6 / Death

• • La Calavera de la CatrinaJosé Guadalupe Posada (Mexican, 1852–1913)	Bis PoleAsmat artist(s), Omadsep village, New Guinea, Papua (Irian Jaya) Province, Indonesia	Twin Figures (Ère Ìbejì)Yoruba artist, Nigeria	Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (The Ambassadors)Hans Holbein the Younger (German, 1497–1543)	My Love Sings When the Flower is Near (The Philosopher and the Woman)Angelo Filomeno (Italian, b. 1963)	Memorial for Solomon and Joseph HaysUnknown artist, United States
    Eagle CoffinWorkshop of Kane Quaye, Teshe, Ghana	Death leading a doctor holding a vial of urine. La Danse Macabre.Unknown artist, France	Triumph of DeathPieter Bruegel the Elder (Netherlandish, c. 1525–1569)	A page from the Ars MoriendiUnknown artist, Germany	Terracotta Army (detail) from the Tomb Complex of Qin Shi HuangdiUnknown artist(s), China	Kha and His Wife Meryt Before Osiris (detail) from the Book of the DeadUnknown artist, Egypt
    Realm of Hungry Ghosts (from The Six Realms of Rebirth)School of/Style of Hirotaka, Japan	Coffin of HenettawyUnknown Artist, Deir el-Bahri, western Thebes, Egypt	Ancestral Effigy (Rambaramp)Vanuatu artist(s), Tomman Island, Vatbuyang Village, Vanuatu	Funeral Portrait of a WomanUnknown Artist, Egypt

expert perspective

Larry Silver Professor of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania

“

The Holbein Ambassadors is such a different kind of picture from anything anyone had painted before that it is a kind of epitaph for the painter. The amount of physical detail is astonishing and the picture really is life-size. So when you confront it in London, it’s an astonishing experience. So that alone probably would be a kind of memorial for a painter. He was a court painter to Henry VIII. On the one hand, it certainly has a message that may have been very comfortable to a pious patron, that yes, I think about death, but it’s at a strange corner of my mind. But it also is an indication that the artist was himself involved in this culture. People who paid to have epitaph pictures were, in effect, just asking for a continuity of what they had. The idea of memorial is a kind of hope that they’d be remembered, but also a hope that the good things of this life would be repeated or enhanced in the next life. They used their wealth, in a way, to assure their afterlife. And that’s very much present in the Holbein Ambassadors. You see worldly instruments, instruments that measure the heavens, instruments that are geographical, globes, you see works of creativity, you see lutes, songbooks, architect squares. So it’s very clear there is a joy, a delight in what you can accomplish in this life. And the two characters who are presented there are such accomplished men.

Death is the loss of all these wonderful opportunities. And only with some guidance are you told that this strange white object that seems to go diagonally across the picture is something you need to look at from a different point of view. But it comes right when you turn to that side edge of the picture and look down on it. And, in fact, you see it reconciled as a skull. But at the time that you can see that, you are so much at the edge of the picture that you can see almost nothing else in it. So the experience is one where you can choose to see the worldly goods and people or you can focus on the skull itself. So there is this surprise, but also a kind of willful choice about which of the two you are going to respond to. To have to look at a picture from two different angles in order to make its meaning come across is a brilliant manipulation by the artist of anybody who looks at the picture. You have to get a different point of view even to think about death in the midst of all those wonderful, worldly trappings.”