DEATH
REPRESENTED THROUGH ART ACROSS THE AGES
The Impending Doom
"While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die."
-Leonardo da Vinci
The Grim Reaper: The Personification of Death
Memento Mori
Danse Macabre
Note: I chose this depiction of Danse Macabre because it was destroyed; it no longer exists. So, is it...Dead? It was never alive and yet we still mourne its loss, the loss of a beatiful thing. Life is beautiful. This painting is dead.
What irony! It symbolizes the inevitability of Death, its complete lack of bias and now it, (the painting, itself) is gone.
Ars Moriendi
The Ars moriendi ("The Art of Dying") are two related Latin texts dating from about 1415 and 1450 which offer advice on the protocols and procedures of a good death, explaining how to "die well" according to Christian precepts of the late Middle Ages. It was written within the historical context of the effects of the macabre horrors of the Black Death 60 years earlier and consequent social upheavals of the 15th century. It was very popular, translated into most West European languages, and was the first in a western literary tradition of guides to death and dying.
Funerary Art
Ubi Sunt
Ubi sunt (literally "where are... they") is a phrase taken from the Latin 'Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?', meaning "Where are those who were before us?" Sometimes interpreted to indicate nostalgia, the ubi sunt motif is actually a meditation on mortality and life's transience (short).
In "Coplas por la muerte de su padre", the Spanish poet Jorge Manrique wrote equally famous stanzas about contemporaries that death had taken away:
¿Qué se fizo el rey don Juan?
Los infantes de Aragón¿qué se fizieron?
¿Qué fue de tanto galán,
qué fue de tanta invención
como trujeron?
Las justas y los torneos,
paramentos, bordaduras
y cimeras,
¿fueron sino devaneos?
¿qué fueron sino verduras
de las eras?
Translation:
What became of King Don Juan?
The Princes of Aragon,
What became of all of them?
What of so much handsome nobility?
And of all the many fads
They brought with them?
What of their jousts and tournaments,
Gilded ornaments, fancy embroideries
And feathered tops?
Was all of that meaningless waste?
Was it all anything else but a summer's green
on the fields?