Sculpture of the Day: Death as a Skeleton

The Victoria & Albert Museum

We’re used to seeing skeletons around this time of the year, and we often associate them with death, for obvious reasons. Still, these are not the kinds of images that we usually want around us.


Personifications of Death as a skeleton were especially common in German sculpture from about 1500 and remained popular attractions in Kunstkammern (or 'cabinets of curiosities') until the Eighteenth Century.

This relief dates to the Nineteenth Century and appears to imitate Seventeenth-Century memento mori of the German tradition. What’s odd about it is its unusually large scale. This object has always been something of a mystery since it has no maker’s mark and no one is quite sure where it came from.