She that is both Death and the Maiden.

Welcome to my dreamy death den.

[fiery-kitty]

Der Flösser Tod / The raftsman Death – Franz Lippisch (1897)

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Death and the Maiden “The End of the Song”

ph. Zygmunt Szporek, c. 1930

[slobbering]

Death and the Maiden - Camillo Verno (Italian 1870 - 1942) oil on canvas - 63 by 51 cm

With Death and the Maiden Camillo Verno presents the viewer with a classic vanitasor momento mori portrait. Painted circa 1895, the young woman, quite possibly the artist’s wife and model, is embraced from behind by a leering skeleton, clearly symbolic of the shortness and fragility of human life and the inevitability of death.  Death and the Maiden was a common motif in Renaissance art and finds its roots in the Danse Macabre, an artistic genre of allegory of the Late Middle Ages on the universality of death. No matter one’s station in life, the Danse Macabre unites us all. The German artist Hans Baldung famously depicted the subject of Death and the Maiden several times in his career. The theme was revived in the arts during the Romantic era, and variants of the subject occur in well-known self- portraits by such contemporary artists of Verno as Hans Thoma and Arnold Böcklin.  <Sotheby's>

[nobrashfestivity]

Jean Jacques Lebel  SUNLOVE  1967

[thegothbutcher]

[pmamtraveller]

by Sergius Hruby

[roserosette]

Secrets of a Soul, 1926, Georg Wilhelm Pabst

[autumnoiir]

[nosferatu-eggers-deactivated202]

“Death and the Maiden” is a Renaissance “memento mori” (“remember you must die”) allegory, which originated from Late Middle Ages “Danse Macabre”. A representation of a young and beautiful woman and a skeleton or corpse figure, either embraced or being dragged to the Afterlife against her will, consistently portraying death as the ultimate victor.

This motif explores the complex relationship between sex and death and the tension between life and death: the ephemeral nature of life and youth, the seductive allure of death, fear and desire for mortality, and the helplessness of the living in the face of death’s inevitability.

Albrecht Dürer, “The Ravisher” (“Young Woman attacked by Death”), c. 1495

Hans Baldung Grien “Death chases a Maiden” (detail), c. 1513

Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, “Danse Macabre” (detail), c. 1516/1517

Hans Baldung Grien, “Death and the Maiden”, 1517

Hans Baldung Grien “Death and the Maiden” (detail), c. 1518-1520

Hans Baldung Grien “Death and the Maiden” (detail), c. 1530

[dark-art-666]

[pmamtraveller]

Henry Jones Thaddeus - The Origin of the Harp of Elfin'

[mermaidenmystic]

The Death of Sappho ~ c. 1890 ~ oil on cardboard ~ P. Léonard (xix-xx) Symbolist School

[deathandmysticism]

The Resume, 1909

[pmamtraveller]

Welder Wings - Woman in love with death

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Tómas Mondragón, “Alegoría de la Muerte”, 1856

source

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

Nos Invisibles (1907, book illustration) - Raffaele Mainella

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

Death and Psyche (1908/etching) - Feliks Jabłczyński