Ends

Anonymous French Artists
Tomb Figures for Philippe Pot, Grand Seneschal of Burgundy
ca. 1495
painted limestone
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous French Artist
Loving Couple and Figure of Death
ca. 1490-1500
ivory scepter pommel
Musée du Louvre

Riccio (Andrea Briosco)
Funerary Relief of Hell - Tomb Element for Girolamo and Marc Antonio della Torre
ca. 1515-20
bronze
(Napoleonic loot seized in Italy)
Musée du Louvre

Frémin Roussel
Recording Angel
1563-65
marble figure for royal tomb of François II
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous German Sculptor
Death's Head - Memento Mori
ca. 1550-1650
rock crystal
Musée du Louvre

Valerio Marucelli
Skull and Crucifix
before 1620
drawing
British Museum

Filippo Napoletano (Filippo Angeli)
Skeleton of Bat
1620
etching
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Filippo Napoletano (Filippo Angeli)
Skeleton of Camel
1620
etching
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Filippo Napoletano (Filippo Angeli)
Skeleton of Gurnard
1620
etching
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Filippo Napoletano (Filippo Angeli)
Skeleton of Turkey
1620
etching
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Anonymous French Artist
La Musique
ca. 1685-1700
marble relief (tomb element)
Musée du Louvre

Gaspare Diziani
Discovery of a Skeleton in a Loggia
before 1767
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Michele Tedesco
Death of the Goldfinch
1872
oil on canvas
Museo Michele Tedesco, Moliterno

Max Beckmann
Small Scene of Death
1906
oil on canvas
Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Ashley Havinden
Keep Death Off The Road
ca. 1942
lithograph
(poster for British Ministry of War Transport)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Claes Oldenburg
Proposal for a Skyscraper for Michigan Avenue, Chicago
in the form of Lorado Taft’s sculpture, Death
1968
collage and graphite on paper
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Jerome Witkin
Study of Claudia Glass as Death
1980
drawing
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

In legend all were simple,

And held the straitened spot;

But we in legend not,

Are not simple.

In weakness how much further;

Along what crooked route

By hedgehog's gradual foot,

Or fish's fathom.

Bitter the blue smoke rises

From garden bonfires lit,

To where we burning sit:

Good, if it's thorough.

It won't be us who eavesdrop

In days of luck and heat,

Timing the double beat

At last together.

– W.H. Auden (1931)

Visual Preferences (20th century: 1915)

Florine Stettheimer
Flowers against Wallpaper
1915
oil on canvas
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee

Jean Pougny (Ivan Puni)
Construction Relief
1915
painted wood and tin
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

Edward Henry Potthast
The Bathers
1915
oil on canvas
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Jules Pascin
Figures and Horses
1915
watercolor and ink on paper
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

Violet Oakley
The Woman Clothed with the Sun
1915
gouache on board
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Robert Henri
Edna Smith in a Japanese Wrap
1915
oil on canvas
Indianapolis Museum of Art

Jean Heiberg
Goldfish
1915
oil on canvas
Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Sweden

Jacoba van Heemskerck
Image no. 105
1915
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Childe Hassam
Isles of Shoals
1915
oil on canvas
Portland Museum of Art, Maine

Natalia Goncharova
Costume Design for Apostle Mark in Liturgie
(for Ballets Russes, but never produced)
1915
pochoir
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Frederick Carl Frieseke
Woman arranging Flowers
1915
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Ernst Deutsch (called Dryden)
Teufelchen
1915
lithograph (poster for film)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Nils Dardel
Portrait of Ellen Roosval née Hallwyl
1915
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Virginia Keep Clark
Portrait of arts patron Mrs James Ward Thorne
1915
pastel on paper
Art Institute of Chicago

Gifford Beal
At the Hippodrome
1915
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Eugène Atget
Staircase with Ivy
1915
gelatin silver print
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

from Nocturne

Do squamous and squiggling fish, 

down in their fireless houses,

notice nightfall? Perhaps not.

But any grounded goer,

and all to whom feathers grant

the sky's unbounded freedom, 

alter their doings at dusk,

each obsequious to its

curiosity of kind.

The commons mild their movements

and mew all their senses, but 

there are odd balls, for instance,

the owl and the pussy-cat,

as soon as day has thestered,

increase their thinking and jaunt 

to kill or to engender.

No couple of our kindred

obey the same body-clock:

for most the law is to shut

their minds up before midnight,

but someone in the small hours,

for the money or love, is

always awake and at work.

Here young radicals plotting

to blow up a building, there

a frowning poet rifling

his memory's printer's-pie

to form some placent sentence,

and overhead wanderers

whirling hither and thither

in bellies of overbig

mosquitoes made of metal.

– W.H. Auden (1972)

Dürer

Albrecht Dürer
Drawing a Lute in Perspective
1525
woodcut
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Albrecht Dürer
Drawing a Ewer in Perspective
1523
woodcut
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer
The Annunciation
1503
woodcut
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer
The Nativity
1504
engraving
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer
Virgin and Child with a Monkey
ca. 1498
engraving
Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Albrecht Dürer
Fall of Man
1509
woodcut
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Albrecht Dürer
Christ on the Mount of Olives
1508
engraving
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer
Man of Sorrows
ca. 1498-1505
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Albrecht Dürer
Death and the Landsknecht
1510
woodcut
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Albrecht Dürer
St George and the Dragon
1501
woodcut
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Albrecht Dürer
Portrait of Ulrich Varnbüler
1522
woodcut
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich

Albrecht Dürer
The Cook and his Wife
1496
engraving
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer
The Market Farmer and his Wife
1519
engraving
Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo

Albrecht Dürer
The Small Horse
1505
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Albrecht Dürer
The Large Horse
1505
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Albrecht Dürer
Apollo and Diana
ca. 1503
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Now the ambassadors of the Mytilenaeans that went out in the first galley, having been referred by the Lacedaemonians to the general meeting of the Grecians at Olympia to the end they might determine of them together with the rest of the confederates, went to Olympia accordingly.  It was that Olympiad wherein Dorieus of Rhodes was the second time victor.  And when after the solemnity they were set in council, the ambassadors spake unto them in this manner:

"Men of Lacedaemon and confederates, we know the received custom of the Grecians.  For they that take into league such as revolt in the wars and relinquish a former league, though they like them as long as they have profit by them, yet accounting them but traitors to their former friends, they esteem the worse of them in their judgment.  And to say the truth, this judgment is not without good reason when they that revolt and they from whom the revolt is made are mutually like minded and affected, and equal in provision and strength, and no just cause of their revolt given.  But now between us and the Athenians it is not so.  Nor let any man think the worse of us for that having been honoured by them in time of peace, we have now revolted in time of danger." 

– from The Peloponnesian War as written by Thucydides (5th century BC) and translated by Thomas Hobbes (1628) and edited by David Grene (1959)

Ends

Hans Baldung
The Knight, The Lady and Death
ca. 1498-1503
oil on panel
Musée du Louvre

Master S (Netherlandish printmaker)
Memento Mori
ca. 1515-45
hand-colored engraving
British Museum

Anonymous French Artists
Death of the Elephant
ca. 1530
wool and silk tapestry
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous French Artists
Tombstone with the Taking of Christ
ca. 1540-50
stone relief (originally painted)
Musée du Louvre

Germain Pilon
Figure funéraire de Valentine Balbiani, vivante et morte
1573
marble
Musée du Louvre

attributed to Leonhard Kern
Memento Mori with sleeping Cupid
ca. 1630
ivory
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Pietro Vecchia
Ex Voto with Angel proffering Skull to seated Woman
while St Justina of Padua hovers in the Sky above
1640
oil on canvas
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Thomas Blanchet
Classical Composition with Tomb and Mourners
ca. 1654
drawing
British Museum

Giuseppe Maria Mitelli
Death in Graveyard
ca. 1675
engraving
British Museum

Anonymous Italian Artist after Giacinto Gimignani
Death of an Old Man
ca. 1680
etching and aquatint
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Anonymous Italian Artist
Death of a Mother
ca. 1750
etching and aquatint
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Placido Fabris
Postmortem Portrait of Antonio Canova
1836
oil on canvas
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

James Ensor
Masks confronting Death
1888
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

William Nicholson
Time and Death illuminating the Dissection of a Heron
ca. 1928
watercolor and gouache on board
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Joop Sanders
Death and Entrances
1951
oil on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Meret Oppenheim
X-Ray of My Skull
1964
gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Nicole Eisenman
Death playing Checkers
2002
watercolor and ink on paper
Museum of Modern Art, New York

To ask the hard question is simple;

Asking at meeting

With the simple glance of acquaintance

To what these go

And how these do:

To ask the hard question is simple,

The simple act of the confused will.

But the answer

Is hard and hard to remember:

On steps or on shore

The ear listening

To words at meeting,

The eyes looking

At the hands helping,

Are never sure

Of what they learn

From how these things are done.

And forgetting to listen or see

Makes forgetting easy;

Only remembering the method of remembering,

Remembering only in another way,

Only the strangely exciting lie,

Afraid 

To remember what the fish ignored,

How the bird escaped, or if the sheep obeyed.

Till, losing memory,

Bird, fish, and sheep are ghostly,

And ghosts must do again

What gives them pain. 

– W.H. Auden (1930)