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Death and the Maiden
1518-20
Oil on panel, 31 x 19 cm
Offentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel
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See collection:
Hans Baldung
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Hans Baldung Grien:
The Three Stages of Life, with Death
c. 1510
Strange quartet
Rose-Marie, Rainer Hagen
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Three Ages of the Woman and the Death
1510
Oil on limewood,48 x 32,5 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
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 Three Ages of Man
1539
Museo del Prado, Madrid |
In 1510 the artist Hans Baldung, alias Grien, completed a
painting enigmatic enough to ensure that its theme has remained the
object of speculation ever since. Who is the young woman, so
engrossed in her own reflection: a goddess, the allegory of Vanity,
a whore? The other figures are equally obscure. All that can be said
for sure of this Renaissance work is that it retains no trace of
that Christian notion of salvation "which so dominated the art of
the Middle Ages. The painting (48 x 33 cm) is in the
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Of the four naked figures in the gloomy landscape, it is the young
woman who draws our attention. A pale, attractive figure, she stands
out starkly against the browns and darker hues of the other figures.
To her right, a torn creature holds an hourglass over the young
woman's head; a hag enters from the left, a child kneels at the
comely blonde's feet.
The work belongs to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, in whose
catalogue of 1896 the old woman is described as Vice, the young
woman as Vanity and the child as Amor. In the catalogue of 1938 the
painting is entitled Allegory of Transience, and 20 years later:
Death and The Three Ages of Woman, Allegory of the
Vanity of all
Worldly Things. The laconic title in a catalogue of works exhibited
at the Baldung exhibition of 1959 reads: Beauty and Death.
Dispute has not been confined to the subject of the painting; the
authorship, too, remained obscure for many years. Initially ascribed
to Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Altdorfer, the painting was eventually
attributed to the hand of Hans Baldung Grien. Little is known of the
artist's life: he was born c. 1485, probably in Schwabisch Gmund.
From 1503 to 1507 he was apprenticed to Albrecht Durer's Nuremberg
workshop. He painted the high altar at Freiburg Cathedral, but lived
mainly in Strasbourg, where he died in 1545.
Despite the puzzle presented by the theme, it is nonetheless
possible to reconstruct contemporary ideas associated with the four
figures, while throwing light on the historical background of the
ideas themselves. Numbers, for example, held a peculiar significance
at the time. They not only served the practical purpose of ordering
diverse phenomena, but were considered things in themselves, pillars
of the world order. Numbers possessed a mythical aura that can be
retraced to antiquity and, in particular, to the work of Pythagoras.
Though number symbolism had never quite sunk into oblivion during
the Middle Ages, it nonetheless experienced a revival with the
rediscovery of antiquity.
Three and four are the numbers most strongly felt in Baldung's
picture: the three stages of life, and, as a fourth stage, Death.
Both numbers were highly significant. Four were the points of the
compass, four the elements and the humours; there were four periods
of the day and four seasons. The times of day and seasons, too, were
frequently associated with periods in life: spring and morning were
childhood, night and winter the final years of a person's life, or
death.
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Eve, the Serpent, and Death
1510
Panel
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
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As a universal number, three was even more significant than four.
The Holy Trinity, after all, was at the heart of Christian theology.
In antiquity, the number three — the beginning, middle and end —
stood for the totality. Aristotle had used the number three in his
ethics: a bad action derives from an "excess" or a "deficiency",
whereas the "just action" lies in the "mean". The Greek philosopher
also applied the number three to the stages of a person's life:
youth had too much strength, courage, anger and desire; old age had
too little of these. Only persons in their prime possessed these
qualities in due proportion.
Much thought during Classical antiquity was devoted to the division
of life into three, or four (or even seven, or ten), stages, but
these ideas did not find their way into the visual arts. The
portrayal of the different stages of a human life in medieval art,
in paintings commissioned by the church, is exceptional, for such
distinctions were considered irrelevant in the face of that still
greater division between life before and life after death. It was
not until approximately 1500, when worldly patrons began to
influence artistic themes, that the ages of Man were more frequently
painted. Hans Baldung made them the theme of his own work on several
occasions.
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First steps
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 Three Ages of the Woman and the Death
(detail)
1510
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 Death and the Maiden
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It is difficult to judge whether the child at the young woman's
feet is a boy or a girl; contours barely visible behind the veil
suggest a boy. The hobby-horse, probably considered a boy's toy at
the time, tends to confirm the suspicion. Conversely, however, if
the painting is intended to portray "the three stages", why give
childhood a different sex from that of maturity and old age?
Perhaps the gender of a child was of little importance to
contemporary spectators. The difference was, in any case, rarely
emphasized. During the first years of their lives boys and girls
wore the same clothes: long frocks or smocks, and snug caps in
winter.
At the same time, less interest was shown in children altogether
than is the case in today's nuclear family: bonding between parents
and children did not occur with quite the same intensity. Too many
children were born, and too many died. Only a fraction of those born
actually survived; it was better, therefore, safer, not to get too
close. Perhaps such emotional reserve partly also explains why
artists paid relatively little attention to children. They perceived
the adult body more accurately than that of a child. This is
certainly true of Hans Baldung Grien. Children who are not old
enough to find their balance do not kneel with one leg stretched out
in the manner shown in the painting. At least, the position would be
extremely unusual.
The image of the child was determined not only by feelings and
social relations, but by a whole superstructure of theological
theory. This included the tenet, prevelant since antiquity, that
children were intrinsically innocent. However, everyday relations
with children made very little of the belief in a child's innocence.
Children were treated as imperfect adults. Their special status
existed only in theory, characteristically illustrated by a motif in
the Bible story of the Garden of Eden: the bite taken from the
forbidden apple, and Man's consequent loss of innocence. Baldung
cites the theme in the shape of the round object on the ground: this
could simply be a child's ball, but it could equally be an apple
lying within the child's reach. The child is likely to pick it up
before long.
To an educated spectator, the hobbyhorse, too, was more than a toy
that happened - by accident, as it were - to be lying on the ground.
Cognoscenti would have linked it, through one of Aesop's fables, to
the theme of the different stages of life. For the Greek writer
attributes an animal to each of the three stages: the dog, the ox
and the horse. The dog, a morose creature, friendly only to those
who look after it, stands for old age; the ox, a reliable worker,
who provides nourishment for old and young alike, represents life's
prime; the horse personifies childhood, since, in this fable at
least, horses are unruly creatures, lacking in self-discipline.
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Beauty keeps her secret
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 Three Ages of the Woman and the Deat h
(detail)
1510
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The star of the painting is the damsel. The other figures seem
present solely to make her stand out more starkly. Baldung achieves
this effect by arrangement and colour: the young woman is furthest
to the fore, the only figure whose body is not, at least partially,
obscured by one of the others. At the same time, her skin is
significantly brighter, indeed nearly white.
In his use of colour, Baldung follows a convention here. His teacher
Albrecht Diirer, as well as his contemporaries Albrecht Altdorfer
and Lucas Cranach, usually painted the bodies of women somewhat
paler than those of men, and young bodies lighter than older ones.
But in so doing, they showed moderation, were less given to
extremes. Since, even in those days, male skin "was probably no
darker than that of women, and young skin no paler than old, artists
must have been influenced by something other than Nature. Perhaps
pallor was intended to indicate a
certain delicacy. It is more likely, however, that they were
painting an ideal aspired to by women themselves. Pale skin was the
fashion, at least in circles that could afford it: at court, or
among the wealthy urban middle class.
The special status granted to the young woman may mean that she is
intended to represent a special person: the goddess Venus, for
example. The child, in that case, would be Amor. However,
contemporary spectators of the painting, exposed to pictures of
Venus and Amor more often than we, would have noticed immediately
that something was wrong. Amor, for one thing, has no bow and arrow,
his traditional attributes; secondly, since Venus is immortal, the
hourglass held over her head is entirely superfluous.
If not a goddess, perhaps the young woman was intended as the
allegory of Vanity. There is much in the painting to suggest this.
The young woman, apparently absorbed in her own reflection, brushes
back her lovely, long hair with her left hand, while, in her right,
she holds a mirror, the symbol of Vanity. The mirror is convex; flat
mirrors were difficult to fabricate, and therefore inordinately
expensive. If the young woman is Vanity, then the older woman is a
procuress: supporting the mirror with one hand, she probably
beckoned with the other, making sure the young woman did not lack
admirers for very long. Death, too, has its place in this picture:
anyone setting out to paint the vanity of beauty would probably also
have its ephemerality in mind. This was doctrinaire Christian
morality, for which the flesh, an obstacle to the spirit's journey
to God, was evil. Outside the church, too, people were constantly
forced to confront death and the ephemerality of life. The average
life expectancy was thirty, almost half our own. Many died in their
prime, especially women in childbirth. Hans Baldung Grien painted at
least three women who had come under the shadow of Death.
In contrast to the three paintings mentioned, however, Death in the
present picture seems merely to be imparting a polite reminder to
the young lady that life eventually comes to a close. The hourglass
has not yet run out: Beauty has time enough to regard herself in a
mirror. But is she really the allegory of Vanity? The child would
certainly be out of place in such an allegory. Baldung's composition
does not comply with any of the many iconographical patterns of his
time. Something is always left unexplained.
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The body becomes a burden
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 Three Ages of the Woman and the Death
(detail)
1510
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Death and the Maiden |
Greek and Roman authors, writing of the different periods of life
and death, had men in mind. They talked of young men and old, not of
girls and old women. Men, during antiquity, were considered the true
representatives of mankind, a notion which has survived the
centuries and, even today, continues to find its way into people's
minds.
Painting has often differed in this respect, not least that of
Baldung himself. Three of his paintings show Death and a maiden. A
panel in Leipzig shows the Seven Stages of Life, another, in the
French town of Rennes, the Three Stages of Death: in both Baldung
paints nude women. Only once does Baldung show Death and a man: the
man is fully clothed, his dress that of a mercenary. Baldung's
preference for women may derive from a more general preference for
painting the female nude. But there may also be reasons less
personal: women's bodies alter more visibly than men's, making it
easier for the artist to illustrate the different stages of her
life. Furthermore, beauty is considered more significant in woman
than in man - more attention is therefore accorded to the passing of
her charms.
Baldung's work belongs to a period in the history of art called the
Renaissance, an era in which the human body is said to have been
discovered anew. But that is only half the story. The body that "was
discovered, celebrated and painted over and over again was
restricted to a single stage of human development: young adulthood,
which, like the pale-skinned woman in the painting, was full of
youthful energy. The other periods, age and childhood, were
neglected. There are very few individual portraits of children, or
paintings of nudes who are visibly past their prime.
If painted at all, then it was not for their intrinsic qualities,
but for purposes of vicarious illustration. Children, for example,
were a part of the traditonal inventory of allegories: as putti,
angels or Amor. The bodies of old women, on the other hand, were
generally linked to something revolting or contemptible: witches,
for example, or the Fates. One such work is Durer's famous
illustration of parsimony, showing a bare-breasted old hag with
narrow eyes in her wrinkled face, with more gaps between her teeth
than teeth in her mouth, and a sack of gold in her lap.
The old woman in Baldung's painting may be intended as a bawd. In
contrast to the younger woman, she is portrayed to her disadvantage,
for her bodily proportions are incorrect. The arm with which she
wards off Death is too long. Baldung frequently distorted
proportions in this way.
The lack of respect and devotion granted older women at the time,
with the exception, perhaps, of portraits like Durer's charcoal
drawing of his mother, together with a pronounced tendency to
portray the older female nude as ugly, probably derive from a
peculiarly male perspective. The young woman, the object of male
desire, was given a certain appeal; sexual inclination determined
aesthetics. Conversely, an older woman's body was seen as worn out,
its erotic properties dissolved. The male reaction to this was one
of disillusionment, perhaps even disappointment. This decided how he
painted.
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Dancing to death
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 Three Ages of the Woman and the Death
(detal) 1510 |
The artist has crowded three figures into the left of the
painting, leaving the right to Death. The proportional harmony and
figural balance sought by Durer is lacking here. Instead, the chief
effect is one of movement: created, for example, by the old woman
striding forcefully towards Death, or by the veil. The latter begins
with the child, flows over the young woman's upper arm, is picked up
by Death, finally drifting out of the painting on the right.
It has been suggested that the pale nude's veil is the badge of a
whore, for in cities like Strasbourg at that time, prostitutes were
obliged to wear veils. But then the Virgin was also frequently
painted wearing a veil, as were Eve and Venus. It is therefore
unlikely that Baldung's contemporaries would have linked the
delicate fabric of the veil with the idea of fornication.
The veil is nonetheless an important feature. Firstly, it fulfils a
practical and traditional function in covering the pubic region;
secondly, it creates a link between the child, the young woman and
Death. The older woman, warding off Death with one hand and
supporting the mirror with her other, completes the group.
All four are inter-connected. The cycle of figures thus suggests the
motion of a dance: a roundel. Dancers often joined by holding a
piece of cloth rather than each others' hands.
Bearing this in mind, it is possible that the contemporary spectator
of this painting would not have thought only of Venus and Amor,
Vanity and the bawd, the ages of Woman, beauty and ephemerality, but
also of the widespread image of the danse macabre, the dance of
death. It was an image often seen carved on the walls of graveyards
and churches: a skeleton, usually playing an instrument, leads
representatives of each of the social strata, from the peasant to
the emperor to the pope, into the Hereafter. The message these
pictures conveyed was that Death cancelled worldly distinctions;
only God's judgement counted.
This religious and moral exhortation was evidently compounded by the
widely held belief in ghosts. Death was not the only figure to haunt
the living; there were also the "undead". People in those days spoke
of revived corpses, dead persons taken before their time, the
victims of murder, suicide, accident or war, who, deprived of last
rites, roved the surface of the earth like a "tormented army".
One of Baldung's contemporaries, the doctor and philosopher
Paracelsus, referred to these revived corpses as "mummies". The term
aptly describes Hans Bal-dung Gricn's figure of Death: no naked
skeleton, but a dried-out corpse, whose finger and toe-nails
continue to grow, whose parched skin hangs down in tatters like the
dry bark of the nearby tree. But even a superstitious belief in
zombies cannot fully account for the four figures in the painting.
There is, at any rate, one thing that all these explanations have in
common: the painting contains no reference to the Christian notion
of salvation, not a trace of that doctrine of Divine Supremacy that
was acknowledged and celebrated so frequently in medieval painting.
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See collection:
Hans Baldung
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The Seven Ages of Woman
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See collection:
Hans Baldung
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"When Shall We Three Meet Again"
Europe swept by witch-burnings
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Two Witches
1523
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Now I come to speak of the greatest of all heresies: of the mischief
wrought by witches and fiends. By night they fly through the air on
broomsticks, stove forks, cats, goats or other such things.
Witchcraft is the most accursed of all errors - and it must be
mercilessly punished by fire.
Mathiasvon Kemnat, Chronicle of Frederick the Victorious of the
Palatinate, c.1480;
heading: William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1,
Scene 1
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Hell's weather cauldrom, 1489
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They concocted devilish ointments of toads'
eyes, choke cherries, peppercorns and spiders. They poisoned the air
with powders ground from intestines. They caused cataclysmic deluges
to fall from the heavens. Thev set off avalanches and turned
themselves into red-eyed goats. Their favourite food was pickled
children. Imagination knew no bounds when it came to describing the
monstrous things done by witches and their evil powers. Some early
tales are inadvertently funny. Witches blew up storms by vigorously
fanning them with their slippers or slid down into valleys on the
backs of avalanches, the tails of their scarves flapping in the
wind. In early Modern times, however, witches were no laughing
matter. Enlightened bishops — who castigated belief in ghosts,
witches and black magic and regarded it as utter nonsense that
represented a revival of pagan practices — were not heeded. Most
theologians not only promoted dark superstition; they were convinced
that sorcery was a reality and the result of pacts with the devil.
Witchcraft was heresy, which made it doubly important to prosecute
it and to persecute practitioners. In 1487 a compendium of horror
stories was published in Strasbourg, the Hexenhammer (Witches'
Hammer), which continued to be read in Europe until the seventeenth
century. Both Protestant and Catholic judges consulted it as a penal
code for dealing with witchcraft. One can imagine King James,
famously obsessed with witchcraft, having been sent a copy by his
daughter from the Palatinate. At any rate, the book may be said to
have sparked off much of the witch-burning madness of the early
Modern age. Its authors approved of torture, maintaining that women
in particular were inclined to the sin of witchcraft. Of course
women who gave themselves up to "lust and carnal desire or even
sodomy" were prime targets for persecution. The German painter
Hans
Baldung Grien, who from 1509 lived in Strasbourg — where
Hexenhammer
had been published not long before — most likely wanted to get in on
the act with his Two Witches. Despite the continued call for
moderation and reason, witch-burnings — which had ceased in England
by 1685 — were still common practice on mainland Europe as late as
1749. Trials however continued until 1717 in England, whereas the
last recorded trial of a witch took place in 1793 in Germany.
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Burning witches at the stake, 1555
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Hans Baldung
Witches
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Witches Sabbath
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Departing for the Sabbath
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Three Witches
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Sorcieres
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Hexenszene
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Departing for the Sabbath
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Szene
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See collection:
Hans Baldung
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