Romancing the Skull: Ballarat gallery does death

Skulls and death motifs are more popular today than they have ever been and Ballarat Art Gallery celebrates their history.

Rick Amor’s Doll portrait (2015).

Customs relating to death and the treatment of dead bodies, while they vary considerably, play a central role in all human cultures; indeed, evidence of rituals associated with the disposal of cadavers is held by anthropologists to be a criterion for discriminating between our prehuman and fully human ancestors.

Most people seem to consider funerary ceremonies as essential to the wellbeing of the deceased in whatever form of afterlife they believe in, as well as ensuring the effective departure of the dead person’s spirit, securing its goodwill and averting the anger and resentment that may cause it to return as a vengeful ghost.

Practices vary widely. Neolithic people in Choirokoitia in Cyprus buried their dead under the floors of their houses, as though the spirits were to be reborn in later family offspring. In Neolithic Malta, bodies were buried in hypogea, deep in caves hollowed from the sandy limestone, presumably because of the belief that the dead must be put back into the womb of mother earth, similarly to be born anew.

In Iran, the Zoroastrians, probably from some time before 700BC to 600BC, had the opposite view: the earth was holy and could not be polluted by burying corpses in it. When I was in this fascinating country a couple of months ago, I visited one of the so-called towers of silence on a rocky hill in Yazd, where until the 1960s bodies were left to be devoured by vultures. An old Byzantine source relates that they were, in earlier times, simply left in the desert for birds or dogs to tear apart, and there was no attempt to collect or inter the bones.

The Greeks and the Romans generally buried bodies outside their cities, so roads leading into Rome, like the Via Appia, were lined with tombs, from the modest to the magnificent, remains of which can still be seen today.

The Christians, on the other hand, took to burying their dead within the city walls and even under the floors of their churches, which is why so many are filled with beautiful tombstones and funerary monuments from the medieval to the baroque periods.

Unlike the ancients, the Christians liked to be reminded of death and the proximity of the departed, which helped them to see beyond the pleasures of this world and dwell on the afterlife and the rewards or punishments that they believed awaited them. Consequently imagery of death, of skulls and skeletons, virtually unknown in classical art, becomes ubiquitous in the Christian centuries.

Giovanni Battista Di Egidio Bertani’s The Vision of Ezekiel (1554).

Hence the subject of this intriguing if somewhat eclectic exhibition is rooted in the Christian tradition and most of the works date from the Renaissance to the present day, where it is perhaps surprising to find motifs of skulls and the theme of the memento mori more popular than they have been since the 17th century. A part of the exhibition is devoted to Mexico, which is a particular case because the ancient Aztec culture, which practised regular human sacrifice, was already obsessed with death and the underworld.

Aztec art is filled with gruesome images of skulls and demons that make Christian imagery look tame in comparison. In any case the encounter of this culture with Spanish Catholicism, which had its own morbid preoccupation with death, produced a bizarre hybrid in which skulls and skeletons have broken out of temples and churches to invade everyday life in every possible form.

A Jose Guadalupe Posada print satirising society with skeletons.

The most notable example of this phenomenon here is a collection of woodblock prints with humorous and satirical images of members of every class of society, all represented as skeletons or calaveras (from the same Latin word that gave us the word Calvary, or skull mountain). They are the work of Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), whose prints were widely known in his own time but discovered by audiences outside Mexico between the wars.

Within the Christian tradition, skeletons regularly appear in scenes of the Last Judgment, when bodies are shown rising from their graves and even being disgorged by wild animals or sea creatures that had devoured them. One print of this motif here — specifically referring to the Book of Ezekiel — is accompanied by an inscription in Latin promising that the skeletons will once again be clothed in flesh.

Medieval art developed several variations on a theme generally referred to as the danse macabre, or dance of death, and whose general intention was to remind us that the end can come to anyone at the most unexpected time. There was a particular pathos in images of the young and beautiful cut off prematurely, and artists and no doubt their audiences seemed to take a special pleasure in dwelling on the downfall of the great and the powerful.

Here the subject seems to merge with the resurrection at the Last Judgment in an image from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), while Duerer’s image of Father Time importuning a young woman is a variation on the theme.

Four images by Holbein also evoke various faces of death: death is better than life, says a caption from Ecclesiastes under a picture of an ancient crone.

In another a husband tells his new bride that only death will separate them, but death is already at hand, beating his drum, perhaps anticipating the dangers of a first pregnancy, always the most perilous event in a young woman’s life.

In a third image, with a saying ironically borrowed from Matthew’s Gospel — “come to me all you who are burdened” — death tugs at the sleeve of a heavily laden porter. The moral is akin to that of Jean de La Fontaine’s poem in which an old woodsman calls on death to end his sufferings, but when he arrives simply asks for help in picking up his bundle of wood again.

Significantly, the subject continued even in the following centuries when religious belief had waned but when the theme of death as a leveller, with its potential for social and moral commentary, had lost nothing of its relevance.

In the age of mass publishing, images of death became a powerful shorthand for everything from the devastating effect of a cholera epidemic (1912) to evocations of German brutality in World War II.

Skulls and skeletons also became a way of graphically and memorably publicising public health risks and social problems. Thus a mid-19th century cartoon for Punch (1845) denounces sweatshop labour with an image of a fat businessman smoking a cigar while supervising a group of cross-legged skeleton tailors. Another cartoon, by Thomas Nast (1870), has King Death awarding a first prize medal to Bacchus, evidently a comment on the ravages of alcoholism. The iconography is faulty because Bacchus is represented in the likeness of Silenus but, even more significantly, the charge is an unfair one considering that the truly devastating alcoholism of the modern age was caused not by wine but by the abuse of spirits, always more popular in the US (think of Nicolas Cage filling his shopping trolley in Leaving Las Vegas).

EW Kemble’s Death's Laboratory (1905).

An effective cartoon by EW Kemble, titled Death’s Laboratory (1905), denounces cheap patent medicines intended for the poor and, according to this document, based on a mixture of laudanum — liquid opium, as consumed by Thomas De Quincey and other romantic authors — and alcohol. The same essential formula, it seems, was claimed to calm nerves, put children to sleep, settle the stomach and even heal diseased lungs.

More recently — in fact three decades ago now, in 1987 — similar imagery was used to great effect in the Grim Reaper campaign of television advertisements, one of which is shown here. At the time, AIDS had been known for four or five years, but it was still necessary to convince the public that it could affect anyone. The ads had a powerful emotional impact, and young people just beginning to explore sexuality in the late 1980s found themselves in a dark and fearful environment that could not be more different from the anything-goes ethos of a decade earlier.

Charles Allan Gilbert’s All is Vanity postcard, c1905.

Skulls by themselves are a standard prop in memento mori images of all kinds, including still lifes, but also in pictures of saints in penitence or spiritual meditation, such as Joos van Cleve’s picture of St Jerome, translator of the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into Latin, who sits weeping on the transience of human life, his hand on a skull. The label above reads homo bulla — man is a bubble.

From the 19th century and the age of photography there are several sinister trick pictures in which what appear to be skulls turn out to be, for example, two young girls sitting side-by-side, their black hair composing the shadow of the skull’s eye sockets. One of the most sinister, an old theme reprised in a new technological format, has a beautiful woman sitting at her dressing table: her head and its reflection in this case form the two eye sockets.

Such intimations of mortality even colour the anatomical diagrams of the early modern period. Those of antiquity may have been quite different, judging by the oddly seated figures with their neutral and impassive expressions that we see in medieval anatomical texts based on ancient sources, or the Fasciculus medicinae printed in Venice in 1493.

Here, one of the earliest anatomical images is a hand-coloured plate from an early 16th-century printed book of hours: a skeleton with what seems a jester between its legs, is surrounded by four smaller figures that stand for the four temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholy and phlegmatic), which correspond respectively to the four humours in the human body (blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm) and the four elements in the world (air, fire, earth and water) as well as the four seasons and four ages of man. The greatest work of early modern anatomy, Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543) is famous not only for the beauty and accuracy of its anatomical diagrams but for the uncanny melancholy of images such as a skeleton with its hand on a skull, pondering the mystery of mortality.

Later images here almost inevitably present flayed, dissected or even skeletal figures still in action and motion, partly to show the function of the system in action but inevitably evoking thoughts of the frailty of human life.

There are countless other images in this exhibition, from a sinister painting by Rick Amor combining that other disturbing subject, the ventriloquist’s doll, with a skull whose dislocated jaw suggests not only death but violence. Finally, a virtual reality work by Shaun Gladwell has a skull hurtling towards us through space like a meteorite, until we enter one of its cavities and travel around its inner spaces as though through chambers of the underworld.

Romancing the Skull

Ballarat Art Gallery, Ballarat, Victoria, to January 28