Mostly made between 14, the objects in The Ivory Mirror represent a darker side of art and belief than what’s usually associated with Renaissance Europe. The grisly vision is both the future of the happy couple, and a personification of death as the great leveler. A prominent motif in the Renaissance was a youthful couple on one side of the ivory, and a skeleton on the reverse an example in The Ivory Mirror is grotesquely detailed with snakes and lizards swarming out of the corpse’s mouth. Lost in a 1942 World War II bombing, it was a vivid mural of cadavers cavorting with people from every class, painted life-size so that viewers felt present in this chain of vitality and death. Another ivory memento mori from 1520-30 has a whole narrative when turned: first there is a young man cradling a wine glass, next a skeleton in the same pose holding an hourglass, then a ghastly portrait of the youth on his deathbed, followed by gleeful demons with the inscription “follow me.”Īlthough memento mori objects like these peaked around 1500, they evolved from a tradition of the “dance of death.” One of the most famous depictions was the 1463 “Danse Macabre” frieze at St. “These are objects meant to be seen in motion,” Perkinson said. The smaller beads have figures on either side representing classes from across society, from king to laborer, with a sudden corpse thrown into the mix. Like all the approximately 70 objects in The Ivory Mirror, many on view for the first time in North America, the 1530 prayer beads are exquisitely crafted, down to the worms crawling through the skull’s bared teeth. 105 (Northern France, beginning of the 16th century), manuscript illumination on parchment (courtesy the Huntington Library, Art Collection, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California) Unknown Artist, Office of the Dead, Book of Hours, use of Rome, fol.
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