The Putto with the Death's Head

1 This paper has grown out of an assignment in the course “History of Drawing and Engraving” conducted by Prof. Paul J. Sachs at Harvard University; it was presented, in preliminary form, at the meeting of the Harvard-Princeton Fine Arts Club in Princeton, N.J., January 30, 1937. I want to acknowledge my gratitude to Prof. Erwin Panofsky of Princeton, N.J., for many valuable suggestions; to Prof. Chandler R. Post of Harvard University for generous help and advice; to Dr. Lieselotte Moeller of Hamburg for having procured the photographs used for Figs. 11, 14, and 22.

Abstract

Eath in the numerous allegories conceived by the imagination of fifteenth and sixteenth century artists assumes its strangest, if not its most important, form in the putto with the death's head. Unlike others, it was not founded on the literary or pictorial traditions of earlier periods. Consequently, it retained, throughout its existence, a flexibility that enabled it to be a focal point for all those conflicting notions of death which the Renaissance developed out of the heritage of the late Middle Ages. The putto with the skull had so many affiliations with other allegories of the same general import that, in order to clarify its unique position, its history may best begin with a short survey of the earlier representations of death in western art.