Art’s Greatest Gift of Death

In Pompeii’s ruins, buried beneath three meters of volcanic ash, was a two-millennia-old mosaic concerning the transitoriness of all things. Now exhibited in the National Archeology Museum in nearby Naples, similarly death-haunted by the same volcano that rendered Pompeii a ghost town, the so-called Memento Mori mosaic features in colored tesserae and mortar the cackling visage of a black-eyed skull balanced atop both a butterfly — symbol of the soul — and the ever-turning wheel of fortune, all of it beneath a triangular leveling device known as a libella, as if to take the full measurements of a finite life. Dated to the first few decades of the Common Era, and then preserved in 79 CE beneath that powdery volcanic effluence, the morbid mosaic served a pedagogical purpose: to remind the wealthy owner of the villa where it was displayed that they, too, shall die. This is far from the only example of a memento mori within the necropolis beside the Bay of Naples. Not far away was another mosaic rendered in black and white stones of a spindly, smiling skeleton holding dual wine jugs, a playful carpe diem exhortation not unlike that in the apostle Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, written around the same: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

The memento mori tradition didn’t originate with the Romans — the need to create potent reminders of death is a necessity in any culture — but they did exemplify the theme. After all, this was the empire in which triumphant generals charioting through the capital in their laurel crowns and purple togas were accompanied by the constant refrain, whispered by an enslaved man known as an Auriga: “Remember that you too shall die.” Rome’s pastoral poetry, with its sylvan evocations of rusticated Arcadia, would also take pains to inform readers that Et in Arcadia ego — even in paradise there is death. By the time those tiny colored rocks were set into the Pompeii mosaics in the first surviving example of a skillful simulacra of a skull in three dimensions, the tradition of using skeletons as a memento mori had been entrenched for about two centuries. A particularly jovial cadaver can be seen, for example, in a Turkish mosaic from Antakya, sitting next to a loaf of bread and a goblet of wine beside Greek lettering reading “Be cheerful, enjoy your life.” Whether melancholy or cheerful, grim or jolly, such art taught a crucial lesson — maybe the most crucial one: that death is inevitable, nothing afterward is assured, and what we do in the interim, that crack of light between two infinities of darkness, is our responsibility. 

Today, in a culture so completely shaped by the cannibalistic dictates of transnational capitalism, a strangely self-assured, triumphalist, and positivist morality reigns, despite the horrific violence of our age. That death shall have no dominion is the imbecilic creed of both wellness gurus and Silicon Valley tech mavens, who believe in a fantasy that immortality is only a matter of a vitamin regiment and gene editing, and that we may be uploaded into a digital cloud where we will all live forever as computer simulations. This is the distinctly post-modern dogma of Singularitarianism, the myth that death can be vanquished through technology. “Death is a great tragedy,” said inventor Ray Kurzweil in a 2009 documentary, “I don’t accept it.” Between those two contentions — the accurate observation and the immature nonacceptance — is the need for such wisdom. 

Kurzweil, and others in his stead, such as philosopher Nick Bostrom or gerontologist Aubrey de Grey — not to mention industrialists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — believe that death is an engineering problem, that technology will one day render the grave obsolete. “I’ve often been asked what the life expectancy will be in the year 3000,” writes de Grey in Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (2008), answering that there “won’t be one.” This is, of course, the oldest variety of foolishness. Even Gilgamesh believed he could live forever, and, like all of us, he failed. The techno-utopian fabulism of eternity rendered in silicon is just a secular form of magic, and just as deficient. 

Philosophy, literature, art — the humanities — long disparaged by some of those same men who believe that death can be finally vanquished, offers a different understanding. It grants us perhaps the greatest wisdom, the gift of understanding that death is the prince of this world. This may bethe most important task of the humanities and of the arts: As Michel de Montaigne put it, the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die. Struggle against the dying of the light all we wish, but every one of us will one day appear as the Pompeiian mosaic — in the meantime, do we pretend that we won’t, or do we grab a loaf of bread and a glass of wine? How would our ethics to ourselves and to others change with such a meditation? How different would our world be if somebody followed a Musk or a Thiel around, whispering “memento mori?” 

If the utmost value of the arts is to remind us of this inviolate truth, we are not for want of examples. Memento mori art is replete across both geographies and centuries, though it’s true that it becomes particularly prevalent during certain periods. Just as skeletons became a popular aesthetic feature in early imperial Rome, so by the High Middle Ages the theme of the Danse Macabre or “Dance of Death” proliferated. In the early 15th century, a generation after the Black Death had killed nearly a third of Europeans, depictions of cackling, dancing skeletons could be found in murals and lithographs, friezes and woodcuts. Hartmann Schedel’s 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle, an encyclopedic compendium illustrated by Michael Wolgemut, included a dance of death where a ring of five skeletons, one playing a recorder, kick up their bare heels in a dirt pit. In various stages of decomposition — some hair still clings to bony pates — the grinning cadavers serve as not just reminder, but almost as exhortation. 

Hans Holbein, the German painter celebrated for his portraits of Renaissance humanists and rulers, produced a set of Dance of Death lithographs in 1523, but even in his paintings such themes are evidenced. His 1533 masterpiece “The Ambassadors,” now exhibited at the National Gallery in London, is a celebration of international humanistic learning as focalized through its two titular protagonists — but hidden within is a distinct reminder of mortality. On the left, outfitted in resplendent black velvet, red silk, and white ermine is Jean de Dinteville, the ambassador to England from the French court of King François I; on the right is the French bishop Georges de Salve in smart, black ecclesiastical garb that appears no less luxurious for its staidness. Standing in front of patterned green drapery, the two share between them a variety of objects meant to signal the new learning that had transformed Renaissance intellectual life — various geometric drafting tools, an intricate red-hued oriental rug, a telescope, a mandolin, two globes depicting the extent of European exploration during this century. Yet stretched across the bottom quarter of the massive composition is a distended, blurry splotch overlaid against the intricate mosaic floor of the scene. If one comes to the painting from a certain angle — perhaps that from the staircase that leads up to the gallery —the splotch rearranges itself in our field of vision into what it is: a grinning skull. 

During the wars of religion that marked the Reformation — and which did so much to produce new skeletons to contemplate — memento mori was a theme with cross-sectarian appeal. In his circa 1605 “Saint Jerome in Meditation,” originally completed for the Monastery of Santa Maris but now displayed in the Museum of Montserrat, Caravaggio adds his own distinctive style to the venerable subject of the translator of the Vulgate Biblecontemplating death. A gaunt, elderly Jerome, bathed in light but otherwise shrouded in darkness per Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro, sits nearly nude atop white and red cloth, looking into the vacant eyes of a skull nearly covered in the scene’s blackness. 

Such fascinations with the macabre persisted across religious affiliations and geographies. Later that century and across an ocean, the American Puritan artist Thomas Smith presents himself with a hand laid on a skull in a 1680 self-portrait in the new country’s earliest extant self-portrait. Simultaneously, in the Protestant Netherlands, memento mori encompassed the form of Vanitas paintings. Encouraged by both the Protestant reluctance to depict explicitly religious subjects like saints, as well as an anxiety over Holland’s commercial prominence, the Vanitas is ironically a lush and rich warning about the lush and rich life. 

A vanitas such as Adriaen van Utrecht’s 1642 “Still Life with Bouquet and Skull” combines the markers of wealth with a token of death. Red and white carnations are arranged in an expensive clear vase, while on the table next to the flowers are several luxury objects, including a leather-bound book, a gold chain, a golden serving dish, a fluted glass, a pewter dish, a clay pipe, an intricate pocket watch, a string of pearls, and a pile of coins, all of it assembled around a jawless skull. For the wealthy patron who owned the van Utrecht, the moral lesson is clear — enjoy these riches, but don’t pretend that you can take them with you. And as the vanitas theme transmuted into the vernacular of the Catholic Baroque, the French painter Phillippe de Champaigne — vanitas became a popular Catholic Baroque theme as well — distills the message to elemental simplicity in his 1671 “Still-Life with a Skull,” now held by the Musee de Tesse in Le Mans, France. A rough gray table, seemingly floating in an elemental darkness, displays three objects: on the left, a red tulip with frayed yellowing petals in a spherical glass vase, on the right, an hourglass whose bulbous bottom now contains more sand than the top, and in the middle, a brown, decaying skull. It suggests an equation: the waning life of the delicate tulip plus the dwindling clock ultimately equals death. 

Artists of the last century or so have hardly abandoned the theme. The motif is as widespread as it’s ever been, obvious in everything from the Dia de los Muertos skulls inspired by the early 20th-century Mexican lithographer José Guadalupe Posada in his “La Calavera Catina” (1913) to the 1929 Walt Disney animated danse macabre masterpiece The Skeleton Dance — and as omnipresent as the Halloween decorations on any American porch. Vincent van Gogh’s 1885 student effort “Skull of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette,” held by the single artist museum dedicated to his work in Amsterdam, presents its ominous subject with a cigarette clutched between its teeth, smoke coiling upward from lungs that no longer exist. Both a parody of the memento mori tradition as well as its summation, Van Gogh’s composition exemplifies the form, where the cocky, self-assured stare of the skeleton serves as a challenge to the viewer, a being whose laughter will only dulled when we’ve joined him in the grave. Much more recent is Damien Hirst’s 2007 “For the Love of God.” Constructed from an actual 18th-century skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, the piece was sold to an investment group for 50 million pounds. Hidden in storage in London, one wonders if those who now own this relic of a once-living human have fully grappled with its eternal message, that lesson that they too — like me and like you — must die.