Description
German school; 15th century. "Memento Mori". Polychrome carved wood. Presents restorations. Measurements: 17 x 36 x 12 cm. Round sculpture in which we can appreciate the figure of a small child with delicate and rounded volumes, leaning on a skull. The author manages to create a great impact on the spectator by combining the presence of an infant with that of the skull, which represents death. Thus showing a sculpture in which the concept of life, which sleeps peacefully resting on death without being aware of it, and how danger lurks from the earliest childhood, come together. This sculpture is part of the genre of vanities, which was so important to him. The transience of life was one of the themes that most preoccupied Baroque artists. Vanities denounced the relativity of knowledge and the vanity of the human race subject to the passage of time and death. Its title and conception are related to a passage from Ecclesiastes: "vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas" ("vanity of vanities, all is vanity"). As in the rest of Europe, sculpture played an important role in Germany during the 17th century. It appeared in public spaces, in palaces and private residences, in churches and cathedrals, government buildings, etc., and also reflected a wide variety of subjects, ranging from traditional religious, mythological and historical heroes to famous people, statesmen, etc. Formally, these are works of very free compositions, always marked by their dynamism and by a marked tendency towards instability in the representation, in keeping with the taste for the curved line that is so typically Baroque. For this reason, the figures, as we can see here, are characterised by wide folds, gestures or theatrical compositions, a break with compositional frontality, dynamic lines determined by anatomy and movement, etc.
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