Seville (The Art Museum) Paintings with Skulls)

While visiting the art museum in Seville, pretty fantastic collection, I started noticing all the different ways that skulls show up in paintings.  Many of them were upended or turned at a weird angle.  You see them from the bottom, where the spinal column and at an angle that is not the most recognizable view of the skull.

I wondered, why is that?  So I used Ebscohost and read some stuff.

Art historians generally say that the unusual way skulls are depicted—tilted, inverted, or seen from awkward angles—is intentional, especially in Spanish Baroque painting.

 (I'm actually not sure since none of them seemed to refer to an actual text where an artist who painted them said this, but, it does seem reasonable. )

In works like San Jerónimo penitente en su estudio by Sebastián de Llanos Valdés, Tentaciones de San Jerónimo by Juan de Valdés Leal, and San Francisco confortado por un ángel by Domingo Martínez, the skulls are rarely shown straight on. Instead, they are often viewed from below or turned in ways that make them harder to recognize.

They might be shown this way because artists wanted them to function as more than simple symbols of death. By rotating or foreshortening the skull, painters turned it into more of an idea rather than something we literally could put a face on.

I bet it's because they may have gotten bored with straightforward ways of painting a skull and wanted to experiment or show off.

One historian, in fancy jargon, calls this a "conceptual device that slows down the viewer and demands careful observation." (paraphrased) and that this visual difficulty makes us think more about moral and philosophical ideas about mortality, knowledge, and the limits of human life, which were central concerns during the Renaissance and Baroque periods (Juan, 2012).

To reiterate, he's guessing or theorizing.  To go with this, historians theorize that, in religious paintings, especially those associated with saints like San Jerónimo, skulls serve as vanitas or memento mori symbols—reminders that worldly achievements, learning, and power are temporary. When the skull is shown from an unusual angle, it becomes less decorative and more unsettling.

 The viewer has to “discover” the skull rather than immediately recognize it, which mirrors the moral lesson: people often ignore death until they are forced to confront it directly (Sofer, 1998; Goscilo, 2010).

I found one guy who kind of agrees with my guess or theory that artists were bored or showing off.  To paraphrase,

These angles may reflect the period’s artist's experiments with foreshortening, perspective, and anatomical accuracy. (Think Mantegna's Dead Christ.

 From the sixteenth century onward, painters were deeply invested in demonstrating their technical skill. Showing a skull from the base, including the opening where the spine connects, allowed artists to display their mastery of foreshortening and their knowledge of human anatomy. In Seville’s paintings, this technical ambition reflects the influence of Italian Renaissance theory combined with a distinctly Spanish realism that emphasizes physical and spiritual intensity (Kajinishi et al., 2023).

They did like to play with optics.  There's a famous painting by Holbein that I saw at the British National Gallery that puts some "flesh" on the theory. 

Distorted skulls may connect to the idea of anamorphosis, where an image only appears correct from a specific viewpoint. 

While the Seville works I saw are not fully anamorphic like Holbein’s The Ambassadors, their angled skulls still suggest that truth—and death—is always present but not always immediately visible. The viewer must change how they look in order to understand what is being shown (Massey, 1997).

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References (forgive the crappy formatting. I'm on a phone.)

Juan, R. M. S. (2012). The turn of the skull: Andreas Vesalius and the early modern memento mori. Art History, 35(5), 958–977.

Kajinishi, Y., Kodera, R., & Kodera, H. (2023). Anatomical intention in a seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas skull. Anatomical Science International.

Massey, L. (1997). Anamorphosis through Descartes, or perspective gone awry. Renaissance Quarterly, 50(4), 1142–1169.

Sofer, A. (1998). The skull on the Renaissance stage: Imagination and the life of props. English Literary Renaissance, 28(1), 3–31.

Goscilo, H. (2010). Vision, vanitas, and veritas: The mirror in art. Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 34(2).

Çelik, Z. (2016). About antiquities: Politics of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire. University of California Press.

De Pascale, E. (2009). Death and resurrection in art. Getty Publications.