Attitudes to human remains like skulls have changed greatly over time. A few thousand years ago, in the towns and cities of early civilisations in the Fertile Crescent, our ancestors appeared quite happy to sleep on platforms in which the heads of their loved ones were buried. Until the late twentieth century, it wasn’t unusual for doctors and others to keep a human skull in the office, and you could even buy them from shops.
Human skulls have thus made many appearances in paintings, in a wide range of contexts.
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In 1894, the Danish artist Laurits Andersen Ring visited the Cappucin monastery in Palermo, Sicily, which was famous for the more than eight thousand bodies of monks that are quietly mummifying there. His response was to paint a small group of them in his unusual Three Skulls from Convento dei Cappuccini at Palermo (1894).
Skulls are one of the most recognisable signs of dead humans.
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In Arnold Böcklin’s Sirens from 1875, three human skulls and other bones indicate the graver intentions of these two creatures.
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At the left of Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life (1910-15) is the figure of death, a skull wielding a club resembling a church candle-holder and emblazoned with dark crosses and eyes/corpuscles. At the right is life, with seven bodies of sleeping women, one man, and a young boy. They’re wrapped in a decorative quilt bearing brightly coloured flowers reminiscent of Klimt’s holiday paintings of gardens.
By simple extension, lots of skulls means mass death.
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Vasily Vereshchagin’s powerful Apotheosis of War (1871) shows ravens or crows perched on a huge pile of human skulls in a barren landscape outside the ruins of a town.
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In Eugen Bracht’s Shore of Oblivion (1889) (detail below) their number indicates the apocalypse and oblivion for the whole of humankind.
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Their most famous literary reference must be to William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, where the prince laments the passing of Yoric to the gravediggers, opening with the words “To be, or not to be…”. This is captured well in Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s Hamlet and the Gravediggers from 1883.
As the symbol of death and human mortality, skulls are a common feature of vanitas paintings.
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David Bailly’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols (1651) contains multiple portraits referring to the past. The figure shows the artist as a younger man, holding the maulstick he used in painting. His actual self-portrait at the time is in the painting he’s holding with his left hand. Next to that is a painting of his wife, who had already died, and a ghostly image of her is projected onto the wall behind the wine glass.
Gathered in front of the artist are ephemera and other signs of vanitas: the snuffed-out candle, a glass of wine, flowers, and soap bubbles, together with a string of pearls and a skull. If that message isn’t clear enough, he provides the quotation on a piece of paper: vanitas vanitum et omnia vanitas, “vanity of vanities, and all is vanity”, together with his signature and date.
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Cézanne painted a series of arrangements of skulls, here in his Pyramid of Skulls (1898-1900), for example. These appear to be his variant of vanitas painting, as his thoughts turned towards the end of his life. These skulls are preserved in his studio in a suburb of Aix-en-Provence.
There’s one religious scene in which skulls have a more literal meaning, the Crucifixion.
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Antonello da Messina’s Christ Crucified, probably from 1473, was unknown until it surfaced in a private collection in 1848 and was bought by the National Gallery in London. The mourning figures at the foot of the cross are the Virgin Mary on the left, and Saint John the Evangelist on the right. On the ground are several skulls, referring to the meaning of the name Golgotha, the place of the skulls.
Another Christian association is with Mary Magdalene, although this seems to have arisen long after the Gospels were written, and may have been the invention of a visual artist.
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Titian’s version from about 1552, now in Naples, shows her relatively fully clad. The traditional pot of myrrh next to her is accompanied by an open Bible resting on a human skull.
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Titian’s radical treatment in his series of portraits changed paintings of the Penitent Magdalene irrevocably. This is one of several painted by that great exponent of chiaroscuro, Georges de La Tour, probably dating from around 1630, in which her hand rests on the skull on her lap.
Skulls also became one of the marks of a doctor, and in William Hogarth’s narrative series Marriage A-la-Mode has its own story to tell.
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In The Inspection, Hogarth takes us to a doctor’s consulting room where the Viscount, who appears familiar with the room, is in company with a young girl and an older woman most probably her mother, both of them prostitutes. They’re seeking the aid of a doctor who is thoroughly foul in appearance, and himself suffering from severe congenital syphilis.
A crucial detail which may be hard to see in this image is of a link between three small boxes of black pills: the young woman holds one closed box; a second closed box is on the seat of the chair in front of the Viscount’s crotch; the third is open in the Viscount’s right hand, outstretched towards the doctor. The pills are black, in common with the pox-marks on the Viscount and the mother, indicating they’re mercuric salts used to treat syphilis. The implication is that the Viscount is questioning their effectiveness with the doctor.
A skull on the table at the left bears the unmistakeable erosions produced by advanced syphilis. All around the group are various troubling items of medical equipment and specimens.
My final example is more of a puzzle, though.
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As with other classical myths, at the time that Jean Cousin painted Eva Prima Pandora, in about 1550, the story of Pandora had been mixed with Christian religious narrative, in this case of Eve and the Fall of Mankind. Eve/Pandora lies naked, propped against a human skull. Her left hand clutches her dreaded jar, which she hasn’t yet opened. Her right hand holds a fruiting sprig of the apple tree, an allusion to the traditional Biblical story of Eve. Coiled around her left arm is a serpent, another reference to the Fall of Mankind. Subsequent depictions of Pandora have done without the skull.