Death in Art

Kevin Llewellyn Cadaver Study

Death is the end of life, the living’s last heart beat and breath and the completion of the life cycle. Death is represented in art as a cloaked skeletal figure, a skull and corpse among other guises. The cloaked skeleton is the personification of death, the grim reaper, who approaches as death becomes inevitable and ends life. The skull represents the peeling away of the face revealing the casing of the mind.

My interest in death lies in my interest in mortality, old age, the decayed body and the anatomical structure layered in a lifeless body. With death comes a peeling back of layers, skin, muscles, organs – embalming and mummification complete the process for the deceased. For organ donors the non living body becomes a sum of it’s parts, a commodity to help the living if possible.

In philosophy and religion, death presents us various views and beliefs. Two philosophical notions, dualism and physicalism, question whether there is an immaterial soul or whether the body is only a complicated organ capable of immense things. Most religious views have a belief in the afterlife and the continuation of living in some other form after life has been completed. For Christians death leads to heaven, or hell to nonbelievers. For Buddhists death restarts the life cycle in reincarnation, the person becoming another living entity in another shape.

The theme of death in art has been around for centuries. Death and the last living hours are present in the passion of the Christ, a subject matter that has been present strongly through art’s history. Christ on the cross has seen much iteration throughout the centuries, from El Greco’s Christ Carrying the Cross

To Velázquez’s Christ on the Cross- 1632

Death in art has the power to confront the viewer with their own mortality, their own livingness, in ways that surpass normal emotions. In most modern countries, death is something that is hidden away from people, separated into cemeteries and funerals. Most would agree that death is an inherently bad thing, that living surpasses death in possible everyway. In Mexican culture, death is celebrated in the Day of the Dead (El Día de los Muertos- Nov 2nd) the holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died. Death in culture has such wide ranging importance between nations and societies that simple analysis does little justice to the range of connotations.

In Ancient Greece death was personified as a bearded and winged manKevin Llewellyn

In Germanic folklore Death was a guise of Odin. The 'Grim' of Grim Reaper being derived from Grimnir, a name for Odin.

Wotan takes leave of brunhild by Konrad Dielitz

Old Slavic tribes viewed Death as a woman in white clothes, with a never-fading green sprout in her hand. The touch of the sprout would put a human to an everlasting sleep.

In the Bible, the fourth horseman of Revelation 6 is called Death, and is pictured with Hades following him.

Autopsy Alexander Carletti

Autopsy is a painting which I began featuring a medical examination of a corpse. An Autopsy is a medical procedure that consists of a thorough examination of a human corpse to determine the cause and manner of a person's death and to evaluate any disease or injury that may be present. It is usually performed by a pathologist, from the Greek words "pathos" meaning "disease" and "logos" meaning "a treatise" = a treatise of disease.

Rembrandt’s
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. 1632

Death as a cutthroat by Alfred Rethel

Egon schiele
Death and the maiden 1915

Triumphing Death by Alfred Rethel

Dantes inferno
"This miserable way
is taken by the sorry souls of thoses
who lived without disgrace and without praise.
They now commingle with the coward angels,
the company of those who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.
The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
have cast them out, not will deep Hell recieve them-
even the wicked cannot glory in them."
Inferno, Canto III, lines 34-42: Virgil on the Neutrals in the Ante-Hell.

Here one must leave behind all hesitation;
here every cowardice must meet its death.
Inferno: Canto III, lines 14-15

Death presents the artist with the theme of decay and mortality, a reminder to the living of their own livingness. The theme fits into the dark arts, the macabre and gruesome, the unhinged and strange. Death is an event, an experience, the terminal experience of one’s life, however death has a wider relation than that in art. Images of death personified, the dead, corpses and autopsies among other images, form the fabric for death’s tight grip.