IMAGES OF DEATH

Waiting for the museum in Sansepolcro to open after lunch so that I could see its great Piero della Francesca altarpiece, I spotted an ordinary-looking church with this extraordinary door, above, with dapper figures of Death: skeletons with scythes. They turned out to have been carved in 1563, designed, like the church, by Alberto Alberti; inside, below, the massive wooden ceiling, sadly now with its paint removed, features skeletal angels, crossbones and crowned skulls, aptly for this church of the Confraternita della Morte.

In the Marche, I found more skulls, like the relic of St Valentine, so prettily flower-strewn, in Sassocorvaro, middle left above, and the one in the miniature of two monks in Urbino; in Urbania – or Casteldurante, as it once was – were the preserved bodies of monks, above right, with skulls piled on top of their display cases. In Rome was the winged skull in the marble inlay floor of a chapel, above left. Below, another funerary chapel, with twin sarcophagi atop which golden skeletons emerge from black marble shrouds, apparently to chat to each other. A cardinal’s tomb has death holding his portrait, one foot on a winged hourglass, while a gilded death frolicks in the entrance lobby of baroque genius brothers Asam’s own 1733 church in Munich.

In one of the evocatively arranged cases of the old King’s Library in the British Museum are two little, carved ivory skulls, above left, both with snakes, one with flesh not quite rotted away; were they once rosary beads? Three real skulls from New Ireland, below, plastered, painted, decorated with beads, feathers and real hair, have a great presence in the wonderful, dark space of Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. Finally, a simple skull, sitting on a stony patch of ground in a vast tempera altarpiece in Ferrara, bottom.