With winter fast approaching, it is only a matter of months before our shivering bodies will be wrapped, layered, and decorated with all things knitted, sewn, and crocheted. As with any items of fashion, there are certain symbols and icons that come and go, whereas others are in it for the long haul. In the mid-nineties, I clearly remember butterflies being the choice of adornment and they could be seen on t-shirts, hairclips, and even tattooed onto the lower backs of young women, strategically peeking out from above the waistband of the very popular hipster jeans. The butterfly represented beauty, freedom and of course renewal, much as the mythical phoenix rises from ashes, so does the reviled brown caterpillar emerge into a radiant and colourful butterfly. However, the butterfly symbol seems to have done its dash – the hairclips and t-shirts have been pushed deep down into the closet along with platform sneakers and cargo pants. One symbol that has been uniquely resilient however, even through the 'fad-tastic' eras of the eighties and nineties, is the human skull. While fashion seems to be undeniably cyclical (meaning that the butterfly symbol may soon rise from the ashes again), the symbol of the skull has been strangely omnipresent throughout art, fashion and craft.
An online search of craft patterns provides a plethora of death's head delights, from Shabana Ahmed's crocheted Easter skull featured on the aptly named Skull-A-Day website, to Severina's knitted skull stockings and instructions on how to felt your own 'skull and crossbones tote' on Helloyarn.com, proving that the time-tested traditions of crafting are injecting modernity through the use of a symbol that looks more at home on the chest of a heavy metal rocker than your nan's tea cosy. However, the symbol of the human skull is far from modern at all, and has been used since the fourteenth century when death personifications confronted people with memento mori, a latin term literally translated as 'remember you must die'. Due to the decimation caused by wars, failing crops and the Black Death, one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, highly concentrated incidences of death and dying created both a fear and acceptance of mortality in the fourteenth century, as well as an acknowledgement and forewarning. Historian Philippe Ariés states in Western Attitudes Toward Death that many people in the Middle Ages 'did not die without having had time to realise that they were going to die', and consequently wanted to 'tame' their deaths by preparing for them. [1]
Since its introduction to art in the fourteenth century, the skull has been embraced as one of the most significant symbols in art history. As opposed to the full-bodied skeletal incarnation of Death, death's head avoids personification because it is an abrupt representation of the morbid reality of death: a detached human head. This confronting reality is difficult for the human brain to ignore, as a recent study at the University of Wales confirmed a region on the lateral surface of the brain that responds specifically to facial recognition, therefore the human brain cannot separate the image of a human skull from that of a human face. [2] An element that makes the image of a skull even more disturbing in its ability to simultaneously fascinate and repel is the notion that its large eye sockets give the skull a degree of juvenilisation or neoteny which is visually appealing to a society traditionally preoccupied with youth. [3]
While memento mori motifs used the figure of a skeleton to graphically distinguish between the living and the dead, the solitary skull was not widely popularised in visual art until the early-sixteenth century, when the style of vanitas evolved from the Netherlands and gained independent status. The term 'vanitas' was taken from the fifth-century Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, in which the phrase 'vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas' appears (Ecclesiastes 1:2) and can be translated to 'vanity of vanities; all is vanity'. Considering this, vanitas art, while still maintaining the memento mori theme of life's ephemerality, also possesses moral undertones that suggest that the pursuit of worldly pleasures and goods is worthless, though ironically, vanitas paintings themselves were, and continue to be, valuable and collectable commodities. Vanitas art commonly took the form of still-life paintings, rich in symbols that represented life's temporality—such as fruit, flowers, butterflies, bubbles, candles, smoke, hourglasses and the human skull, as shown in Philippe de Champaigne's Still-Life with a Skull—as well as musical instruments, cloth, wine, and books, representing the pursuit of worldly pleasures.
From vanitas paintings, the symbol of the skull found its way to trompe-l'œil illustrations—images that up close looked like an innocent scene but when viewed from afar clearly represented the shape of a human skull—such as Blossom and Decay created by an unknown artist in 1860, photography such as Phillipe Halsman's In Voluptas Mors (1951), and countless other prints, paintings and sculptures such as Damien Hirst's epic diamond-skull For the Love of God (2007). In 1974 Ariés wrote 'the attitude toward death may appear almost static over very long periods of time. It appears to be a-chronic. And yet, at certain moments, changes occur, usually slow and unnoticed changes, but sometimes, as today, more rapid and perceptible ones'. [4] Certainly, while the symbol of the human skull may at one point in history have been viewed with a fear of mortality, it is now not only being embraced, but emblazoned on our scarves, beanies, jumpers and mittens, not as a reminder of death, but as a celebration of life and its creative, crafty, wintery joys.
© Louise O'Neil
Louise O'Neil is an Art History Honours graduate from the University of Queensland and is a Brisbane-based freelance arts writer and curator.
[1] Ariés, Phillipe, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Trans. Patricia M. Ranum. Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1975. p. 2
[2] Downing, Paul, New Function Identified for an Area of the Brain. Wales Bangor U, 28 September 2001. Web. 7 Apr. 2010
[3] Charlton, Bruce. "Psychological Neoteny and Higher Education: Associations with Delayed Parenthood." Medical Hypotheses, 69, 2007. p. 237
[4] Ibid.
