Vanitas Vanitatum Omnia Vanitas
Mors Omnia Aquat, Pompeian mosaic 1st Century BC
The popular notion of the vanitas object is that it represents a reminder of the frailty of
life amongst its pleasures and achievements, ostensibly to provoke the viewer
to sober reflection on the human condition. The Crystal Reference Encyclopedia gives the
following definition of vanitas:
A type of still-life picture, produced mainly in Leyden
in the 17th Century, in which symbolic objects such as skulls,
hour-glasses, and old books are arranged to remind us that life is short and
uncertain. The name comes from the Bible (Eccles 1.2): vanitas
vanitatum (‘vanity of vanities’).
For the Love of
God is, on the surface at least, an example par excellence of the vanitas
icon. It combines in one object both the lure of earthly riches, and the
sober reminder of the brevity of life on earth.
It is the economy of this gesture that makes
the skull such an evocative object. Each skull is ultimately unique, yet all
particular examples are linked by the archetype of the common form: everyone
has one, and everyone recognizes and identifies in some way with the skull
motif. It expresses the universal in the particular[1],
and thus seems to function as a symbol that is at once semantically minimal and
physically ostentatious.
The theme of the vanitas (and by extension, the skull motif) arguably has its roots
in antiquity; Charles Sterling points to mosaic examples (under the guise of
the Mors Omnia Aquat) recovered from
the ruins of Pompeii[2]. A
development of the device can then be sketched, in Sterling’s historiographic
tradition, until reaching its full and familiar fruition in the virtuosic still
life renderings of the Dutch masters.
Fritz Saxl, in his lecture Continuity and Variation in the Meaning of
Images demonstrated how such motifs could be seen to progress, disappear
and re-appear through civilizations, crossing the boundaries of continents and
centuries:
Images with a meaning peculiar to their own time and place, once
created, have a magnetic power to attract other ideas into their sphere…they
can suddenly be forgotten and remembered again after centuries of oblivion.
(Saxl, 1970, p.14)
Adriaen van Utrecht Still Life with a Bouquet and Skull oil on canvas 1643
Thus an icon or popular motif can effectively
evolve, and is heavily dependent on cultural context for its received meaning.
The image of the skull can be seen to emerge and develop at various points in
the history of culture, apparently with a broadly comparable received meaning. However,
as developments in twentieth- century theory have shown, transmission of
symbolic meaning is no simple matter, and the mechanisms by which it does so
are problematic and shifting.
Iconography, the
methodology of reading works of art as palimpsest-like layerings of finely
nuanced meaning was exemplified by Erwin Panofsky, whose analysis for a long
time dominated the discipline. Panofsky emphasized the importance of context in
reading works of art, he positing the work as standing at the centre of, and
being inseparable from, an intricate web of cultural, historical and social
interstices that are vital to its reception. As Donald Preziosi writes:
The Panofsky analysis makes it clear that the meaning of the work is a
complex function of its position in a field of cultural production. (Preziosi,
1998, p. 232)
Panofsky’s work on iconography arguably
contributed much to the development of modern semiotics, the study of signs,
and in particular to a semiotics of art, and as such has had a vast impact on
contemporary interpretation.
This study will consider Damien Hirst’s piece
from several perspectives; as an object, as a symbol and as a sign. These
categories are of course rarely exclusive, and much of this discussion will
inevitably involve several of them simultaneously. In juxtaposing and at times
contrasting theoretical perspectives, it is intended to suggest a practical
reading of For the Love of God.
Before proceeding further with this analysis,
it is useful to briefly look at the iconographic context of the work by
examining some recent examples of the skull in the practice of other artists .
[1] The function of
symbol and allegory is usefully discussed by Hanneke Grootenboer in The Rhetoric of Perspective as the
following quote demonstrates:
(Goethe and Schelling)
considered allegory as a discursive sign that refers to something else and
essentially deals with content. By contrast, they argued, the symbol deals with
form and really is that which it represents. They conceived the symbol as a
representation of an idea, through which the particular expresses the
universal, while they understood allegory as the representation of a concept that
deploys universal signs to voice the particular. (Grootenboer, 2005, p. 152)
[2] See Charles
Sterling Still Life Painting from
Antiquity to the Present Time trans. James Emmons 1959
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