The Transience of Life: Two Canvases from the Ashmolean

Quietly Remarkable Pieces in the Baroque Tradition

From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe...

- John Donne, 'Death, be not proud', Holy Sonnet X

AMONG the Baroque treasures in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, are two deceptively simple paintings, Portrait of a Young Man with a Skull, an early work of Bernardino Licinio, and An Allegory of Vanity, Showing Truth Personified by a Young Woman Holding a Pair of Scales and a Mirror, by an unknown artist. Though both comparatively small canvases, they offer telling perspectives on finitude, melancholic ruminations on both the primitivism and the inevitability of death.

Portrait of a Young Man with a Skull (Bernardino Licinio)

Born in Bergamo, North East of Milan, Bernardino Licinio (c.1489-c.1565) worked in Lombardy and the city in which his Portrait was probably completed, Venice. Dating from around 1515, it was one of six paintings bequeathed to the Ashmolean by Gaspard Farrer, ones he inherited from his father, Sir William Farrer, one of the nineteenth century's foremost collectors of Italian art.

The combination of man and skull reminds us innately of the Danish Prince, the sitter's expression characteristic of one for whom pained meditation is more a vocation than a tendency. The man looks into the distance, a gaze that is intense, almost defiant, yet wearied in its curious resignation. His hands are loose, vacant - he seems more the custodian of the skull than the possessor. He holds it not so much as some coveted relic of humanity as a libation to be offered to an unseen recipient. The collision of youthful vitality and the naked immutability of death could not be more abject, and yet Licinio associates rather than distinguishes the man and the object - respectively, they are the first and final stages of the universal passage from becoming to inertia.

Far from idealising the man's vigour, Licinio shows him in black garb. His attire is as gaunt as the skull, Licinio aligning life and death rather than intrinsically venerating existence over fate. There is no fusion here of death and horror, nor any synonym of existence and virtue, as if life is implicitly to be exalted and death naturally shunned. With the skull motif, the metaphysical denotes immediacy rather than abstraction. It functions not as the emblem of some popularly-perceived esoterica, but as Licinio's lyrical yet blunt twinning of perception and negation. It recalls a former identity, a past capacity for happiness and aspiration, thought and reason. If the man's gestures echo Hamlet's doleful musings, then they resonate, too, with Edgar's enforced humility. "That's something yet...I nothing am" (3.2.21) says Lear's godson, reducing himself to utter anonymity. Edgar's denial of his own identity recalls, in Licinio's canvas, the man's affinity with nothingness, conveying a sobriety tantamount to deprivation. If Edgar's relegation of Self likens him to a mere object, then "something yet" is how Licinio has the man view the skull. It typifies nothingness and thus something - it is the shell of a unique agency, a remnant of fundamental personhood. In the closing speech, Edgar is still more submissive, observing "The oldest hath borne most; we that are young, shall never see so much, nor live so long" (5.3.326-8). He concedes the limitations of youth and the salience of experience. Even as he stands surrounded by death, Edgar preserves the example and character of those who have gone before. As in Licinio's vision, mortality is neither to be feared nor scorned as the antithesis of some precious social aesthetic, but accepted and laid bare. If we are not spared Licinio's artistic candour, then nor are we his creative integrity.

An Allegory of Vanity, Showing Truth Personified by a Young Woman Holding a Pair of Scales and a Mirror (Artist Unknown)

The woman denotes and fulfils both elements of the Dane's aspirant epistemology, "...to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature..." (III.II.21-22) and "...I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space..." (II.II.254-55). Hamlet advocates a futile objective - the containment of reality within a defined frame, and yet Phenomena is too vast, nuanced, for pedestrian reflection and apprehension. Further, he wills his arbitration of an unbounded realm from a confine, a quasi-divinity with pretensions to quantifying Noumena according to some idealised criteria.

The woman holds up a set of scales, presuming to weigh up life, as if existence is at her dictation. In the scales, life is measured quantitatively rather than qualitatively, a false reckoning over innate recognition of its value. The woman stands "above" the skull, apparently taking precedence over, and neglecting, the individual's former agency. Amid her sumptuous garb, she reduces the skull purely to an inanimate object, rather than a relic that once housed a unique seat of reason and emotion, conscience and insight. Equally, though, for all the woman's treatment of the skull as a mere footnote to her beauty, she also portrays it in the most conspicuous and negative light. She reflects it in the mirror, showing us the skull from different angles. The woman advertises the fact of death, and does so with a purse-lipped, almost arrogant sincerity. She presents the skull as if indicting death, as though mortality were a vice to see embarrassed, even shamed.

The positioning of the skull atop the folio reduces what was once the place of that faculty which enabled perception and registered experience to links purely with theory and hypothesis. The textual may feed the imagination and offer salient instruction, but, here, the woman, in her colour-rich attire, takes centre stage while that other "subject" is aligned to the scholarly but not the pragmatic, the inspirational but not the aesthetic. Vanity cajoles us into exclusively visual considerations, motioning the eye to her appearance rather than the curious pathos of that Other "character".