The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe
THE ART OF MORTALITY IN RENAISSANCE EUROPE
the “mirror” referenced in the title of the new book The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe, represents both the ivory-colored skull beneath one’s skin and a harbinger of one’s physical fate. In his essay that shares the book’s title, editor Stephen Perkinson writes that during the early 16th century, a Dutch engraver known simply as Master S created an image of a cadaver rising from the grave below. He bears a banner with a Dutch phrase that exhorts viewers, “Mirror yourselves, people, on the mud of the earth: I am so as you will become.” Could a truer portrait of humankind be rendered?
Perkinson is an associate professor of art history at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and guest curator of the exhibition The Ivory Mirror, currently on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art through Nov. 26. “There was a story to be told and the way to tell the story is through objects,” he said in an interview. The accompanying book includes contributions by Elizabeth Morrison, senior curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum; Naomi Speakman, curator of late medieval Europe at the British Museum; Katherine Baker, assistant professor of art history at Arkansas State University; and Emma Maggie Solberg, assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College. But for all its impressive scholarly input, the book isn’t an overly wordy or inscrutable text. Perkinson’s lengthy introductory essay “The Ivory Mirror” takes up most of it. The text is illustrated throughout, and includes a large section of plates of objects in the exhibition. It is a thought-provoking, erudite examination of its subject, considering that much has already been written about artistic depictions of mortality and the memento mori.
We may not think of death as something belonging to a particular artistic genre. The term “genre painting” is often used to describe works that depict everyday scenes, produced in the golden age of Dutch and Flemish painting during the 16th and 17th centuries. It was a period rife with depictions of street and market scenes, still lifes, and domestic themes. But in her foreword to The Ivory Mirror, Bowdoin College Museum of Art co-director Anne Collins Goodyear identifies the memento mori as nother kind of genre
work. In her opening paragraphs, she sums up the artistic and literary intentions behind the memento mori as a reminder to viewers to “remember death.” The memento mori has its origins in the Renaissance period, but the figure appears in later works such as the Dutch landscape, portrait, and history paintings that dominated the Dutch Golden Age.
The book is a fascinating foray into some of the macabre elements of pre-Enlightenment art — skulls, skeletons, the figure of Death itself — tropes which, though they may startle, unnerve, or repel, have an unequivocally didactic reasoning behind their ubiquity. Collins Goodyear writes that their proliferation in European art coincided with booms in the arts and sciences and in a new-found humanism that characterized the Renaissance. The memento mori existed as a kind of foil to the conceits (one might say hubris) of humankind. But humanity’s great and lasting works exist, too, as a bulwark against death itself because they live on, even when their makers have long since passed into history.
The catalog is also engagingly written. As we approach this Halloween night, who can’t get behind a sentence that reads, “The bony face meets your gaze, grinning out at you with his toothy rictus?” Perkinson refers to a skull in an elephant ivory chaplet, a beaded garland from circa 1530 that was similar to a rosary, although the ones in the exhibition and shown in the book show little wear. Each bead contains a carved relief of a human face, but on the opposite side of the beads are the antitheses of the living visage: the faces of death. One of these skulls even has worms squirming from the corners of its leering smile. It may not be often stated in the art history books, but it’s not just sublime representations of beauty that sell, but also the morbid and the grotesque — because they hold a certain very human fascination. However, that is hardly the main reason we see death depicted so often in Renaissance and Baroque works. As Perkinson points out in the text, “death was a pervasive part of life,” in the 15th and 16th centuries, and he calls our present-day ability to mask and ignore mortality from the comforts of our homes a “distinctly modern” development. “In the 15th and 16th centuries, people were more comfortable with confronting these issues — and, in fact, not just comfortable with it, but actively cultivating their interest by acquiring luxury goods like books, ivories, metal work, prints, and paintings that convey the theme,” he said. “Today, of course, we tend to repress the theme, and it bubbles up in genres like zombie movies and things like that. But we try to keep it at arm’s length, more so than they did then.”
Mortality is, of course, the constant state that each individual shares. Nothing addresses this as succinctly as the iconography of the danse macabre (dance of death), which, according to Perkinson, achieved its penultimate expression at the end of the 15th century. Artwork typically depicted Death appearing to a broad spectrum of social classes, suggesting that no one, not even royalty or the aristocracy, is immune to its advances. Perkinson gives a popular illustrated literary example from 1485: Parisian printer Guy Marchant’s Danse macabre, each page of which detailed the fates of characters who, collectively, represented men from all levels of society (a later edition, The
Danse macabre of women, dealt with the opposite sex).
Death, however, is not necessarily treated so matter of factly in all Renaissance art and literature. There was a religious component, as the ivory prayer beads illustrate. But other objects of personal devotion, such as prayer books, often contained illustrations of the Office of the Dead, a daily prayer cycle normally observed on Nov. 2, All Soul’s Day, and recited on behalf of loved ones in Purgatory. The Office of the Dead was also a reminder of one’s own impending death, as an illustration in a 16th-century French Book of Hours, in which a humbled man gazes at his own reflection in a mirror held by up by the dead, shows us. Morrison’s essay “The Light at the End of the Tunnel” deals primarily with the treatment of death in such illuminated manuscripts. She considers the spiritual dimension of death as it appeared in illuminations from the Middle Ages. “Death meant the end of the body’s life in this world,” she writes, “but it was also considered as simply a marker delimiting the next phase of existence for the soul.” She goes on to advance the idea that life and death were seen as being in constant interaction. The living appealed to the dead for guidance in life and the dead relied on the prayers of the living in the afterlife.
Morris explains how the book, as an item, exists as intercessor, making frequent appearances alongside figures of death in medieval and Renaissance art. She views the frequent appearance of the book as an acknowledgment by the artists of the long history of writing about death, as well as a signifier of its importance in prayer books and religious texts. The book itself, however, had power. In addition to a section titled “Book as Intercessor,” she includes a section called “Intercessor as Book” to consider this second angle in greater detail. In the case of Book of Hours, for instance, the very act of reading aided in purging the soul of sin. The Ivory Mirror expounds on the idea of the memento mori as more than a simple reminder of death, offering fascinating insight into how its depiction in art changed over time. In formal portraiture, for instance, the presence of a skull as an actual physical object, not merely a symbolic or allegorical one, lent the sitter a certain learned prestige and wisdom. “By the time you get to the year 1600 or so, you’ve got objects that are depicted as much more self-sufficient,” Perkinson said. In the book, he discusses how around the middle of the 16th century, increasing knowledge of the human anatomy impacted its appearance in the portraits of surgeons, where it served a dual purpose. “It references the sitter’s profession,” he writes, “but it also functions as a memento mori, and thus signifies the man’s awareness of his own mortality.”
“The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe” was published by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in 2017.
As we approach this Halloween night, who can’t get behind a sentence that reads, “The bony face meets your gaze, grinning out at you with his toothy rictus?”