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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Iconodule, post: 10637486, member: 91417&quot;]The mirror reflecting the woman as a skeleton is a modern version of the late medieval/Renaissance theme combining <i>vanitas</i> with death imagery, a <i>memento mori</i> reminding the viewer that earthly beauty is fleeting, that death comes unexpectedly, and the beautiful woman soon will be only a skeleton.&nbsp; For example:&nbsp; Hans Baldung Grien’s painting of the <i>Three Ages of Women with Death</i> (the animate skeleton holding an hourglass) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, or <i>Memling’s Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation</i> in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg, where the images of the beautiful nude holding a mirror, the skeleton (decomposing corpse), &amp; skull are in separate panels.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]532461[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]532462[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]532465[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>It is the same theme expressed by Shakespeare’s Hamlet as he holds the skull of Yorick and tells it, “Now get you to my lady&#039;s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come.”&nbsp; Or the oft repeated, <i>Media vita in morte sumus</i>&nbsp; (In the midst of life we are in death).</p><p><br /></p><p>The snakes entwined around the upper part of the mirror refer both the “worms” that eat the flesh from skeletons and (more significantly for this iconography) the Fall of Man, where Adam and Eve are tempted by the devil in the form of a serpent and thus bring sin and death into the world.&nbsp; I will illustrate that with two more images by Baldung:&nbsp; <i>Eve, the Serpent, and Death</i> (National Gallery of Art, Ottawa, Canada) and a chiaroscuro woodcut of the “Fall of Man” from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (U.S.A.)</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]532463[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]532464[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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