While the less well-off contemplated the futility of life by viewing the death imagery in the cheapest possible medium of print, the rich could prettify their deathly encounter with illuminated manuscripts and woodcuts, art forms exclusive to the elite.
Religious images of this period were designed to inspire spiritual contemplation, especially representations of Christ’s life and Passion. A viewer becomes not only a witness but an active participant of the events depicted through engaging his emotions and imagination. Significant proportion of illuminated manuscripts conceived as private devotional objects was concerned with mortality.
Visions of Death and Journey Through Purgatory, Hell and Heaven
Echoing the narrative principle of Danse Macabre, Simon Marmion depicted the motif of procession in the illuminated manuscript for Margaret of York. His visual interpretation of the literary text Visions of Tondal depicts the knight’s journey through hell, purgatory and heaven in the role of the viewer. As viewer/pedestrian, Tondal encounters various possible manifestations of his unavoidable future. Although still alive, the knight’s state of unconsciousness brings the visions of what awaits him after his death.
In the Mary of Burgundy’s Book of Hours illuminated by Vienna Master ‘the act of contemplating Christ’s Passion was an important route to salvation, and its contemplation and mental re-enactment was one of the central goals of the worshipper at this period’ (Susie Nash).
In a parallel way, the viewer of Tondal’s adventure can identify with him as a viewer of the after-life realms by assuming the role of a pedestrian on an imaginary journey. Here, the visions are an inevitable future that is death.
Meadow links the visions of death to the element of the passage of time, where ‘the claims already effected by Death, the images seen, serve as signposts for the inevitability of those to come’, and the present is continually shading into past. However, Tondal and the viewer are still alive and witnessing only a possible fate in the after-life.
Tondal and the viewer are seeing a possible future by means of visions and imaginative contemplation respectively. In the act of spiritual devotion, the illuminated manuscript would have inspired the desire to live well in order to lessen the suffering in the after-life, which was a primary concern of a devotional object.
Representations of Death
Meadow classifies the representations of Death into two types: dramatic and juxtapositional. In both types of imagery, the figure of Death is accompanied by its mortal counterpart and typically some sort of interaction between the two takes place.
The relationship between the protagonists ranges from comical as in Dodtendantz, the woodcut version of Dance of Death published by Heinrich Knoblochtzer in c. 1485, to violent such as Woman Attacked by Death, an engraving by Albrecht Dürer , to almost consoling in Young Man and Death by Housebook Master.
However, in the Allegory of the Transience of Life by Albrecht Dürer there is no such partner for Death. Yet the recumbent skeleton seems to have an ‘attitude’ characteristic of the dramatic type as outlined by Meadow: ‘In the dramatic type, Death actively menaces or claims his victim in the image, reminding the viewer of the eventual struggle that will signify his own end.’In the print, the skeleton appears to be reclining in his tomb or grave, in an assured and challenging pose, sardonically grinning, almost laughing. His frontal position suggests that he confronts the viewer directly and his shroud falling over the lower border of the picture gives impression of Death entering the viewer’s space.
This sense of immediacy evoked by pictorial devices seems to prompt the beholder to acknowledge his impending fate and obey the Ten Commandments prominently displayed at the centre of the picture.
Sources:
- Woods Kim W, Richardson Carol M, Lymberopoulou Angeliki, Viewing Renaissance Art, Yale University Press, 2007
- Nash, Susie, Northern Renaissance Art, Oxford University Press, 2008
- Meadow, M.A., ‘The observant pedestrian and Albrecht Dürer’s Promenade’, Art History, 15:2, June 1992, pp. 197-222.
Zuzana Minarikova - I live in London and work in publishing in Bloomsbury which is an exciting part of London, full of museums, galleries, bookshops and ...
