From Baccio Bandinelli’s untitled sixteenth-century sketch to Anne Bradstreet’s seventeenth-century poem “The Four Ages of Man,” humanity has continually reflected on the inevitability of aging.[1] Some, like Aristotle and Giles of Rome have taken more philosophical outlooks of the process, whereas others – such as Titian and Sir Anthony Van Dyck – have approached the topic from an artistic lens.[2] In Mesoamerican communities, the subject takes the form of las edades del hombre, ceramic masks where a skull symbolizing death breaks open to reveal the faces of old age and youth. Regularly seen in contemporary artwork, some of the earliest renditions come from the pre-Columbian culture of Teotihuacan, with one such artifact dating to roughly 1300 C.E. housed in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.[3]
Works Referenced
González Gómes-Cásseres, Patricia. “La muerte/Death, Then and Now.” Death and Dying in Hispanic Worlds: The Nexus of Religions, Cultural Traditions, and the Arts. Ed. Debra Andrist. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2021. 38-50.
Joannides, Paul. Titian to 1518. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
Lepore, Jill. The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death. New York: Vintage Books, 2013.
Price, David. History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and the Past. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
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[1] Lepore, 64.
[2] Price, 61; Joannides, 197.
[3] González Gómes-Cásseres, 49.
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