looking figure as the artist has represented. L. A. Willette painted this subject of La Fontaine's fable in 1882, and many other artistic illustrations of it (prints, &c.) exist. It is said that La Fontaine, by his fable, La Mort et le Bucheron, intended to express his sympathy with the hard life and sufferings of the French peasants under the old aristocratic regime (Jules Andrieu, quoted by Lady Ritchie, in her Madame de Sévigné); but, of course, there is also the Aesopian fable, "Death and the Woodcutter," of ancient classical times. Guiart figures a water-colour sketch by Villon, a young artist of Lyons, representing a grisly figure of Death laying hold of a miser, a powerful rendering of a subject which has likewise been dealt with by others (including Holbein). In regard to the subject of misers and death several satirical Greek epigrams may be compared, for instance, Anthol. Graec. Palat., xi. Nos. 166 and 168 to 172 and 264. Of these No. 171 is by Lucilius, and refers to a miser who preferred death to paying the physician's fee on his recovery-and so he died, after having bequeathed all his property to himself, but he carried away with him only the obol in his mouth (Charon's fee). No. 264, likewise by Lucilius, is about a miser who dreamt that he had spent money and hanged himself from vexation. No. 170, by Nicarchus, is quoted in another portion of this book. A spirited caricature of "La Revanche " by the modern French artist, Jean Veber (likewise figured by Guiart), represents the dead soldiers of 1870 rising from their graves to follow the skeleton drummer and once more try the issue of the fight. A design (in the same grimly humorous spirit, though perhaps rather profane), which might be labelled "Recruiting the Dead," is suggested by an English newspaper paragraph during the Great European War (April, 1915). The paragraph in question referred to a recruiting appeal said to have been posted up on the cemetery gates in a Suffolk coast town: "A Call to Arms.-Wake up!-Your King and Country need you."-None of the inhabitants of the cemetery did "wake up," according to report. The dreadful realism with which death and decay have sometimes been represented is well exemplified by the Spanish artist, Juan de Valdes Leal (1630–1691), in his "Finis Gloriae Mundi" picture (referred to also in Part I. C.) at the Caridad Hospital at Seville. Murillo is said to have remarked of this picture that it was so forcibly painted that it was necessary to hold one's nose when looking at it see Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell's Annals of the Artists of Spain, new edition, 1891, vol. 4, p. 1291. But as to the deliberate insistence on the thought of death being especially congenial to the ethical temper of the Spanish people, cf. Havelock Ellis's The Soul of Spain, London, 1908, pp. 24-26; and Emile Verhaeren's España Negra (translated from the French of the Belgian poet) referred to by Ellis. In regard to disagreeable realism in art, one may recall the statue of the flayed St. Bartholomew at Milan (seventeenth century) bearing the sculptor's proud inscription: "Non me Praxiteles sed Marcus finxit Agrates." Marco d'Agrate's figure, with the stripped-off skin carried like a shawl, is practically a "muscle-man," or écorché manikin, similar to those used for anatomical teaching. An anatomical-like figure holding the stripped-off skin exists somewhere else in Italy. Another écorché figure (bronze), in the Stuttgart Museum, has the base inscribed: "Homo bulla Memento mori Vigilate et orate." In the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) there is a horrible statuette (see Fig. 27) of Death with bow and arrows, representing him as a skeleton (osteologically incorrect), his decaying flesh and skin, "eaten with worms," hanging about his bones like ragged clothes. It is carved in boxwood, and is supposed to be of German or Dutch eighteenth-century workmanship. A somewhat similar (but earlier?) wooden statuette is figured in Paul Richer's L'Art et la Médecine, Paris, 1902, p. 522, fig. 327; and also as a supplement to Aesculape, Paris, January, 1913. In respect of painful realism the picture of the Crucified Christ by Matthias Gruenewald at Karlsruhe (Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, Neue Folge, 1904, xv. page 153) may be also noted, but the muscles are exaggerated like those of an anatomical "muscle-man." To Valdes Leal's ghastly realism we may contrast the hidden allusion to Death (a distorted skull) in Holbein's picture (painted in 1533), known as "The Ambassadors," in the London National Gallery. In the latter picture the presence (on the floor in the foreground) of a curious memento mori, namely, a human skull elongated almost beyond recognition, as it would appear if reflected from a cylindrical concave mirror,133 is accounted for by what is known about Jean de Dinteville, Lord of Polisy, one of the two men represented. He wears in his black bonnet a jewel formed of a silver (or white enamel) skull set in gold, and there are reasons for supposing 133 A mirror of the kind which has been sometimes amusingly employed at eating-houses, to make intending diners see themselves looking long and thin, as if they required a dinner. The perspective distortion of an image here alluded to is technically known as anamorphosis. that at that time of his life (he was twenty-nine years of age when the picture was painted) he thought much of FIG. 27.-Wooden statuette of Death, represented as a decaying corpse with bow and arrows. Incorrect anatomy. death, and he had doubtless seen the so-called Holbein's "Dance of Death" designs, or similar designs in other series. 134 This picture by Holbein, and Holbein's portrait of Sir Brian Tuke, to which I have already alluded, throw much light on the use of memento mori devices in the sixteenth century. I shall later on refer to the favourite device of Erasmus, a terminal head with the legend "Cedo nulli," or "Concedo nulli," a device chosen for his medals and for the seal with which, in the house of Jerome Frobenius at Basel, he signed his last will, dated 12th February, 1536. With the hidden allusion to Death on Holbein's "Ambassadors" may be compared the hidden allusion to Death on a portrait in the Villa Borghese, at Rome, by the famous sixteenth-century Venetian. painter, Lorenzo Lotto. Lotto's picture represents a bearded man in the prime of life, standing in a room by the side of a window; his right hand rests on some flowers on a table, and amongst the flowers is a minute death's-head, doubtless carved in ivory; his left hand is pressed to his side, as if he might be in pain.135 A similar but more obvious allusion of the memento mori kind is that in a picture by Frans van Mieris at the Amsterdam Museum, representing a beautiful lady with some roses which she has just gathered, pointing to a human skull on an open book. Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) wrote: "Je vous envoie un bouquet Cela vous soit un exemple certain Que vos beautez, bien qu' elles soient fleuries, 134 See Holbein's Ambassadors, the Picture and the Men, by Mary S. Hervey, London, 1900. 135 See B. Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto, London, 1901, p. 190. This picture is illustrated facing p. 190. Edmund Waller (1606-1687) commenced his poem on the sending of a rose to a coy beauty: "Go, lovely rose! Tell her, that wastes her time and me, When I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be "; and ended thus: "Then die! that she The common fate of all things rare How small a part of time they share That are so wondrous sweet and fair!" In regard to poetical comparisons of human youth and beauty with the rose and perishable flowers, see also the epigrams, &c., referred to in Part I. A. H. P. Dodd (Epigrammatists, 1870, p. 52) gives the following English version (by C.) of an epigram by Rufinus in the Greek Anthology (Anthol. Graec. Palat., v. 74) :— "Take, take this flowering wreath from me, With lilies, and the violets blue; Here the moist wind-flower darkly blows, Let pride to gentler feelings bow, At thought of that no distant day, When thou, as these, must fade away." As an example of a memento mori skull accompanying a female portrait, one may instance the picture (in the Guildhall at Exeter) of Mrs. Elizabeth Flay, aet. 86 (1673), the widow of Thomas Flay, a former Mayor of Exeter and founder of "Flay's almshouses." Cf. also the figure of a girl holding a skull on the somewhat remarkable carved sepulchral monument of Rebecca Atkins, aged nine years (who died in 1661), in St. Paul's Church, Clapham. It is almost needless to point out that the aspect of, or mental attitude towards, death must vary much with the age, sex, temporary or permanent occupation (or want of occupation), past experiences, future prospects, education, moral and religious surroundings, personal |