# data[].attributes.body
the skull surounded by flowers and gifts

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'Equid sunt aliud, quam breve gaudium?' Or in translation, 'What are these other than a brief joy?' The viewer of this still life is asked to ponder this philosophical question. All the objects in this painting allude to the transience of earthly things. The skull and the thighbone beside it signify death. The fly on the forehead stands for the persistence with which death pursues us. The books refer to the inadequacy of human knowledge. Flowers are symbolic of the brevity of life, since they bloom for such a short time. The valuable exotic shell, the pearls and the coins are reminders that earthly riches are vain in the face of death.
But there is a ray of light in the darkness, as the French proverb written on the paper protruding from the book tells us - 'mourir pour vivre', die to live, a reference to life after death, the only life that is worthwhile. The butterfly is also an allusion to this hopeful prospect: the butterfly lived as a caterpillar, to become a butterfly. Thus the human spirit, when it leaves this earthly life, will find salvation.

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Vanitas Still Life - Adriaen van Nieulandt - Google Arts & Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
'Equid sunt aliud, quam breve gaudium?' Or in translation, 'What are these other than a brief joy?' The viewer of this still life is asked to ponder this philosophical question. All the objects in this painting allude to the transience of earthly things. The skull and the thighbone beside it signify death.

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it looks like an altar to commemorate someone

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
'Equid sunt aliud, quam breve gaudium?' Or in translation, 'What are these other than a brief joy?' The viewer of this still life is asked to ponder this philosophical question. All the objects in this painting allude to the transience of earthly things. The skull and the thighbone beside it signify death. The fly on the forehead stands for the persistence with which death pursues us. The books refer to the inadequacy of human knowledge. Flowers are symbolic of the brevity of life, since they bloom for such a short time. The valuable exotic shell, the pearls and the coins are reminders that earthly riches are vain in the face of death.
But there is a ray of light in the darkness, as the French proverb written on the paper protruding from the book tells us - 'mourir pour vivre', die to live, a reference to life after death, the only life that is worthwhile. The butterfly is also an allusion to this hopeful prospect: the butterfly lived as a caterpillar, to become a butterfly. Thus the human spirit, when it leaves this earthly life, will find salvation.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Vanitas Still Life - Adriaen van Nieulandt - Google Arts & Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
'Equid sunt aliud, quam breve gaudium?' Or in translation, 'What are these other than a brief joy?' The viewer of this still life is asked to ponder this philosophical question. All the objects in this painting allude to the transience of earthly things. The skull and the thighbone beside it signify death.

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Snakes going more deep into her mouth when they were crawling around.

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Fundación MAPFRE acquired its first Iturbide works in 2008 (16 prints) and made a second purchase of 169 photographs of similar characteristics in 2011, which means that this artist's career is quite well represented in its collection.

Fundación MAPFRE organised a major retrospective in 2009, and two years later, in 2011, Fundación MAPFRE arranged for her work to be shown at one of the most important events on the international photography calendar, the Rencontres d' Arles, where she had already won an award in 1991.

Paula Susaeta

Details

Title: Autorretrato con serpientes, Oaxaca, México

Date Created: 2006

platinum print: Artist print

Physical Dimensions: w19.5 x h19.5 cm (Without frame, without passepartout)

Photographer: Graciela Iturbide

It was taken there: Mexico

Artist Biography: Graciela Iturbide (1942) Graciela Iturbide wanted to be a writer and later a filmmaker, but when she met Manuel Álvarez Bravo and saw his photographs, she found them so moving that she decided to become a photographer. For her, photography is a way of exploring, researching and getting to know other cultures, starting with her own. In her hands the camera becomes a tool of knowledge. Cartier-Bresson, Koudelka and Hiroshi Hamaya are among her professional role models. In 1969 Iturbide enrolled in the Centre for Film Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she became an assistant to one of her teachers, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who would also become her mentor. In 1970 the demise of her daughter Claudia plunged her into several dark years of grief and fixation on death, from which the artist claims that death actually rescued her: "It told me, 'End it now, beware of it' and I did." She later travelled to Panama to photograph General Omar Torrijos, and immediately afterwards, in 1975, her first exhibition, Tres fotógrafas mexicanas, opened at Galería José Clemente Orozco in Mexico City. In 1979 she visited the Sonora Desert and took one of her best-known photographs, Mujer ángel [Angel Woman]. This trip would give rise to the project Los que viven en la arena [Those Who Live in the Sand] (1981). She also went to Juchitán at the invitation of artist Francisco Toledo to work on an exhibition about the Zapotec culture. Both her immersion in Zapotec culture and her encounter with Toledo-who from that moment on would remain a close friend and colleague with a tremendous intellectual influence on both her life and work-were pivotal moments in her career. In response to questions about her interest in symbols and rituals, Iturbide has commented, "Even if we renounce our upbringing, it's always part of our baggage; it accompanies us wherever we go." And no one knows this better than her. The photographer, now a practising agnostic, was brought up in a Catholic middle-class Mexican family, where symbols and rites were an intrinsic part of the language: as a young girl, Graciela would dress up as a Madonna or a little angel, depending on the occasion. The photographer subsumed the writer and the filmmaker: words and motion are trapped in the static image of the world that Iturbide offers us. Their surrealism, poetics and a certain carnality make her photographs immediately recognisable. In 1980 her work was exhibited in Mexico City and Juchitán, and in 1982 the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) organised her first trans-Atlantic solo show (she had been exhibiting in the United States since 1976). After that time Iturbide held exhibitions around the world, with two major shows taking place in 1996: Graciela Iturbide, la forma y la memoria at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey and Graciela Iturbide: Images of the Spirit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and other venues. Symbols, rites, death, communities and the complicity required to photograph them, as in Juchitán de las mujeres [Juchitán of the Women] (1994) and Graciela Iturbide: Juchitán (2008); festivals, celebrations and the nonchalance of those who pose unabashedly for the camera, as in Chalma; the trip to photograph the goat slaughter, captured in En el nombre del padre [In the Name of the Father] (1993); the silence after photographing gardens, such as the botanical gardens of Oaxaca seen in Narurata (2004) with their plants in the process of healing, with veils, injected solutions and strings to help them grow straight; the Seri Indians of Sonora; the festivities of Chalma and Juchitán; and the birds that are her inseparable companions, to the point that they became part of an emblematic self-portrait in which the artist's eyes were covered by birds, one living and one dead. Each image inspires us to remember the essential: life, death and pleasure. What makes humans human and the world, the world. The journey is always present as a tool for learning. In the 1990s Iturbide travelled to Benares, India. She discovered solitude in the United States in the year 2000, photographing landscapes for the first time in Tampa, Florida. Iturbide found her interest in the idea of the landscape and the horizon growing strong again. She returned to India. In 2006, back in Mexico, she photographed the reopening of Frida Kahlo's bathroom, which had been closed up by Diego Rivera in 1954. Iturbide is not a Frida-maniac, as she herself admits, but Frida is Saint Frida Kahlo in Mexico and one must approach the legend with respect. The evocative power of this work allows us to imagine the days and nights of an artist marked by pain and the oppression of corsets, crutches, politics and her own illness. Japan, Korea, Italy... as the list of countries grew, so did her collection of awards and distinctions: the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant, first prize at Mois de la Photo in Paris, and the International Grand Prize in Hokkaido, Japan. In 2008 she won the Hasselblad Award, currently the highest distinction a photographer can receive. "I am a solitary person, which is why I chose photography over film. When you take pictures you're alone, and you also have those nights of reflection." Paula Susaeta

Rights: © Graciela Iturbide, ©COLECCIONES FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE / Fernando Maquieira

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Autorretrato con serpientes, Oaxaca, México - Graciela Iturbide - Google Arts & Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fundación MAPFRE acquired its first Iturbide works in 2008 (16 prints) and made a second purchase of 169 photographs of similar characteristics in 2011, which means that this artist's career is quite well represented in its collection.

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Showing how over time the plant and flower are dying

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The exuberant profusion of flowers in this still life by Rachel Ruysch celebrates color, texture, and form. Her minute attention to detail captured even the individual grains of pollen inside each open flower.

The dynamic, pyramid-shaped composition derives much of its energy from the asymmetrical arrangement of the blossoms, further accentuated by the wildly curving stems and dramatically highlighted central section. The dark background reveals a hint of architecture, demonstrating Ruysch's awareness of this new compositional trend among flower painters in Amsterdam.

While this painting contains several elements that would also be found in the popular 17th-century Dutch picture type known as a vanitas, scholars doubt that this was Ruysch's intention. A true "vanitas" painting stresses the brevity of earthly life and the inevitability of death and decay, through such objects as a snuffed-out candle or a worm-eaten fruit.

Ruysch's depiction of insects alighting on the flowers or leaves that are beginning to turn brown, seems more a straightforward depiction of life rather than a moralizing statement on death.

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Roses, Convolvulus, Poppies, and Other Flowers in an Urn on a Stone Ledge - Rachel Ruysch - Google Arts & Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The exuberant profusion of flowers in this still life by Rachel Ruysch celebrates color, texture, and form. Her minute attention to detail captured even the individual grains of pollen inside each open flower. The dynamic, pyramid-shaped composition derives much of its energy from the asymmetrical arrangement of the blossoms, further accentuated by the wildly curving stems and dramatically highlighted central section.

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there 2 dead and another person trying to die

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This painting and the one titled Satire of the Romantic Lover's Suicide,(Museo del Romanticismo, inv. 33), are the most surprising representation of death in all Spanish Romanticism. They were signed by Leonardo Alenza, who presented them to the Academia de San Fernando in 1839. / Alenza makes a sharp, ironic criticism of men of letters as victims of the Romantic influence and of suicide as a final solution to their problems. / These were some of the first paintings to be incorporated into the new Museo Romántico, in the year 1921, thanks to the generosity of the marquis of Cerralbo.

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Satire of Romantic Suicide - Leonardo Alenza - Google Arts & Culture

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This painting and the one titled Satire of the Romantic Lover's Suicide,(Museo del Romanticismo, inv. 33), are the most surprising representation of death in all Spanish Romanticism. They were signed by Leonardo Alenza, who presented them to the Academia de San Fernando in 1839.

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the skeleton dancing around the old women as she going to be with them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Old woman, from the Dance of Death - Hans Holbein the Younger|Wenceslaus Hollar - Google Arts & Culture

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Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world’s treasures online.

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It resembles death because the animals are dead

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Matanza, La Mixteca, Oaxaca, México - Graciela Iturbide - Google Arts & Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fundación MAPFRE acquired its first Iturbide works in 2008 (16 prints) and made a second purchase of 169 photographs of similar characteristics in 2011, wh...

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I have always read or envisioned decaptitated heads as a symbol that someone was truly dead. In Kahlo's painting "Girl with Death Mask" you have a decapitated head shown next to her. I'm curious as to what the head belonged to, but it could have been the enormous defeat of a monster or something symbolic.

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Frida Kahlo was a female painter who represented Mexican modern art, and her reputation has been growing in recent years. When she was eighteen she was in a traffic accident, and suffered from its aftereffects throughout her life. She fought the pain by painting. She led a problem-filled life as the wife of mural painter Diego Rivera and as his comrade in the revolutionary movement as well.
Kahlo's painting continued the tradition of Mexican folk art and was also deeply rooted in her private experience, which resulted in extremely unique and attractive works. The French surrealist poet, André Breton, admired her as a "born surrealist".
In this work, "Girl with Death Mask", the theme of death from which no one can escape is taken up, and it was painted while she was mourning the death of her own baby by miscarriage."Death" was the most intimate theme for Kahlo, who always lived in close context to it. Mexican traditional idea of death is reflected on each motif in this painting. The death mask worn by the girl is a toy for the "Day of the Dead" and the marigolds in her hand are to be offered at a grave to guide the spirits of the dead. The "Tiger Mask" at her feet was used as a talisman to protect the child against evil.
(Source: Selected Works from the Collection of Nagoya City Art Museum, 1998, P. 61.)

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Girl with Death Mask [Niña con máscara de calavera] - Frida Kahlo - Google Arts & Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Frida Kahlo was a female painter who represented Mexican modern art, and her reputation has been growing in recent years. When she was eighteen she was in ...

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Birds are coming to take him

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Fundación MAPFRE acquired its first Iturbide works in 2008 (16 prints) and made a second purchase of 169 photographs of similar characteristics in 2011, which means that this artist's career is quite well represented in its collection.

Fundación MAPFRE organised a major retrospective in 2009, and two years later, in 2011, Fundación MAPFRE arranged for her work to be shown at one of the most important events on the international photography calendar, the Rencontres d' Arles, where she had already won an award in 1991.

Paula Susaeta

Details

Title: El señor de los pájaros, Nayarit, México

Date Created: 1995

Physical Dimensions: w46.6 x h32.5 cm (Without frame, without passepartout)

Photographer: Graciela Iturbide

It was taken there: Mexico

Gelatin silver print: Artist print

Artist Biography: Graciela Iturbide (1942) Graciela Iturbide wanted to be a writer and later a filmmaker, but when she met Manuel Álvarez Bravo and saw his photographs, she found them so moving that she decided to become a photographer. For her, photography is a way of exploring, researching and getting to know other cultures, starting with her own. In her hands the camera becomes a tool of knowledge. Cartier-Bresson, Koudelka and Hiroshi Hamaya are among her professional role models. In 1969 Iturbide enrolled in the Centre for Film Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she became an assistant to one of her teachers, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who would also become her mentor. In 1970 the demise of her daughter Claudia plunged her into several dark years of grief and fixation on death, from which the artist claims that death actually rescued her: "It told me, 'End it now, beware of it' and I did." She later travelled to Panama to photograph General Omar Torrijos, and immediately afterwards, in 1975, her first exhibition, Tres fotógrafas mexicanas, opened at Galería José Clemente Orozco in Mexico City. In 1979 she visited the Sonora Desert and took one of her best-known photographs, Mujer ángel [Angel Woman]. This trip would give rise to the project Los que viven en la arena [Those Who Live in the Sand] (1981). She also went to Juchitán at the invitation of artist Francisco Toledo to work on an exhibition about the Zapotec culture. Both her immersion in Zapotec culture and her encounter with Toledo-who from that moment on would remain a close friend and colleague with a tremendous intellectual influence on both her life and work-were pivotal moments in her career. In response to questions about her interest in symbols and rituals, Iturbide has commented, "Even if we renounce our upbringing, it's always part of our baggage; it accompanies us wherever we go." And no one knows this better than her. The photographer, now a practising agnostic, was brought up in a Catholic middle-class Mexican family, where symbols and rites were an intrinsic part of the language: as a young girl, Graciela would dress up as a Madonna or a little angel, depending on the occasion. The photographer subsumed the writer and the filmmaker: words and motion are trapped in the static image of the world that Iturbide offers us. Their surrealism, poetics and a certain carnality make her photographs immediately recognisable. In 1980 her work was exhibited in Mexico City and Juchitán, and in 1982 the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) organised her first trans-Atlantic solo show (she had been exhibiting in the United States since 1976). After that time Iturbide held exhibitions around the world, with two major shows taking place in 1996: Graciela Iturbide, la forma y la memoria at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey and Graciela Iturbide: Images of the Spirit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and other venues. Symbols, rites, death, communities and the complicity required to photograph them, as in Juchitán de las mujeres [Juchitán of the Women] (1994) and Graciela Iturbide: Juchitán (2008); festivals, celebrations and the nonchalance of those who pose unabashedly for the camera, as in Chalma; the trip to photograph the goat slaughter, captured in En el nombre del padre [In the Name of the Father] (1993); the silence after photographing gardens, such as the botanical gardens of Oaxaca seen in Narurata (2004) with their plants in the process of healing, with veils, injected solutions and strings to help them grow straight; the Seri Indians of Sonora; the festivities of Chalma and Juchitán; and the birds that are her inseparable companions, to the point that they became part of an emblematic self-portrait in which the artist's eyes were covered by birds, one living and one dead. Each image inspires us to remember the essential: life, death and pleasure. What makes humans human and the world, the world. The journey is always present as a tool for learning. In the 1990s Iturbide travelled to Benares, India. She discovered solitude in the United States in the year 2000, photographing landscapes for the first time in Tampa, Florida. Iturbide found her interest in the idea of the landscape and the horizon growing strong again. She returned to India. In 2006, back in Mexico, she photographed the reopening of Frida Kahlo's bathroom, which had been closed up by Diego Rivera in 1954. Iturbide is not a Frida-maniac, as she herself admits, but Frida is Saint Frida Kahlo in Mexico and one must approach the legend with respect. The evocative power of this work allows us to imagine the days and nights of an artist marked by pain and the oppression of corsets, crutches, politics and her own illness. Japan, Korea, Italy... as the list of countries grew, so did her collection of awards and distinctions: the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant, first prize at Mois de la Photo in Paris, and the International Grand Prize in Hokkaido, Japan. In 2008 she won the Hasselblad Award, currently the highest distinction a photographer can receive. "I am a solitary person, which is why I chose photography over film. When you take pictures you're alone, and you also have those nights of reflection." Paula Susaeta

Rights: © Graciela Iturbide, ©COLECCIONES FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE / Fernando Maquieira

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
El señor de los pájaros, Nayarit, México - Graciela Iturbide - Google Arts & Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fundación MAPFRE acquired its first Iturbide works in 2008 (16 prints) and made a second purchase of 169 photographs of similar characteristics in 2011, which means that this artist's career is quite well represented in its collection.

# data[].attributes.body
There is a skeleton behind him

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We will never know for certain whether or not the personification of death was an afterthought, as one account would have it. Artists' self-portraits with a memento mori have been known since time immemorial. The inspiration for this figure of Death playing the fiddle probably came from the Portrait of Sir Bryan Tuke in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, where Böcklin had lived since 1871. At the time it was wrongly attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger, whose woodcuts of dances of death with images of Death playing the fiddle would also have been known to Böcklin. In this self-portrait, Death is playing on the lowest string, tuned to G, which is here also the only string of the fiddle. The painter, alert, has paused in his work. According to the story, Böcklin only painted in the figure of Death in response to his friends' asking what he seemed to be listening to. This clearly relates to the search for the ultimate that characterizes this self-portrait, and the inspiration the artist draws from the constant proximity of death. The impressive quality of this self-portrait inspired other painters including Hans Thoma and Lovis Corinth to paint similar portraits of themselves.

Additional Items

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Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle - Arnold Böcklin - Google Arts & Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We will never know for certain whether or not the personification of death was an afterthought, as one account would have it. Artists' self-portraits with a memento mori have been known since time immemorial. The inspiration for this figure of Death playing the fiddle probably came from the Portrait of Sir Bryan Tuke in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, where Böcklin had lived since 1871.

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2 dead chickens are just there bleeding out.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Fundación MAPFRE acquired its first Iturbide works in 2008 (16 prints) and made a second purchase of 169 photographs of similar characteristics in 2011, which means that this artist's career is quite well represented in its collection.

Fundación MAPFRE organised a major retrospective in 2009, and two years later, in 2011, Fundación MAPFRE arranged for her work to be shown at one of the most important events on the international photography calendar, the Rencontres d' Arles, where she had already won an award in 1991.

Paula Susaeta

Details

Title: Los gallos, Juchitán, México

Date Created: 1987

Physical Dimensions: w16.9 x h25.6 cm (Without frame, without passepartout)

Photographer: Graciela Iturbide

It was taken there: Mexico

Gelatin silver print: Artist print

Artist Biography: Graciela Iturbide (1942) Graciela Iturbide wanted to be a writer and later a filmmaker, but when she met Manuel Álvarez Bravo and saw his photographs, she found them so moving that she decided to become a photographer. For her, photography is a way of exploring, researching and getting to know other cultures, starting with her own. In her hands the camera becomes a tool of knowledge. Cartier-Bresson, Koudelka and Hiroshi Hamaya are among her professional role models. In 1969 Iturbide enrolled in the Centre for Film Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she became an assistant to one of her teachers, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who would also become her mentor. In 1970 the demise of her daughter Claudia plunged her into several dark years of grief and fixation on death, from which the artist claims that death actually rescued her: "It told me, 'End it now, beware of it' and I did." She later travelled to Panama to photograph General Omar Torrijos, and immediately afterwards, in 1975, her first exhibition, Tres fotógrafas mexicanas, opened at Galería José Clemente Orozco in Mexico City. In 1979 she visited the Sonora Desert and took one of her best-known photographs, Mujer ángel [Angel Woman]. This trip would give rise to the project Los que viven en la arena [Those Who Live in the Sand] (1981). She also went to Juchitán at the invitation of artist Francisco Toledo to work on an exhibition about the Zapotec culture. Both her immersion in Zapotec culture and her encounter with Toledo-who from that moment on would remain a close friend and colleague with a tremendous intellectual influence on both her life and work-were pivotal moments in her career. In response to questions about her interest in symbols and rituals, Iturbide has commented, "Even if we renounce our upbringing, it's always part of our baggage; it accompanies us wherever we go." And no one knows this better than her. The photographer, now a practising agnostic, was brought up in a Catholic middle-class Mexican family, where symbols and rites were an intrinsic part of the language: as a young girl, Graciela would dress up as a Madonna or a little angel, depending on the occasion. The photographer subsumed the writer and the filmmaker: words and motion are trapped in the static image of the world that Iturbide offers us. Their surrealism, poetics and a certain carnality make her photographs immediately recognisable. In 1980 her work was exhibited in Mexico City and Juchitán, and in 1982 the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) organised her first trans-Atlantic solo show (she had been exhibiting in the United States since 1976). After that time Iturbide held exhibitions around the world, with two major shows taking place in 1996: Graciela Iturbide, la forma y la memoria at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey and Graciela Iturbide: Images of the Spirit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and other venues. Symbols, rites, death, communities and the complicity required to photograph them, as in Juchitán de las mujeres [Juchitán of the Women] (1994) and Graciela Iturbide: Juchitán (2008); festivals, celebrations and the nonchalance of those who pose unabashedly for the camera, as in Chalma; the trip to photograph the goat slaughter, captured in En el nombre del padre [In the Name of the Father] (1993); the silence after photographing gardens, such as the botanical gardens of Oaxaca seen in Narurata (2004) with their plants in the process of healing, with veils, injected solutions and strings to help them grow straight; the Seri Indians of Sonora; the festivities of Chalma and Juchitán; and the birds that are her inseparable companions, to the point that they became part of an emblematic self-portrait in which the artist's eyes were covered by birds, one living and one dead. Each image inspires us to remember the essential: life, death and pleasure. What makes humans human and the world, the world. The journey is always present as a tool for learning. In the 1990s Iturbide travelled to Benares, India. She discovered solitude in the United States in the year 2000, photographing landscapes for the first time in Tampa, Florida. Iturbide found her interest in the idea of the landscape and the horizon growing strong again. She returned to India. In 2006, back in Mexico, she photographed the reopening of Frida Kahlo's bathroom, which had been closed up by Diego Rivera in 1954. Iturbide is not a Frida-maniac, as she herself admits, but Frida is Saint Frida Kahlo in Mexico and one must approach the legend with respect. The evocative power of this work allows us to imagine the days and nights of an artist marked by pain and the oppression of corsets, crutches, politics and her own illness. Japan, Korea, Italy... as the list of countries grew, so did her collection of awards and distinctions: the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant, first prize at Mois de la Photo in Paris, and the International Grand Prize in Hokkaido, Japan. In 2008 she won the Hasselblad Award, currently the highest distinction a photographer can receive. "I am a solitary person, which is why I chose photography over film. When you take pictures you're alone, and you also have those nights of reflection." Paula Susaeta

Rights: © Graciela Iturbide, ©COLECCIONES FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE / Fernando Maquieira

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Los gallos, Juchitán, México - Graciela Iturbide - Google Arts & Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fundación MAPFRE acquired its first Iturbide works in 2008 (16 prints) and made a second purchase of 169 photographs of similar characteristics in 2011, which means that this artist's career is quite well represented in its collection.

# data[].attributes.body
Seems to be the woman's soul leaving her body, so viewers assume that death may of occurred.

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"It may seem surprising just how many of Evelyn's paintings are situated with water and in particular the sea in the background of the image. For Evelyn the motif of the sea encompassed a number of tropes both metaphorical and physical. Evelyn uses the device to help create a mood, for instance, beauteous contemplation or violence and death. It could be a vehicle for allegory, indicating birth and renewal or the end of life. It could contain creatures representative of evil such as crocodiles, dinosaurs or dragons or creatures of beauty and myth such as mermaids.

In this painting executed towards the end of Evelyn's life, the sea is used to illustrate her spiritualist belief that at the moment of death the soul's essence, or spirit, passes out of the body and into the light of the next world. The dying figure is sitting on rocks in a dark shadowy land. The flaming torch of life has fallen from her hand and will shortly be extinguished in the water. A dark shadow of a dragon representative of evil menaces the dying woman, and yet her spirit passes safely across the water, to the sunlight of the spirit world on the other side of the pool."

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The Passing of the Soul at Death - Evelyn De Morgan - Google Arts & Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"It may seem surprising just how many of Evelyn's paintings are situated with water and in particular the sea in the background of the image. For Evelyn the motif of the sea encompassed a number of tropes both metaphorical and physical. Evelyn uses the device to help create a mood, for instance, beauteous contemplation or violence and death.

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There are three corpses in that room

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After the defeat at the battle of Actium and after Anthony had killed himself, the Egyptian queen chose suicide by viper bite to avoid the shame of falling prisoner to the Romans. Unlike the Baroque precursors, we do not see her in the throes of death, and only the snake to the left alludes to the way she was to die. The three corpses seem to have frozen into stone thanks to the use of bleak incarnate. In contrast to Poussin's scene of Germanicus on his death bed, Regnault's drama does not evidence any emotional echo in the guise of ancillary figures mourning. The finality of extinguished life is presented as if in the limelight on stage. The blind absorption of the dead allows us to view them without being disturbed. With the queen and her arm hanging down Regnault quotes David's Death of Marat (1793, Brussels). The painting was produced in the '5th Year of the Republic' and was read as an expression of resignation in the face of the bloodshed of the French Revolution. (Bettina Baumgärtel)

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Death of Cleopatra - Jean-Baptiste Regnault - Google Arts & Culture

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After the defeat at the battle of Actium and after Anthony had killed himself, the Egyptian queen chose suicide by viper bite to avoid the shame of falling prisoner to the Romans. Unlike the Baroque precursors, we do not see her in the throes of death, and only the snake to the left alludes to the way she was to die.

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sculptures of dogs were common companions of the dead.

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Frida Kahlo was a female painter who represented Mexican modern art, and her reputation has been growing in recent years. When she was eighteen she was in a traffic accident, and suffered from its aftereffects throughout her life. She fought the pain by painting. She led a problem-filled life as the wife of mural painter Diego Rivera and as his comrade in the revolutionary movement as well.
Kahlo's painting continued the tradition of Mexican folk art and was also deeply rooted in her private experience, which resulted in extremely unique and attractive works. The French surrealist poet, André Breton, admired her as a "born surrealist".
In this work, "Girl with Death Mask", the theme of death from which no one can escape is taken up, and it was painted while she was mourning the death of her own baby by miscarriage."Death" was the most intimate theme for Kahlo, who always lived in close context to it. Mexican traditional idea of death is reflected on each motif in this painting. The death mask worn by the girl is a toy for the "Day of the Dead" and the marigolds in her hand are to be offered at a grave to guide the spirits of the dead. The "Tiger Mask" at her feet was used as a talisman to protect the child against evil.
(Source: Selected Works from the Collection of Nagoya City Art Museum, 1998, P. 61.)

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Girl with Death Mask [Niña con máscara de calavera] - Frida Kahlo - Google Arts & Culture

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Frida Kahlo was a female painter who represented Mexican modern art, and her reputation has been growing in recent years. When she was eighteen she was in ...