Compare also the following from the Grande Danse Macabre des Hommes et des Femmes (first published in the latter part of the fifteenth century by Guiot Marchand at Paris) : "Quoi sont vos corps, je vous demande, Vostre char, qui est fresche et tendre ; Vos vers après deviendront cendre." Cf. such sayings as:-" Forma bonum fragile est" (Ovid, Ars Amat. ii. 113); "Forma flos, fama flatus"; "Forma perit, virus remanet." It is not surprising that in the land of chivalry and the troubadours the poetry which adored and idealized lovely woman, should have frequently referred to the painful idea of feminine beauty being transformed by death into a loathsome mass of corruption. Pierre de Ronsard is one of the many French poets of various periods (cf. C. P. Baudelaire amongst moderns) who have pictured this idea in their verses "Ton test n'aura plus de peau Et ton visage si beau N'aura veines ni artères; Tu n'auras plus que des dents Les têtes des cimetières." Compare the vignette of the engraved title-page of Richard Dagley's Death's Doings (London, 1826), representing three (female) skeletons, standing on a tomb in a traditional attitude of the Three Graces in classical sculpture. Above are the words: "The Last of the Graces." In crowded graveyards of olden times a visitor or passer-by had, like Hamlet and the poet François Villon (1431-1484?), frequent opportunities of seeing human skulls and human bones, as the gravedigger often turned out the contents of old graves into pits or charnelhouses to make room for the fresh arrivals. Villon (whom R. L. Stevenson considered "certainly the sorriest figure on the rolls of fame "), in his Grand Testament, referred to seeing skulls heaped up in charnel-houses. A charnel-house figures in certain memento mori designs of the fifteenth century "dance of death" style. In one also of the Holbein woodcuts, skeletons before a charnel-house play on noisy musical instruments to attract the attention of the living. Cf. also L. Larmand, Les Poëtes de la Mort, preface and p. 20. On p. 1 Larmand prints the anonymous fifteenth-century Complainte de la Demoiselle, commencing "Une fois fut sur toute autres belle, Mais par mort suis ores devenue telle. Ma chair était très douce, fraiche et tendre, " 93 In his Ballade des dames du temps jadis (included in his Grand Testament), well-known for its refrain, Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? Villon asks where all the beautiful and famous women of past times (including Joan of Arc "qu' Anglois bruslèrent à Rouen ") now are just as Saint Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, in his famous Latin hymn, Rythmus de Contemptu Mundi, asked where all the famous men of Biblical and Classical antiquity had gone to : "Dic, ubi Salomon, olim tam nobilis ? &c. Another picture described and figured by Guiart (op. cit.), is one painted in 1461 by Nicolas Froment, of Avignon, and now preserved at Florence. It represents the resurrection of Lazarus. The decomposition of the body is shown very realistically, and some of the spectators in the scene are imagined holding linen to their noses on account of the smell. Lucien Nass 95 93 How much modern taste prefers to dwell on the living beauty and virtue of the deceased, as Ben Jonson (1573-1637) did (with poetical exaggeration) :— "Underneath this stone doth lie As much beauty as could die; 94 Rabelais quoted Villon's question (Where are last year's snows?), in regard to the answer given by Panurge (when Epistemon asked him where the money and jewels were): "By St. John! they are far enough off now if they keep on travelling." 95 Lucien Nass, Curiosités Médico-Artistiques, Paris, first series, pp. 284-291. I refers to a representation of the same resurrection by a miniature-painter in Les très riches heures de Jean de France, duc de Berry, and also to another one (a painting at Padua), by Giotto, the "Dante of Painting." This reminds me of the "Finis Gloriae Mundi' picture (I shall refer to it again further on) by the Spanish artist, Juan de Valdes Leal (1630-1691), which I have seen at the Caridad Hospital at Seville, and which represents the decaying corpses of a bishop and a Calatrava knight with horrible realism. Murillo is said to have remarked of it that it was so forcibly painted that one had to hold one's nose when looking at it. In the Bargello Museum at Florence are two reliefs in coloured wax by Gaetano Giulio Zumbo (1656-1701), which are figured by Paul Richer.96 They represent decomposing bodies amidst ruined buildings and tombs. In one of them a figure of Time points to the hideous spectacle of putrefaction. In the other a figure of Grief or Melancholy is seated on a high tomb, dominating the scene. A similar relief by the same artist refers to a plague-epidemic, and, indeed, the rats on those just mentioned remind one of descriptions of such epidemics. To the same class belong coloured wax models of skeletons and decomposing human bodies in tombs, charnel-vaults, or other desolate surroundings, possibly made in various countries at various periods, and doubtless valued as specimens of clever work of a dismal kind of realistic art, quite as much as for true memento mori reasons. In the "curio-room" in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, is a wax model, supposed to be of Italian workmanship of the seventeenth century, representing the inside of a tomb, with a human skeleton and living sepulchral fauna. According to a label attached to the back of the model it is the work of Zumbo himself. It was presented to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1859, by Daniel Barker, M.R.C.S. 96 Paul Richer, L'Art et la Médecine, Paris, 1902, pp. 534, 535, figs. 337, 338. Richer also mentions a picture of the same kind by Houasse, a pupil of Le Brun. Disagreeable realism of a somewhat similar style was likewise carried to an extreme by the seventeenth-century sculptor Agrate, in his statue of the flayed St. Bartholomew at Milan, which he proudly signed with the following hexameter: "Non me Praxiteles sed Marcus finxit Agrates." I have alluded elsewhere in this book to such figures (like anatomical "muscle-men" or écorché manikins) and to certain wooden statuettes of skeleton-like corpses covered with ragged skin (see Part I. E., and Fig. 27 further on). In regard to realistic representations of the horrors and melancholic ideas connected with death, Mr. W. Wale has kindly drawn my attention to a story, given in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters (English translation, Bohn's Standard Library, 1851, vol. 2, p. 305), of an Italian painter, Fivizzano, who represented the fearfulness of death so realistically on canvas that he died from the effect of the contemplation of his own production. The following Latin epigram is said by Vasari to have been inscribed below the picture: "Me veram pictor divinus mente recepit, Dumque opere in facto defigit lumina pictor, Viva igitur sum mors, non mortua mortis imago, Somewhat similar in character to the above-mentioned picture by Valdes Leal is a sixteenth-century stainedglass window in the Church of St. Vincent at Rouen, apparently representing the putrefying body of the donor, being "eaten by worms." 97 Many of the best artists of the sixteenth century have left behind them representations of corpses or skeleton-like figures. Even of Michael Angelo there exists in the St. Petersburg Museum a very realistic study in wax of mummified skeleton-like 97 Figured by Guiart, op. cit. figures. Guiart 98 likewise figures the extraordinary sepulchral statue (in the Louvre Museum at Paris) of Jeanne de Bourbon, Countess of Burgundy and Auvergne, who died in 1511 (the decaying corpse of a woman, partially draped, being "eaten by worms"), and the sixteenth-century statue of Death (of the Mediaeval "skin and bones" type, like the German Hautskelett) by Germain Pilon (likewise now in the Louvre Museum), which formerly stood in the Cimetière des SaintsInnocents at Paris. There are many queer stories as to the reason why such ghastly memorials were made. To one of these stories Jeremy Taylor refers in his famous work, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651, Section ii.): "I have read of a fair young German gentleman, who, living, often refused to be pictured, but put off the importunity of his friends' desire, by giving way, that, after a few days' burial, they might send a painter to his vault, and, if they saw cause for it, draw the image of his death unto the life. They did so, and found his face half eaten, and his midriff and backbone full of serpents; and so he stands pictured among his armed ancestors." The sixteenth-century masterpiece of this nature was apparently the sepulchral statue of René de Chalon, Prince of Orange, who was killed in 1544 at the siege of Saint-Dizier. Before his death he is said to have expressed a wish that a likeness should be made of him, not as he appeared when alive, but as his body would appear a considerable time after his death. His widow, Anne de Lorraine, employed the Lorraine sculptor, Ligier Richier, who made a remarkable statue of a decaying corpse, erect, in a noble attitude, with the left arm stretched up to heaven, as if confident of the resurrection of the dead (cf. Job xix. 25-27). According to Marcel Lallemand, the raised-up hand originally held an |