When did death lose its skin?

December 22, 2023 4:46 AM

In art history terms, when did the physical manifestation of death move to being commonly portrayed as a bony skeleton, instead of a weird dried-up skin-on corpse?

In medieval art, images of Death definitely have skin and some rounded tissue. When did this stop being the norm, and get replaced with death as a fleshless skeleton? In these examples, it looks like the mid 1800's are where skeletons start becoming more and more common, but what I'm wondering is whether there's a specific art movement or cultural change that prompted this.

posted by Naib to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

The Danse Macabre art coming out of the late 1300s into the 1500s has a good mix of fleshy and full skeleton depictions of death. Europeans got real obsessed with the plague. A lot of these pieces are a delight, for folks who like dancing spooky boys, which I do. I don't think there's a clear turning point between fleshy and bony in personified death, artists were doing both for hundreds of years there.

My gut guess though is that the Tudors had something to do with it, just because they usually do. Holbein was THE hottest Tudor painter, the one who did the famously beefy Henry VIII, and Holbein also had a series of woodcut vignettes of death goofing around in everyday Tudor life. That death was a bony skeleton, no flesh to be seen. Given how influential the Tudor era was to Western art and culture, I'd bet Holbein's image of death had a huge impact on what followed.

See also the very cool skull in The Ambassadors.
posted by phunniemee at 5:46 AM on December 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Best answer: You may be interested in the answer I gave about the association of scythe with death for r/askhistorians. More research would be necessary, but at least Death was pictured as a skeleton as early as the mid 15th century. Scholars have linked this change in representation to the difficult living conditions of the late Middle ages.
posted by elgilito at 5:49 AM on December 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

Whose Death? I think plenty of personifications of death are still never portrayed as skeletal. Eg. King Yama and Thanatos. In the European scene, here's a painting from 1897 with a very life-like death.

The Wikipedia article on personifications of Death has a wide variety of artistic depictions, and even several Western figures whose representations remain non-skeletal, including banshees, Hel, etc.

So I think you have to narrow down which Death you're talking about, and even if you narrowly focus on the Death/Grim Reaper of the Four Horsemen/Biblical fame, you'll see plenty of non-skeletal modern depictions.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:03 AM on December 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Here is a really great article on the subject (that sums up what many people above stated in their answers) via Art & Object
posted by haplesschild at 10:15 AM on December 22, 2023 [2 favorites]