I'm no long sure when I first became interested in this painting -- perhaps when I read about it in John Berger's Ways of Seeing (pages 88ff.). But I do know that I find the distorted skull (in the foreground) the most captivating part of the picture. If you stand off to the right of the picture at a very sharp angle, you can see the skull pretty clearly. I realized that when I stumbled across the picture while walking through the National Museum in London. I was also struck by how large the painting is -- over six feet tall. The size and the brightness of the green drapery where the most surprising new details that I noted that day in the gallery (and which made me temporally forget about my aching feet and lower back, the result of a few hours of slowly trekking through endless galleries).
I am drawn to this painting not just because the skull is a memento mori, but because of the way this particular example of the tradition is rendered. (I guess I have to admit that I "collect" images of memento mori; I have a cool postcard in my office of another one that was created inadvertently by a different museum display.) I have used this skull to illustrate the perspective of death or eternity in various poems, such as ones by Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti that use beyond-the-corpse narrators . I have also used this image -- and its contrast with the undistorted and luxurious material existence of the two ambassadors and their belongings/surroundings -- to try to present a figurative objects that gestures toward the nature of eternity or timelessness as T.S. Eliot invokes these modes of being in "Little Gidding," a section of the longer work called "Four Quartets." I try to connect this strange image of a skull (you can see what it looks like when undistorted here) to these lines in particular:
And what the dead has no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead; the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
The twisted, hard to perceive, unnatural skull serves as a sort of iconic rendering of the fact that the timelessness that Eliot speaks of is not simply a continuation of our sense of time as we live it. Timelessness is beyond our ability to experience it. We cannot speak from the view of death (we cannot "speak Death"?) because we have no way of getting to that perspective while still staying connected to the perspective we have while living. I suppose the best symbol of this disjuncture might be nothing, but the distorted skull is an effective makeshift indicator of the difficulties of perceiving eternity. Eternity is always around our lives, but it is also never available to us. We cannot connect to it. Tolkein's elves were another attempt to deal with this issue.
Damien Hirst has a title for one of his projects that captures the idea I'm trying to articulate: "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living." I'm not really sure how the physical reality of this artwork, however, achieves the title. Here it is -- a shark suspended in formaldehyde:
This is an amatuer shot of the front view (the tank now resides in the NY Met Museum).
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