Everyone reads a skull at once, which is exactly why painters kept asking more of it. Over four centuries they made it carry a line from Hamlet and dressed it in a feathered hat for a Sunday stroll. This list follows the skull from a prayer panel the size of a book to the wall of a hotel dining room.
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How These Were Chosen
A skull is the plainest sign of death there is. A candle or a cut flower can mean several things, but a skull is read at once. Beside a saint, a scholar or a pile of coins, it turns the whole scene toward one thought: all of this will end.
Painters liked it for practical reasons too. A real skull could sit on the studio table for as long as a picture took, and its chipped teeth and dark eye sockets tested a painter's hand.
Here the skull had to be plainly there, with the meaning of the picture resting on it: held, pointed at, written on, carted off, worn by Death as a face, or left alone to give the lesson. Pictures that only hint at death with a stopped clock were left out.
12. Diego Rivera, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central (1947)
At the center of Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central, a fresco more than 15 meters wide, a skull looks out from under a hat heaped with white plumes. It belongs to a skeleton in a long white dress, painted by Diego Rivera in Mexico City between July and September 1947, on the wall of a dining room in the Hotel del Prado that looked out on the Alameda, the city's old central park.
The skeleton was older than the wall. Around 1910 to 1913, the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada had made her for a print and called her the Calavera Garbancera.
What Rivera added was a full body, a long dress and a new name. He wrapped Posada's figure in a feathered stole and called her Catrina.
Rivera then surrounded her with the people who mattered to him. The boy in striped breeches is the painter himself as a child, and Frida Kahlo stands behind him. On the skeleton's other side, in a dark suit and leaning on a cane, is Posada.
Around this small group spreads a Sunday crowd in the clothes of the late nineteenth century. In the middle of it, Death walks arm in arm with the man who first drew her and hand in hand with the painter as a boy.
At a Glance
Artist: Diego Rivera (1886 to 1957)
Painted: July to September 1947
Medium: Fresco
Size: 417 × 1567 cm (164 × 617 in)
Where to see it: Museo Mural Diego Rivera, Mexico City
11. Georgia O'Keeffe, Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue (1931)
A white cow's skull hangs in the middle of an almost square canvas, its horns spread in a wide V. Behind it run bands of blue, a black stripe down the center and two thin strips of red at the far edges. In 1931 Georgia O'Keeffe gave this bone from the desert the colors of the American flag and a title to match: Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue. A cow's skull was a strange salute to the nation, and O'Keeffe had a precise reason for choosing it.