Art and epigram regarding science and medicine in relation to death : being a reprint of a communication from the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (Section of the History of Medicine), 1914, Vol. VII, pp. 192-217 : together with an addition on epigram and art in relation to the excessive fear of death / by F. Parkes Weber.

  • Weber, Frederick Parkes, 1863-1962.
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Art and epigram regarding science and medicine in relation to death : being a reprint of a communication from the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (Section of the History of Medicine), 1914, Vol. VII, pp. 192-217 : together with an addition on epigram and art in relation to the excessive fear of death / by F. Parkes Weber. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    his subject/ Even when Death was represented by a skeleton or a shrivelled figure of skin and bones (the German Hautskeletf) in life- like attitude, the snakes and toads were often not omitted. Thus, in a German fifteenth century woodcut (by an unknown artist) of “ Death in the Jaws of Hell” (reproduced in the ‘‘Catalogue of Early German and Flemish Woodcuts in the British Museum,” by Campbell Dodgson, 1903, vol. i, pi. 2), Death, who is represented by a shrivelled figure of skin and bones (in the mouth of a monster who is vomiting up flames), is accompanied by a snake and has a toad in place of the conventional fig-leaf.^ So also, in the fifteenth-century engraving of “Death warning a Youth,” by the “ Meister des iVmsterdamer Kabinets,”''’ the lifelike shrivelled figure representing Death is accompanied by a toad and snake. I have elsewhere’^ referred at some length to the horror-inspiring aspect of riiemento mori religious art and to the ghastly spectacle of decay and putrefaction revealed in pictures by Valdes-Leal, &c. A small panel- painting in the possession of Dr. Pietro Capparoni, of Rome, seems to rival all others in this respect. It represents a man’s head in a state of putrefaction and being “eaten by worms” and coleoptera. The head rests on a closed book; by the side is a winged hourglass, and above is suspended a small iron lamp, such as might be used to illuminate a dismal vault. In the upper right corner is the inscription from Ecclesiasticus xli, I, “(Mors) amara habenti pacem in suhstantiis suis.” The picture does not seem to me a very early one. In this connexion one may well remember the lines of Edward AMung (“ Night Thoughts,” 1742) “ The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave; The deep damp vault, the darkness, and the worm ; These are the bugbears of a winter’s eve. The terrors of the living, not the dead.” ' In regard to the spontaneous generation of worms and snakes from decaying corpses, an interesting passage is that quoted by -Jules Guiart from Pliny the Younger (“ Hist. Nat.,’' lib. X, cap. 66) ; “ Anguem ex medulla hominis spinale gigni, accepimus a multis. Pleraquo occulta et caeca origine proveniunt, etiam in quadrupedum genere.” Guiart thinks that the mediaeval representation of decaying corpses being “ eaten by worms” was preferred by the artists of the time as being more horror-inspiring (and therefore having a more powerfully memento mori admonitory effect) than the rex^resentation of dry skeletons. This is extremely probable, and moreover, the artist’s deficient anatomical (osteological) knowledge W'as some- what hidden by the ragged skin which covered the skeleton and partially concealed such mistakes as those of the Meister von Zwolle, who, in the above-mentioned design, placed the shoulder-blades of the skeleton-like figure in front of the thorax instead of on the back. - See P. P. Weber, loc. cit., p. 209, fig. 32. See F. P. Weber, loc. cit., p. 34. ' See F. P. Weber,.loc. cit., pp. 56-G8.