In a second you’ll be ashes, so rejoice while you can.Reaper acan Reaper of the Drifting Moon.
Can things get any creepier here? There are times and day when nostalgic thoughts and trips down memory lanes rip my heart in two, but on other occasions thoughts of transience fill me with bewilderment and passion at once because if life passes quickly, if “life is a dream” as Calderon de la Barca wrote, then why waste a single second of it not enjoying it, not being ecstatic that you are alive – while you are alive. In the dark background, another skeleton and a pile of bones and skulls are also painted. The main part of the painting are the two coffins positioned in different directions and they hold the rotting, decaying bodies of a bishop and a knight who both enjoyed fame and repute, though of a different nature, but are both now – dead. The other painting, “Finis Gloriae Mundi”, further emphasises not only the passing of everything on earth but also the pointlessness of success, reputation and everything humans spend (or waste?) their life chasing after. We are surrounded by things that remind us of transience and yet we dread it the most. The verse “the past ages are but as an hour” goes well with the motif of the painting “In Ictu Oculi” a rose blooms and withers quickly, compared to the rose our human life is long, but compared to eternity it is not. So men behold brief fortune’s earthly dower, To flower, the rose displayed her buds at morn,Īnd to grow old and wither, did she flower Snow-white and purple, rivalling heaven’s bow, This posy bright with listed hues of gold, Lulled in the darkling night’s embraces cold. When the white dawn awoke them out of sleep, THESE flowers, whose pomp was joyous to behold, Motif of transience was all the rage in the Spanish Baroque poetry and here is a poem by Pedro Calderon de la Barca called “ These flowers, whose pomp“: The colours – hushed down, sombre, faded, apart from that shiny pink and red – serve to convey the mystical and dark mood. Bellow the grim reaper stretches a cluttered landscape of earthly life, filled with material possession such as books, globe, jewellery, crowns everything that the soul cannot take to the spiritual realm. His left foot is standing on the globe how very dainty. How nice of the grim reaper to point out the title of the painting for us. Arising from the dark background is the figure of a grim reaper who is holding a scythe and a coffin and with his right hand pointing at the letters written above a candlestick “In ictu oculi” meaning “in the blink of an eye”. A dark, dramatic and foreboding atmosphere is seeping out of this painting like spilt ink colouring the white paper in the sea of darkness. The “vanitas” genre of painting captures the mood of the times because it unites the themes of the religious spirit bordering with fanaticism, the fascination with death and the obsession with the transience of earthly life. The sombre and dark paintings fit perfectly with the mood that characterised the sixteenth century in Spain. In 1670-72 Spanish Baroque painter Juan de Valdés Leal was commissioned by the Brotherhood of Charity to paint two paintings, “In Ictu Oculi” and “Finis gloriae mundi”, for the Hospital de la Caridad in Seville.
This is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell. “Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.
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