Famous Skull Paintings: 12 and the Meaning Behind Them
A skull in a painting is almost never just a skull. For four hundred years it was the one object that told you to remember you would die, the memento mori, and painters hid it in portraits, propped it on scholars desks, and stacked it into pyramids.
Here are twelve of the most famous, from a skull you can only see from one angle to a young Van Gogh blowing smoke through a skeleton. Each does something different with the same blunt reminder.
The oldest trick: a skull slipped into a portrait of a living, wealthy person, to undercut the finery.
The vanitas: a whole still life built around a skull, with a candle and a watch for the passing of time.
The hidden skull: painted so it resolves only from one angle, or caught in the reflection of a glass ball.
The modern skull: stripped of religion, kept for the shock, from Cezanne to Van Gogh.
If you like the secrets hidden in paintings
Three that take a single picture apart, properly:
The Ambassadors, detail by detail, the skull and everything else Holbein hid in it.
Seven secrets hidden in famous paintings, details sitting in plain sight.
Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, what is really on those scales.
1. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors
Two rich young men stand beside a table of globes, lutes and books, at the peak of their power in 1533. Everything in the picture says success.
Then you notice the grey shape stretched across the floor. Move to the right of the painting, close to the wall, and it snaps into a human skull.
Holbein built the whole thing so the reminder of death appears only when you leave the comfortable spot. There is a full detail by detail breakdown linked above.
2. Paul Cezanne, Pyramid of Skulls
Near the end of his life Cezanne kept real skulls in his studio and painted them over and over.
Here he stacks four of them into a small pyramid, lit hard from the left, given the same weight he gave to apples and to Mont Sainte Victoire.
No candle, no bible, no Latin motto. The religion has fallen away, and what is left is the plain fact of the object, which is what makes it feel modern.
3. Philippe de Champaigne, Vanitas
Three objects, evenly spaced, nothing else. A tulip on the left, a skull in the middle, an hourglass on the right.
They stand for life, death and time. The flower will wilt, the sand will run out, and the skull is what waits at the end of both.
It is the vanitas boiled down to three words. Once you can read this picture, you can read every other skull on this list.
4. Frans Hals, Young Man holding a Skull
A young man in a feathered hat leans out of the frame and holds a skull toward us with a wide sweep of the arm.
For years people wanted him to be Hamlet with poor Yorick. He is not. The play was barely known in the Dutch Republic then.
He is a vanitas figure, youth and death in one image, painted with the loose, fast brush that keeps Hals feeling alive centuries later.
5. Pieter Claesz, Vanitas with a Violin and a Glass Ball
A skull lies on its side among a fallen glass, a pocket watch and a silent violin. The music has stopped and the drink is spilled.
Look closely at the small glass ball on the right. A tiny reflection shows a man at an easel by a window. It is the painter himself.
Claesz signed his picture by hiding his own reflection inside it, recording the moment while telling you the moment ends.
6. Caravaggio, Saint Jerome Writing
Saint Jerome, old and bald, leans across a table to write, his own head almost echoing the real skull resting on the books.
The skull is his desk companion, the memento mori every scholar was meant to keep in sight, so that learning never turned into vanity.
Caravaggio lights it from one hard source and lets the rest fall to black, so the skull and the skull like head are the two things you cannot look away from.
7. Harmen Steenwyck, Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life
A skull sits among the good things of a life: books, a Japanese sword, a shell, a musical instrument, a lamp just snuffed out.
Each object is an achievement, knowledge, wealth, power, pleasure. The skull says none of them travels any further than this.
It is the textbook vanitas, so clear it is still used to teach the whole idea. The lamp has just gone out, and the thread of smoke is the point.
8. Antonio de Pereda, Allegory of Vanity
An angel rests one arm on a table and gestures at the world with the other. Under that hand sit skulls, coins, a globe and a clock.
Among them is a small portrait of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, the most powerful man in Europe, reduced to one more object in the pile.
The Spanish pushed the vanitas further than anyone, and Pereda piles it high. Even the empire ends up on the table with the skulls.
9. David Bailly, Self Portrait with Vanitas Symbols
A painter holds up a portrait of a young man, surrounded by a skull, a snuffed candle, flowers and floating soap bubbles.
The trick is the age. The young face in the small portrait is Bailly himself as a youth. The older man holding it is Bailly as he was in 1651.
He painted himself twice, young and old, inside one picture about time running out, and let the bubbles say the rest.
10. Adriaen van Utrecht, Vanitas with a Bouquet and a Skull
A skull sits beside a bouquet so full it almost tips out of the frame, with a single soap bubble hovering above it.
The Flemish loved this contrast, abundance and death in one breath, the richest flowers set right next to the barest bone.
The bubble holds the whole idea in one fragile shape. It is perfect, it catches the light, and it is about to be gone.
11. Barthel Bruyn the Elder, Vanitas
A single skull rests on a ledge, wrapped in a cloth, beside a snuffed candle and a line of Latin.
This one was painted on the back of a portrait. One side, a living face. Turn the panel over, and this is what it becomes.
It is the reminder made physical. The sitter could hold their own likeness and, by flipping it, hold their own death.
12. Vincent van Gogh, Skull with a Burning Cigarette
A young Van Gogh, still in training, painted a skeleton head and jammed a lit cigarette between its teeth.
It is half a joke, probably a jab at the dull anatomy drawing he was forced to do at the academy in Antwerp.
It is also the oldest symbol in art doing something new: five hundred years of skulls turning into the kind of image you might print on a shirt.
Where to see them
National Gallery, London: Holbein, The Ambassadors; Frans Hals, Young Man holding a Skull; Steenwyck, Allegory of the Vanities.
Galleria Borghese, Rome: Caravaggio, Saint Jerome Writing.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: Pereda, Allegory of Vanity.
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam: Skull with a Burning Cigarette.
Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden: David Bailly, Self Portrait with Vanitas Symbols.
Why painters kept painting skulls
The skull belongs to a whole language of objects that painters used to signal death and the passing of time. That language has a name, the vanitas, and once you know it you start seeing it everywhere: the snuffed candle, the soap bubble, the watch, the wilting flower.
Most of these pictures are also still life paintings, a genre the Dutch and Flemish raised to its height in the 1600s. The skull was their way of turning a table of nice things into a sermon.
And the broadest word for the whole idea is the memento mori, Latin for remember you must die. Every skull on this list is one sentence in that long conversation.
Skulls in art, questions people ask
What does a skull mean in a painting? It is a memento mori, a reminder that the viewer will die. It tells you to value the soul over worldly things.
What is a vanitas painting? A still life built around symbols of death and time, usually a skull with a candle, a watch or a soap bubble.
Why is there a skull in The Ambassadors? Holbein painted it stretched at an angle so it only reads as a skull when you view the picture from the side.
Who painted skulls the most? The Dutch and Flemish vanitas painters of the 1600s, and later Cezanne, who painted real skulls from his studio.
Is the skull in Frans Hals a Hamlet? No. It is a vanitas figure. Shakespeare was barely known in the Dutch Republic when Hals painted it.
One last skull
The most expensive skull in art is not a painting at all. In 2007 Damien Hirst covered a real human skull with 8,601 diamonds and titled it For the Love of God. The idea, the money and the memento mori, is exactly five hundred years old. Van Gogh got there with one cigarette.