The Turn of the Skull:
Andreas Vesalius and the Early Modern Memento Mori
Rose Marie San Juan
Detail from Aelbert van der
Schoor, Still Life with Skulls,
c. 1650 (plate 1).
DOI:
10.1111/j.1467-8365.2012.00932.x
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790
35 | 5 | November 2012 | pages
958-975
© Association of Art Historians 2012
Out of a desiccated pale skull a face stares and captures our attention, refusing to let
go (plate 1). The face itself, if we think of flesh, physiognomy or expression, no longer
exists, yet it appears to look back and register recognition. We know that the face that
we see cannot see, but we forget that anything that can stare back will, and even make
us conscious of being looked at. We search for differences between our face and the face
that is no longer there, expecting, perhaps, that it will convey its secrets. Yet nowhere
in its hypnotizing stare do we find evidence of what death is, of where presence now
resides or even of what it might mean to be absent and yet stare back. In Aelbert van der
Schoor’s mid-seventeenth-century painting of six skulls, as in most Netherlandish still
life, we are provided with a context, one that quickly fills up a potentially disconcerting
emptiness.1 Skulls and other bones, scattered on a stone ledge, are framed by a familiar
set of objects. These are the tropes of the vanitas still life and they are comforting, for,
unlike the confrontation with death, at least we know what to do with them. The
candle flickers, the flowers are starting to droop, the hourglass will soon empty.
The ground of representation is not concealed to be anything other than what it is,
representation: the objects are laid out for our scrutiny, and as with all representation
for our reassurance. It is the ground upon which we explore the expected paths of
transience, mutability and eventual demise. As Harry Berger has remarked on the
appearance of skulls in Dutch still life: ‘All the items in their neighbourhood contract
the vanitas and become symptoms of supposedly pre-existing bodies of belief.’2 The
timeliness of viewing, of refilling the empty holes to imagine eyes that look back,
only makes the notion of the passing of time palpable, its irretrievable value visceral.
We seem to have no choice but to return to the now all too familiar narrative about
the briefness of life and the certainty of death, a narrative that transforms the fragile
uncertain experience of life and death into something of symbolic weight.
It may seem odd to argue for a narrative about the certainty of death as
somehow reassuring but this is precisely what I seek to do. The vanitas still life, as
well as the overall theme of memento mori, has become commonplace, and in spite
of how accomplished the interpretation, it tends to be deployed to justify rather
than to critically interrogate issues of materiality that sustain Dutch still life and
the work of art in general.3 Not surprisingly, Damien Hirst chose Van der Schoor’s
painting from the Rijksmuseum’s collection of seventeenth-century art for his
2008 exhibition in that museum.4 The exhibition included Hirst’s own take on the
memento mori, the controversial gigantic skull encrusted with diamonds that confronts
such unmitigated materiality with a smirking stare.5 Yet in this instance surface
959
Andreas Vesalius and the Early Modern Memento Mori

1 Aelbert van der Schoor,

Still Life with Skulls, c. 1650.
Oil on canvas, 100 × 81 cm.
Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum.
Photo: © Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam.

and openings do not manage to interact. While the surface of brilliant diamonds
invades and almost blots out the presumed bottomless eye sockets, the empty mouth
only reasserts the brilliant diamonds to be mere surface. One could say that each
takes its turn emptying the other out, refusing to animate the comforting narrative
found in Van der Schoor’s painting. But this raises a crucial issue about the memento
mori narrative because although one might fill up the desiccated face with narrative
potential, its effects are only visited upon the beholder. In the exchange with the
face of the skull, it is not the skull that is affected but the beholder whose very
look becomes infected with fear, as if death itself is a virus one might catch. Hirst’s
diamond skull is no different in this respect, for although it refuses the affective
engagement with the beholder offered by Van der Schoor’s still life, it has in its
attempt to comment on the shallow materiality of the contemporary art world
reproduced the consuming potential of materiality itself. In effect, it has become a
contaminating force for the very thing it is presumably trying to critique.
The face has the potential to trick us, for since it speaks, sees, hears and seems to
understand, it is where we tend to think the human being resides. We continue to
assume that expressions are intentional, even when we have evidence to the contrary.
Our over-investment in faces has been the focus of much discussion in recent years.
Perhaps best known is Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari’s concept of faciality, which
is not about the face or about exchanges between human beings, but about the
mechanisms that enable all signification.6 Faciality not only ‘makes sense’ of the rest
of the body, but also of the world, because it indicates first and foremost recognition so
crucial to the formation of meaning. If it is difficult to extricate the face from meaning,
and the face within the skull from a redeeming view of death, it is precisely because
the face, as a primary strategy of recognition, tends to bank on empathy and affect.

© Association of Art Historians 2012 960

Rose Marie San Juan
2 Attributed to Ludovico
Carracci, Skulls, c. 1590.
Oil on paper applied to
panel. Bologna: Accademia
delle Belle Arti. Photo: ©
Accademia delle Belle Arti,
Bologna.
© Association of Art Historians 2012
But the problems of faciality are further compounded when the face is projected
within the skull. There is a longstanding link between the materiality of the skull
and the allegorical tradition of the memento mori,7 not surprising given that bones,
due to their enduring properties, not only remain after death but also convey a sense
of wholeness and containment that gives them the semblance of presence. They
are in fact the most persistent reminder of death for the living. Moreover, bones, in
contrast to soft tissue, can be conceived as standing in for the whole person, and have
been regarded as holding the potential for identification.8 Yet the skull’s undeniable
ability to forge a connection between the dead and the living is highly ambiguous,
charged as it is by its transitory status in which presence and absence, visibility and
invisibility, can never be fully extricated from each other. The skull thus becomes
a key transit point between life and death, both the furthest point before complete
material disappearance and oblivion, and the closest point from which one might
imagine being looked at from the other side. This crossing is of course profoundly
ambivalent, and as has been convincingly argued, early modern practices for dealing
with the dead ranged widely from fear to hostility, from sorrow to humour, and from
reverence to revenge.9 In any case, the confrontation of this transition was much
more volatile than interpretations of the vanitas still life tend to acknowledge.
The ability of representation to control this volatility is a crucial component of
the vanitas still life. While faciality is the mechanism that enables signification and
fixes representation, the face in the skull must contend with the ways death itself is
a constant threat to representation. As Julia Kristeva
has argued in relation to Holbein’s Dead Christ, death
is ultimately unrepresentable for it is precisely what
representation seeks to control in order to produce
and fix signification.10 If death is revealed to be final
and without hope for continuity or redemption, it
will serve to unsettle the symbolic system. Thus the
possibilities of interpretation opened up by the skull
are crucial to the face’s powers of contagion over the
beholder. In Van der Schoor’s painting, the multiplicity
of skulls, itself a familiar device for contemplating the
transformative potential of death, affects how each
instance is regarded. In some ways, the multiplicity of
skulls reasserts that each instance of confrontation with
a face constitutes a continuum. The distribution of the
numerous skulls, apparently haphazardly on the stone
shelf but also forming a dynamic sequence, encourages
one to project a sense of movement, animation and
expression and perhaps even self-will. If this kind
of movement usually implies a body, here the face
has taken on the properties of the body, producing a
narrative that is compatible with the body’s organic
change and ultimate demise.
This is not to say that the proliferation of skulls
necessarily must produce the narrative flow of the
memento mori.11 A late sixteenth-century painting of five
skulls (plate 2) attributed to Ludovico Carracci shows
otherwise by bringing skulls and other human bones
into an uncertain and disturbing visibility.12 Rather
961
Andreas Vesalius and the Early Modern Memento Mori

than being distributed across a defined space, the skulls seem to compress and rip
apart the possibility of representational space itself. Not only are the skulls squeezed
within an indecipherable non-place, but the very intermingling of their materiality
with their porous boundaries serves to break up a sense of continuity between
different instances, and pierces the surface of the representational space beyond repair.
Instead of mere disorder and fragility within which to contemplate the face, we are
confronted with a surface that does not provide a ground for signification and with
holes that do not offer points of subjectification. Too many gaping mouths, nostril
cavities and eye sockets both tear and interpenetrate the surface. The discontinuities
disallow any narrative coherence and thus all attempts to activate or even recognize
the face fail. This confrontation with the abyss of meaninglessness is achieved not by
suggesting the continuity of life towards death but by what Henri Bergson defined
as duration, which is to say time as incomplete and mobile and not representable
through particular and completed instances of movement.13 For Bergson duration
is crucial for it distinguishes between measured and experienced time, and its
unrepresentability is due to the fact that it is heterogeneous and without a point of
rest from which to define cause and effect. If Carracci’s painting suggests anything,
it is a sense of the incompleteness of time and the impossibility of turning it into a
measured productive sequence. By contrast, the vanitas theme seeks to offset the power
of death to undo meaning by converting time into something that implies progress
and unidirectional change, even if it ultimately measures the briefness of life on earth.
Yet one could argue that Van der Schoor’s still life also has the potential, if not
to challenge the narrative flow of the vanitas, then at least to reverse it. Instead of
displacing the body and its materiality by the projection of the face, it can also suggest
the disappearance of the face itself, as the skulls start to turn away from us, and begin
to deny our desire for recognition. One could also argue that the very multiplicity of
skulls and their disarray on the ledge suggests the discontinuity and haphazardness of
time, or the anonymity and indecipherability of what remains of a person after death.
In other words, the mode of presentation empties out the face so that recognition,
or presumed recognition, increasingly fails to take place. But what about the skull
on the left, which is broken, discarded, helplessly lying on its side, and yet seems
more alive than the one that stares back at us? A single tooth protrudes from the
skull without any hope of encountering its counterpart, which might or might not
be the jawbone just out of reach at the edge of the stone slab. Once noticed, the eye
sockets appear to fill in with an interior glow. We might well mistake it for a living
face, one that exhibits the flickering glow of inner animation. Yet it exhibits not life
but a kind of phantasmatic ‘life’, and has the power to draw in the one who looks on
to its death. This is the horror of that which is neither dead nor alive, and disrupts
the comforting idea of an organic passage from life to death. Moreover, it activates a
constant process of transformation, a prerogative of the vanitas theme, but one that is
infrequently activated to challenge the expected unidirectional move of time towards
death. It is through its potential disturbance of time that Van der Schoor’s still life
challenges the vanitas, revealing the simultaneous making and unmaking of time, and
its unpredictable moves in diverse directions.
The contaminating effects of the skull were already recognized in early modern
Europe, as one can see, not in a text, but in the celebrated full-page woodcut of
a skeleton contemplating a skull in Andreas Vesalius’ seminal 1543 treatise De
humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) (plate 3).14 A skeleton mimics the
melancholic pose of the many saints and sinners that reflect on their future demise
by contemplating a skull. Instead of the blank stare expected of inanimate bone, the

© Association of Art Historians 2012 962

Rose Marie San Juan

animated skeleton has a facial expression that registers, or perhaps mocks, interior
feelings of anguish and despair. This is in direct contrast to the skull under its
consideration, which is turned sideways, away from our view, and, as with the skull
in Van der Schoor’s still life, detached from the nearby jawbone that is necessary
for facial expression. Of course this paradox raises more questions than it answers,
starting with the crucial question of the link between knowledge and death. While
the skeleton’s reduced state suggests that it is already privy to death’s secrets, its

3 Andreas Vesalius, Skeleton

Contemplating a Skull, 1543.
Woodcut from page 164 of On
the Fabric of the Human Body.
Photo: © Wellcome Library,
London.

© Association of Art Historians 2012 963

Andreas Vesalius and the Early Modern Memento Mori
4 Andreas Vesalius, Skull from
the Side, 1543. Woodcut from
On the Fabric of the Human
Body. Photo: © Wellcome
Library, London.
© Association of Art Historians 2012
mournful expression seems to deride the nature of that
knowledge. But the figure is neither alive nor dead, and
thus its insight into death can only be located in a space
that cannot be defined in relation to the binary states of
life and death. While the relation of this familiar image
to the tradition of the memento mori is rarely considered,
the woodcut is always presumed to function as a moral
commentary on the transience of life and hence of
human knowledge, the knowledge produced by the
treatise. Indeed, it is commonplace to argue that early
modern anatomical images deployed moralizing modes
of representation in order to accommodate new forms
of knowledge about the body to established social and
religious paradigms.15
In this essay, I will propose another possibility,
namely that visual strategies are deployed in Vesalius’
treatise to counter the familiar narrative of the memento
mori and the problems that this tradition presented to
the study of the human body. The intriguing relation
between skeleton and skull provides a key, for it
ultimately questions the narrative of life’s fragility and
death’s inevitability. It is through this relation that the
materiality of the body was asserted and the extension
of its future possibilities within medical technologies
proposed. Death’s relation to life would now need to be
reoriented and become not simply the point of life but
also the means, through dissection, to learn about life. Rethinking death entailed a
double move; first, the return of Adam and Eve to evoke the traditional links between
knowledge and death, and second, their departure through the performativity of
the skeleton and the de-familiarizing of the skull. In other words, it is through
established figures of death – the skull, the skeleton – that the treatise counters
the contaminating effects of faciality and the memento mori. Instead of relegating the
visual images to the role of containing or accommodating new forms of knowledge
produced through the text, I will consider how attitudes towards death, which could
not be directly addressed in text, were in fact addressed through visual strategies.
Early modern anatomical imagery did not simply bring the human body into full
visibility, it actually shifted the terms of visibility under which the body would now
be understood.
In Vesalius’ 1543 treatise, the skull literally proliferates across many pages from
the first section, devoted to bones, to the last section, devoted to the brain.16 Its
recurrences include the repetition of some views, yet all are views in which the skull
has been turned one way or another and thus seem to be in the process of turning
into something else (plate 4). One might well be tempted to see this replication of
the skull in the same way as Van der Schoor’s skulls, which unfold across space
contaminating everything along the way with death. And yet, there is no frontal
view to facilitate the transformation expected of the vanitas still life. Moreover,
even in the rare case in which the skulls are clustered within a single space, as in a
framed woodcut that appears at the start of the section on bones and presents five
separate skulls (plate 5), this kind of narrative path is discouraged.17 The five skulls are
arranged into two rows, the first with three shown in profile, and the second with
964
Rose Marie San Juan

two that have their profiles turned towards each other. Instead of the interconnected
movement implied in the painting, the skulls are now still, all transition arrested
by the regular gaps of flat surface that separates them with enough space between to
encourage the consideration of the distinctiveness of each instance. Any attempt to
call up the face within the skull is undercut as the possibility of the emotive subject is
turned into objective observation. Reading from left to right and from top to bottom,
the first example, defined as ‘natural’ by the text, is distinguished from the others
through a differentiation of the surface of the skull. Differences, whether in shape,
markings, depression and compression, are used to define the first as the norm and
the standard against which the others are to be judged. Within the abstracted space
of the woodcut, the skulls offer a different confrontation, one in which recognition
produces knowledge about the make-up of the skull rather than about the state of the

5 Andreas Vesalius, Five Skulls,

1543. Woodcut from page 18
of On the Fabric of the Human
Body. Photo: © Wellcome
Library, London.

© Association of Art Historians 2012 965

Andreas Vesalius and the Early Modern Memento Mori

person who once occupied the skull. In contrast to Carracci’s painting of five skulls,
this is an image that complies with representation’s ability to form and fix meaning
and to do so by altering the relationship between image and beholder.18
Yet the interconnection of skeleton and skull suggests a more paradoxical space,
one that suspends the body’s clear location between life and death by proposing new
notions of the body’s materiality and its relation to new forms of technology. It has
been pointed out that in sixteenth-century English, a common name for a skeleton
was ‘an anatomy’ since the skeleton was increasingly associated with anatomical
dissection and its production of a stripped body.19 And indeed, it is in relation to
anatomical practices that the idea of the skeleton underwent considerable change
in early modern Europe. Philippe Ariès argues that the flesh-less skeleton was an
invention of the seventeenth century and had no counterpart in earlier images,
which tended to favour the corruption of flesh and the decay of the interior.20 The
substitution of the decomposing corpse for the dried-out but highly animated
skeleton signalled a shift in the conception of death from an organic process of
deterioration to a controlled undoing of the body that held the potential to produce
knowledge that would in turn reanimate the body. Berger, in his critique of the
interpretation of the vanitas still life, argues that it tends to focus on the shortness of
life but not on the impact of decay.21 The new skeleton also sheds any history of the
corpse’s decay but in order to turn attention from death back to life. In sixteenth-
century European imagery, the skeleton is frequently engaged in trying to take
people to the other side, although it never actually goes there itself since it is only
meaningful in the world of the living as a dynamic remnant of what is left on earth
after death. The skeleton, already in this liminal space between life and death, makes
a move to the space produced by anatomical knowledge, and it is from the non-place
of anatomical research that the skeleton in Vesalius’ woodcut can contemplate and
mock the pursuit of death while in life.
By the time we encounter the image of the skeleton contemplating the skull, we
have been encouraged to consider the shape of the skull from all sides and angles.
As is frequently noted, the images in Vesalius’ On the Fabric of the Human Body tend to
disregard the sequence of the dissection followed in the text.22 While the treatise
starts with a discussion of the human bones, the actual dissection moves in layers
from outside to inside of the body. Thus the visual images of bones in the first section
serve to suggest something only implied in the text, namely that the bones are the
structure of the body and contain within them a kind of blueprint for both the
making and unmaking of the body.23 As a conclusion to the first book, three full-
page skeletons are pictured, assembled it would seem from the different bones just
discussed, and performing different states of anguish as they display the front, the
side and the back view. Through their expressive performance, the skeletons emerge
as entirely animated and sensory, so much so that it is easy to forget that they are
also entirely stripped of any fleshy body matter that would obscure or conceal the
observer’s scrutiny of the full bone structure.
When shown together the lively skeleton makes the skull seem disconnected
and thus as inanimate, especially with the continuity of notions of bones as dry,
unchanging and more or less inorganic.24 And it is precisely at this moment of
encounter that our view of the skull continues to turn (see plate 3). The skull on the
plinth is virtually unrecognizable as face, not only because it is sideways so that the
skeleton can ponder on its face, but because the skeleton’s hand-bones are extended
to cover any of the recognizable features that might have called upon us to turn the
skull back into face. As with most visual strategies adopted in the treatise, this has

© Association of Art Historians 2012 966

Rose Marie San Juan

6 Lionello Spada, St. Jerome, c.

1610. Oil on canvas, 112 × 143
cm. Rome: Galleria Nazionale
d’Arte Antica di Palazzo
Barberini. Photo: © Ministero
per i Beni e le Attività
Cultural.

practical considerations, in that it enables the display of the front, side and bottom of
the skull.25 But it also means that we can no longer take up our usual relation to the
skull, the relation enacted by the skeleton. Instead, we become aware of a split in the
direction of how we view. We begin to realize that the viewing point that produces
the vanitas narrative and the view that produces new knowledge cannot be the same.
Side-tracked by the skeleton’s melancholic self-regard, we have no option but
to consider the skull from a different direction. From this new vantage point we
no longer see the face in the skull but begin to see the body of the skull. The skull
is no longer physically familiar and psychically strange, but becomes physically
strange and psychically perplexing. When turned on its side, the skull’s sense of
face diminishes, not because one cannot see all the familiar openings but because
it reveals itself to be a head. The recognition of a head, and not a face, makes it
incomplete, obviously separated from the rest of the body, and thus divested of any
potential life but also more like material matter. As Deleuze and Guattari note, the
face is for the viewer a subjectivity that is entirely antagonistic to being embodied,
because the face removes the head and creates the ‘person’ away from the body.26
This early modern move to the body and its materiality was not separate from
the desire to reveal the invisible animation of the body. In Lionello Spada’s painting
of St Jerome (plate 6) from about 1610, the hermit saint is accompanied by his usual
attribute, the skull, but not in order to contemplate death in terms of the future
release of the soul.27 St Jerome has left the skull at one side, avoiding its predisposition
to demand visual recognition and impose its effects. Instead, he translates his interior
experience into the materiality of writing, just as we translate the visual surface of the
painting into tactile sensation, the dryness of the saint’s skin, the pliancy of his flesh,
the rough surface of cloth and burlap. In this world, the body is decidedly material,
but by the same token, the immaterial cannot exist outside the embodied.
This turn to the embodied, to something that is not a face precisely because it
is a body, is a concept of the human body that is present from the start of Vesalius’

© Association of Art Historians 2012 967

Andreas Vesalius and the Early Modern Memento Mori

7 Andreas Vesalius, Adam

and Eve, 1543. Woodcut from
the 1642 edition of Epitome.
Photo: © Wellcome Library,
London.

project, as is the close link between materiality and animation. In its proliferation
throughout the treatise, the skull is invariably laid out as inanimate object within the
flat surface of the page. Yet it also forms, as in Van der Schoor’s still life of the skulls, a
kind of transitional movement that turns the skull from side to back and from back to
its underside, increasingly distancing it from its recognizability as face.28
A different form of animation brings about the reconfigured skeleton, which
also had a crucial role to play within Vesalius’ anatomy project.29 It is well known
that Vesalius had a significant relationship with the articulated skeleton, which
would become a familiar feature of anatomical imagery, including in the title page
of his 1543 treatise (see plate 8).30 Andrea Carlino explains that Vesalius always
demanded to have a skeleton when he conducted teaching dissections, and that
he himself assembled and articulated at least three skeletons in different places at
which he taught.31 For Vesalius, the making of a skeleton was no less a production of
knowledge than the process of dissection itself, and he claimed to have established
a new method for producing skeletons.32 Distinguishing his own practice from
that of Galen, he criticizes the latter’s elaborate method of exposing the body to
lime and water for a long period of time. He argues in considerable detail for the
simpler method of cutting and boiling the body in a container of water, and thus
removing as much flesh as possible and producing entirely clean and even-coloured

© Association of Art Historians 2012 968

Rose Marie San Juan

bones. Vesalius’ association with this kind of reanimated body is clearly suggested
by the illustrated initial letter that starts the first book on bones.33 This letter, which
happens to be located directly opposite the portrait of Vesalius himself pointing to
the anatomy of the arm, shows putti mischievously boiling up bones in a kitchen to
make a skeleton.
Within anatomical treatises, the skeleton stands for a reanimated body produced
out of a conjunction of knowledge between visual observation and new medical
technologies. In fact, there was considerable focus on techniques and tools to produce
such a reanimation of the body, entailing not only the arduous separation of flesh
from bone, but also the re-stitching of parts into a new whole through the use of
tools such as wire and pins.34 Thus while within general physiological knowledge

8 Andreas Vesalius, title-

page, 1543. Woodcut from On
the Fabric of the Human Body.
Photo: © Wellcome Library,
London.

© Association of Art Historians 2012 969

Andreas Vesalius and the Early Modern Memento Mori
9 Andreas Vesalius, Skeleton
Leaning on a Spade, 1543.
Woodcut from On the Fabric
of the Human Body. Photo: ©
Wellcome Library, London.
© Association of Art Historians 2012
bones were associated with both permanence and inorganic matter, in contrast
to the fleshy parts of the body, the reconstructed skeleton, by demonstrating the
‘jointedness’ of bones, became a key figure in displaying and understanding bodily
movement and animation.35 It has been argued that the articulation of bones, the
transforming of separate bones into a new whole, links this kind of new body to
a wide range of embodied practices.36 The articulation of human bones, with its
restoration of mobility and expression, is also linked to the public spectacle of
anatomical dissection, be it as they were displayed in actual anatomical theatres or as
they appear in representations of public anatomical lessons in medical treatises.37 In
these instances, the question of moralizing associations returns, as do the links of the
skeleton and the narrative of the memento mori.
But, of course, the skeleton, like the skull, was always associated with death, even
when it became a tool for the production of new knowledge through anatomy. In
Vesalius’ treatise the importance of death in the formation of new bodily knowledge
is conveyed through the sequence of images of the body, a sequence that produces
a very different narrative from the text. In 1543, alongside the publication of his
treatise, Vesalius published the Epitome, a less expensive and reduced set of nine large
tables, in which individual full-length figures are displayed at different stages of
dissection.38 When these were initially published as a set, the cycle was initiated with
the figures of Adam and Eve as physical examples of the human body, a woodcut
sometimes also included at the start of On the Fabric of the Human Body (plate 7).39 Adam
and Eve stand for our consideration, not simply as models of perfection but as the
human body at a key moment of change. Indeed,
Adam holds the apple that once eaten led to the
expulsion from the Garden of Eden, while Eve covers
herself, already aware and ashamed of her embodied
state. Thus we start with the very moment when the
state of vertical physical perfection and the state of
vertical mortality meet at the boundary of Paradise.
The boundary might well be between the two, and
it is there, low on the ground, that a curious object is
located, a kind of circular orb initially indiscernible
but brought into visibility as a skull, and specifically as
Adam’s skull, due to the twisting snake that moves in
and out of its cavities. In the Golden Legend, the influential
apocrypha compiled by Jacopo de Voragine in the
second half of the thirteenth century, it is written that
due to his fall, Adam’s ‘head was bowed to the ground’
condemning all his children to be born and ‘let fall
prone upon the ground’.40 The snake, of course, recalls
the temptation prompted by the tree of knowledge, but
Adam himself, and specifically his skull, has an even
more specific connection to the tree of knowledge. A
widely circulated story told by Voragine is that when
Adam died, his son Seth planted on his grave a branch
of the tree of knowledge given to him by the archangel
Michael from the Garden of Paradise.41 The branch
grew into a tree and it is this tree that, after being
cut in order to be used for the erection of Solomon’s
temple, was rejected, recognized, forgotten, buried,
970
Rose Marie San Juan
10 Andreas Vesalius, Male
Figure Holding Skull, 1543.
Woodcut from the 1642
edition of Epitome. Photo: ©
Wellcome Library, London.
© Association of Art Historians 2012
and rediscovered, and only then reused to make the
cross upon which Christ was crucified. Hence when
the skull of Adam appears at the foot of the cross, it is
not only about Christ’s redemption of original sin, but
also about death’s crucial link to knowledge through
the tree, which in the Golden Legend, as in other sources,
is conflated with the tree of life.
In some seventeenth-century anatomical prints, the
reversed skull with snake, which even holds the apple
of the Garden of Eden, defines the female body as Eve,
inflecting the project of anatomy with clear moralizing
purpose.42 In these, mortality and sin are within Eve as
much as the internal organs displayed all around her, and
all of the internal parts, including the skull with snake,
are defined as material through the sharp clarity of the
printed line. This brings to anatomical study the same
moral boundaries as the vanitas interpretation of still life
and portraits, in which the morally dubious female body
is always already infested with worms, is always in a state
of organic corruptibility, both physical and moral.43
This kind of association is also presumed to be
at work when Adam and Eve appear in prints of the
anatomical theatre, or framing the corpse at the centre
of the public anatomical lesson, especially since these
lessons held a moralizing function.44 Yet the consistent
use of the articulated skeleton to enact Adam and Eve,
in effect the conflating of the biblical pair with this ambiguous figure suspended
between life and death, complicates their appearance.45 The best known examples,
in the 1609 and 1610 engravings of Leiden’s anatomical theatre, and believed to
be actual skeletons articulated and arranged by the anatomist Peter Pauw, offer a
performance that ruptures any sequential sense of time. The two skeletons are not
only on different sides of the Fall, but they enact their exchange as a courtly dance.46
In the title-page of Vesalius’ On the Fabric of the Human Body, the public anatomical lesson
is focused around a single skeleton, which stands above the female body laid out on
the table and in the process of being dissected, and which unleashes its performative
and even subversive character (plate 8). The skeleton holds a baton, and thus has been
identified as the triumph of death and appropriate to the theme of memento mori.47 But
as with the Leiden engravings, the two figures can be regarded as a performance
of Adam and Eve, each enacting the process of death as both the making and
unmaking of the body. Eve moves towards death through bodily dissection, while
Adam is remade as a body between natural matter and technological knowledge.
The skeleton’s appearance, especially its distinctive distraught facial expression
and bodily stance, is repeated in the first full-scale figure within the treatise itself
(plate 9).48 Thus the skeleton makes a reappearance, now resting its arm on a spade, a
tool of labour through which the figure of Adam would be identified in the Leiden
images of the anatomical theatre. As well as perhaps representing death burying
itself, this figure retains within it the presence of Adam in anatomical imagery,
embodied as a labouring body and as a body that will die. But it is also not death,
not the end of life, but a new beginning, a new point of departure for knowledge
about life.
971
Andreas Vesalius and the Early Modern Memento Mori

11 Andrea Vesalius, Reversed

Skull, 1543. Woodcut from On
the Fabric of the Human Body.
Photo: © Wellcome Library,
London.

What I am proposing is a process in which Adam and Eve perform not their
traditional roles but rather a threshold point that ultimately will exceed their
association with original sin and death, and empty out their initial point of departure
from Paradise in order to take up a new path. Adam and Eve, the focus of intense early
modern debates about origins, were also crucial to attempts to detach the pursuit of
knowledge from the moral implications of original sin by reconsidering and even
remapping their journeys out of Paradise.49 However, this intense and controversial
attention to the contradictory aspects of Genesis was soon followed by an abandonment
of the biblical figures, which, as has been argued, became by the second half of the
seventeenth century detrimental to the goals of new forms of knowledge.50 It is as if
the biblical pair had to appear at the initial stages of new forms of knowledge, not only
to comply with moralizing expectations, but also, and primarily, for a new mode of
knowledge about the body to emerge. Adam and Eve could not be just replaced by new
forms of knowledge, but had to appear in order to reverse ideas already in place, and
return attention back to the moment of creation, of life-giving, rather than of death.
Interestingly enough, the turning of human dissection into a narrative of Adam
and Eve was to become quite conventional, especially throughout the seventeenth
century in the north, but it did not survive within Vesalius’ project as it moved from
the Epitome to On the Fabric of the Human Body. The appearance of Adam and Eve in Vesalius’
anatomical images is ultimately about the performance of their disappearance from
this form of knowledge. If we consider the sequence of Vesalius’ Epitome, the scene of
Adam and Eve framing the skull is followed by a scene in which the figure of Adam, in
the same pose, holds not the apple but a skull, presumably his own (plate 10). Within
the progress of dissection, Adam changes again, this time being partly divested of his
flesh and with his head cut and divided in various ways. By the final image, the figure
of Adam has been fully transformed; instead of holding the skull, he now holds the
fleshy parts of the head, and instead of being in a state of perfect embodiment, he
is now a skeleton, a figure that is dead but is also animated. This skeleton is in effect
reanimated, conjoining death and knowledge, but not within a natural sequence in

© Association of Art Historians 2012 972

Rose Marie San Juan
12 Andreas Vesalius, Skeletal
Figure Hanging from a Noose,
1543. Woodcut from page 190
of On the Fabric of the Human
Body. Photo: © Wellcome
Library, London.
© Association of Art Historians 2012
which knowledge ends in death and death obliterates knowledge. As noted, Vesalius’
treatise starts with the bones, and thus with the living dead. Anatomical knowledge
is conceived not as tracing the progress from life to death, but rather about structural
knowledge, about rebuilding the body. The body must be pulled apart for anatomical
knowledge to emerge, but this is not akin to the natural demise of the body imagined
in the decaying corpse. Instead, it is a kind of disassemblage, one that conceals the
organic deterioration of flesh that troubled anatomical practice, and replaces it with
a technological fragmentation that moves not towards death but comes back to life,
literally to the state of reanimation.
But how does it turn and take up another path towards another form of
knowledge? It is by turning the skull from the front to its underside that its place,
within the fall of Adam and Eve, presses the figure of Adam, if not Eve, to take a
new path out of Paradise. The very process of bringing the face of the skull into
invisibility, I would suggest, underlies a turn in the rethinking or rather unthinking
of death. In Vesalius’ most repeated woodcut (plate 11), the skull is barely discernible
as skull, and we consider and reconsider its uneven surfaces, and try to assemble an
entity out of its crevices, cracks and chinks. While the shape and markings never
fully cohere, a central black hole starts to dominate the rough terrain, and it turns
from a surface to a structure of many parts; it becomes a skull, but a skull seen from
the underside, the side that was once attached to the body. This side does not allow
us to forget that it was once a body, nor does it let us
forget about death. This hole is the point of separation
between head and rest of the body, in decapitation but
also in the more frequently deployed form of public
execution, hanging.
In Vesalius’ treatise, this crucial connection
separating life and death is called up in one of its most
celebrated images, one in which a partly dissected
figure still retains a pre-history as executed criminal
(plate 12). The rope used to hang this man is also the
rope used to pull the head of the anatomical figure
upwards so as to reveal to us the windpipe, carrying
the crucial breath of life and connecting the head
with the rest of the body. It is here, in this image, that
death and knowledge come together and reveal their
complicity. In the case of the skull between Adam and
Eve, this kind of death comes into view, a death that
is physiological and associated with other aspects of
bodily change and procreation, and that looks back to
what can be learned about life from death, rather than
the other way around.
Yet the skull of Adam continued to be a reminder
of the connection of death and knowledge, and in
anatomical treatises this reminder proved problematic.
Adam thus remains but through the continuity of
a skull unrecognizable as face and unreadable as
presence. To the very end, the presence of the face in
the skull continues to be denied to the beholder, and
the last image, divided into two views, shows the skull
from above and opened to reveal an empty container.51
973
Andreas Vesalius and the Early Modern Memento Mori

13 Andrea Vesalius, Human

and Canine Skulls, 1543.
Woodcut from On the Fabric
of the Human Body. Photo: ©
Wellcome Library, London.

The reversal of the skull is fully realized in Vesalius’ 1543 treatise (see plate 11). It
has lost the possibility of being turned into a face, due to its connection to the body,
and its ambivalence as image, and by ambivalence as image I mean both its visual
illegibility and the way it carries within it the memory of the apple, the vanitas skull,
and the decapitated head, but cannot be returned to any of these in particular. In its
reversed form, the skull appears in Vesalius’ treatise no less than three times before
the sequence of dissection begins. The coherence of the skull, with its insistence on
being recognized as face, is undone through this visual inversion, just as it is undone
in the textual account, which describes the skull as a complex assemblage, one in
which multiple separate parts are sutured, separated, overlapped, and never cohere
into a singular entity.
The only frontal view of the skull included in Vesalius’ treatise is also the only
image that includes a non-human body part (plate 13).52 The human skull, without
jaw, surmounts and seems to press its teeth onto the skull of a dog. The image is
inserted within a section of the text in which Vesalius attacks his predecessor, the
Roman physician Galen, for not distinguishing between human and animal anatomy.
According to Vesalius, Galen claimed that certain kinds of holes in the skull that
accommodate the nerves are found in humans when, in fact, they only occur in
the canine skull. However, the comparison of the two skulls in the image is set up
not simply to bring visibility to the differences in the markings of the surface of
the skulls. The image also heightens the distinction between human and animal by
reverting back to the human skull’s ability to project a sense of interiority, something
excluded from the animal.

© Association of Art Historians 2012 974

Rose Marie San Juan

Vesalius’ treatise, then, known for its close links between visual clarity and the
production of knowledge, reveals considerable anxiety about visibility as it pertains
to the issue of death and reanimation. And what I have argued is that it has to do with
the problem that the skull, with its potential for faciality, brought to the larger project
of anatomy, a project that sought to alter the conception of life as the passage to death.
This does not mean, at least not initially, a denial of death itself, as perhaps would
happen later when science asserted its powers over nature. On the contrary, death is
crucial to the project but in its reanimated form, as something that brings knowledge
to life and in the process produces a new state of being, one re-stitched from fragments
and reactivated through technology. It requires a turn to a more unmediated
confrontation with death as fact, but also to the possibilities of reanimating life.

Notes sculpture’, Representations, 17, 1987, 28–61.

1 On this painting as memento mori, see Alberto Veca, Vanitas. Il simbolismo del
tempo, Bergamo, 1981, 60–1.
2 Harry Berger Jr., Caterpillage: Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life
Painting, New York, 2011, 15.
3 On the theme of memento mori and the vanitas still life see Kristine
Koozin, The Vanitas Still Lifes of Harmen Steenwyck: Metaphoric Realism,
Lampeter, 1990, 7–83; Liana De Girolami Cheney, ‘Dutch vanitas
paintings: The skull’, in Liana De Girolami Cheney, ed., The Symbolism
of Vanitas in the Arts, Literature and Music. Comparative and Historical Studies,
Lampeter, 1992, 113–76; Veca, Vanitas, 9–160. For an intriguing
critique of this mode of interpretation, see Berger, Caterpillage, 12–18.
4 For the Love of God – Damien Hirst at the Rijksmuseum, 1 November–1
December 2008, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. See Patrizia Nitti, ed.,
C’est la vie! Vanités de Pompéï à Damien Hirst, Paris, 2010, 266.
5 Another example of the use of memento mori as an implied critique of
value and contemporary art is Subodh Gupta’s Very Hungry God, a giant
skull composed of stainless steel utensils that was exhibited at the
entrance of the Palazzo Grassi in the 2007 Venice Biennale.
6 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London, 1988, 167–91.
7 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death, trans. H. Weaver, Oxford, 1991 (re-
issue), 118, 327–32.
8 Cara Krmpotich, Joost Fontein and John Harries, ‘The substance of
bones: The emotive materiality and affective presence of human
remains’, Journal of Material Culture, 15, 2010, 372–84.
9 Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, eds, The Place of the Dead: Death and
Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 2000, 1–16.
10 Julia Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’, in Black Sun: Depression and
Melancholia, trans. L. S. Roudiez, New York, 1989, 105–38.
11 Examples include Hans Holbein’s Two Skulls in a Window Niche, Basel,
Kunstmuseum, inv. 209; see Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years,
Munich, 2006, 50–2; Giovanni Battista Crespi’s Five Skulls, Bologna,
Accademia delle Belle Arti; see Veca, Vanitas, 236–7.
12 Rappresentare il corpo. Arte e anatomia da Leonardo all’Illuminismo, Bologna, 2004,
248–9.
13 On Henri Bergson’s theory of duration, see Mary Ann Doane, The
Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Cambridge,
2002, 172–5.
14 Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, Basel, 1543, 164. On
interpretation of this and other images of skeletons in Vesalius’ treatise
as serving a moralizing purpose, see Raphael Cuir, The Development of the
Study of Anatomy from the Renaissance to Cartesianism, Lampeter, 2009, 69–70;
Veca, Vanitas, 60–4; Louis Van Delf, ‘I secoli d’oro dell’ anatomia’, in
Rappresentare il corpo, 93–4. On Vesalius’ career and treatise, see Andrea
Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning, trans. J.
and A. C. Tedeschi, Chicago, IL, 1999, 39–53.
15 For example, Cuir, The Development of the Study of Anatomy, 84–6.
16 Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, 20–4.
17 Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, 18.
18 Glenn Harcourt, ‘Andreas Vesalius and the anatomy of antique
19 David Wootton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates, Oxford,
2006, 82.
20 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death, 110.
21 Berger, Caterpillage, 13–14.
22 Wootton, Bad Medicine, 82.
23 Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, De Ossium, LX, 162.
24 Elizabeth Hallam, ‘Articulating bones: An epilogue’, Journal of Material
Culture, 15, 2010, 474, 473–7.
25 On functional aspects of Vesalius’s images, see Cuir, The Development of the
Study of Anatomy, 69–73.
26 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 170–2.
27 Palazzo Barberini, Rome. See Roma al Tempo di Caravaggio 1600–1630,
Milan, 2011, 218-219.
28 Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, 20–2.
29 Hallam, ‘Articulating bones’, 474; Wootton, Bad Medicine, 82–6.
30 Wootton, Bad Medicine, 83.
31 Carlino, Books of the Body, 47.
32 Wootton, Bad Medicine, 84.
33 Wootton, Bad Medicine, 85.
34 Hallam, ‘Articulating bones’, 468, 480–1.
35 Hallam, ‘Articulating bones’, 474.
36 Hallam, ‘Articulating bones’, 473.
37 Tim Huisman, The Finger of God: Anatomical Practice in 17th-Century Leiden,
Leiden, 2009, 40–1.
38 On Vesalius’s publications, see Carlino, Books of the Body, 39–53; Andrew
Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical
Projects of the Ancients, London, 1997, 88–142; on the Epitome, see Bettina
Mathes, ‘As long as a swan’s neck? The significance of the “enlarged”
clitoris for early modern anatomy’, in Elizabeth Harvey, ed., Sensible
Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, Philadelphia, PA, 2003, 112–13.
39 For instance, the image of Adam and Eve appears in the 1543 edition
of Vesalius’ treatise at the Hunterian Museum, London.
40 Jacopo de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. G. Ryan and H. Ripperger,
London, 1941, 337.
41 Voragine, The Golden Legend, 269–70.
42 On this kind of print, see Andrea Carlino, Paper Bodies: A Catalogue of
Anatomical Fugitive Sheets, 1538–1687, London, 1999.
43 For example wax portraits, of women with the head divided into two
states; Wellcome collection, London. See Carlino, Books of the Body.
44 For instance, Huisman, The Finger of God, 41. On public dissections, see
Carlino, Books of the Body, 69–119.
45 Krmpotich, Fontein and Harries, ‘The substance of bones’, 378.
46 Huisman, The Finger of God, 39–41.
47 Carlino, Books of the Body, 44.
48 Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, 163.
49 Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought, Cambridge,
1999, 33–5.
50 James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the
Age of Milton, Oxford, 1987, 214.
51 Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, 24.
52 Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, 36; the same image is repeated on 47.

© Association of Art Historians 2012 975