Skull

Skull is a subject in art. The gallery holds 143 works in this subject in art, including works by Paolo Veronese, Georges de La Tour and El Greco.

The human skull is among art's most enduring symbols, valued less as anatomy than as a blunt reminder that the body decays. As the bony enclosure protecting the brain of a vertebrate—cartilaginous in some fish and amphibians—it became, in Western art, the central emblem of the memento mori, the Latin admonition to "remember that you must die." The motif has deep Christian roots: Golgotha, the site of the Crucifixion, means "place of the skull," and from at least the time of Origen (c. 185–253) a tradition held that Adam was buried there. This is why a skull so often rests at the foot of the cross—as in Fra Angelico's The Crucifixion and Petrus Christus's The Lamentation—signifying that Christ's blood redeems the sin of the first man.

The skull also served as a saint's attribute, marking figures who had renounced worldly vanity for contemplation of eternity. Penitents such as Mary Magdalene and the scholar-hermit Saint Jerome are shown meditating upon one, a convention Albrecht Dürer helped fix in his engravings. Georges de La Tour gave the theme its most haunting form: in The Penitent Magdalen, the saint cradles a skull by candlelight, her gaze turned from a mirror of vanity toward the flame of spiritual enlightenment.

The skull's richest flowering came in the vanitas still life, which emerged in the early seventeenth-century Netherlands and was centered on Calvinist Leiden. Jacques de Gheyn II's Vanitas Still Life of 1603—the earliest known example—pairs a skull with a soap bubble, evoking the idea of homo bulla, "man is a bubble." Painters such as Pieter Claesz, whose Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill is a model of the type, and Harmen Steenwijck assembled skulls with snuffed candles, watches, and books to preach the futility of learning, wealth, and pleasure. Jan van Kessel the Elder and church-interior specialists like Emanuel de Witte extended the meditation on transience.

The motif never died. Paul Cézanne's Pyramid of Skulls, Picasso's late variations, Andy Warhol's Skull screenprints of 1976, and Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted For the Love of God (2007) all renew the ancient bargain between mortality and luxury, proving the skull remains art's most economical image of the end.