 20thC century and photography brought new interpretations of the skull that included combining death and sex, death and politics, and death and capitalism.
Throughout the 20th C skulls would become associated with mass genocides, organized crime, and capitalism, for example Dior’s perfume from the 1980’s ad that plays off of Gilberts 19thC work, or Damien Hirst’s infamous use of skulls for art, and consequently of great value, seen in his works “For the Love of God’ (2007) and its accompanying piece “For Heaven’s Sake”, an authentic infant skull covered in platinum and diamonds. Sold respectively for $100 million and $50 million. Death is no longer the great equalizer, if you want to own a symbol of it, at least…
Skulls have never gone out of fashion. A quick amazon search returns over 100,000 products with skulls associated with them. I own a number of artworks by artists that are of skulls, such as my pandemic purchase by Caitlin McCormack (https://www.caitlintmccormack.com/about )
My tattoo skull is not only a reminder, it is also a self-portrait. It’s the red glasses that give it that personal touch but this could represent anyone. Skulls are universal. We all have one. Unique in its shape, protecting our lifetime of wounds, memories, and imaginations. But it’s also a universal reminder: this is all of us. Underneath it all.
#deathdoula
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#deathtalk
#talkingaboutdeath
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#deathawareness
#endoflifeplanning
#endoflifedoula
#skulls
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#mementomori
#rememberdeath
#underneathitall
#caitlinmccormack
#phillippehalsman
SOURCES:
Kearl, Michael C. “The Proliferation of Skulls in Popular Culture: A Case Study of How the Traditional Symbol of Mortality Was Rendered Meaningless.” Mortality, vol. 20, no. 1, Feb. 2015, pp. 1–18. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/13576275.2014.961004.
Janson, Horst W. “The Putto with the Death’s Head.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 19, no. 3, 1937, pp. 423–49. JSTOR, JSTOR, doi:10.2307/3045691.
IMAGES: either author’s photographs or from artstor.org, unless otherwise stated.