Complete the account of the imagery of death.
The general theme of remembering mortality is ______ mori. Its most developed still-life form is the ______, named from a phrase in Ecclesiastes. The procession in which death leads away figures ordered by rank is the ______ macabre. The tradition teaching dying well as a skill is the ars ______.
Word bank: memento · vanitas · danse · moriendi · transi · judicii
Hints
- The first two are Latin; the third is French.
- The last blank names a fifteenth-century instructional tradition.
Show the answer
The general theme of remembering mortality is memento mori. Its most developed still-life form is the vanitas, named from a phrase in Ecclesiastes. The procession in which death leads away figures ordered by rank is the danse macabre. The tradition teaching dying well as a skill is the ars moriendi.
The last blank is the context that keeps the rest from looking morbid. The ars moriendi treated dying well as a learnable skill with a printed manual, and the images belong to that practical tradition rather than to a mood.
Practise Death, Transcendence and the Human Condition
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Death, Transcendence and the Human Condition
- A vanitas is an expensive, highly skilled painting bought by prosperous people and hung in their houses. Why…
- The danse macabre orders its figures by social rank in order to dissolve the ranking.
- Sort each object by what it signifies in a vanitas.
- Which are true of the Last Judgement as a subject?
- In roughly which decade did the danse macabre mural at the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris appear?
- Match each theme to what the imagery is doing.
- Arrange these developments in the imagery of death in order.
- The vanitas belongs to the genre the academic hierarchy ranked last.
- Memento mori art functions as an admonition rather than an expression of despair. What follows from this…