Skeletons, also known as Allegory of Death and Fame

1518

Skeletons, also known as Allegory of Death and Fame, 1518. Agostino Veneziano (Italian, 1490–1540), after Rosso Fiorentino (Italian, 1494–1540). Engraving; sheet: 30.9 x 50.8 cm (12 3/16 x 20 in.); secondary support: 41.2 x 61.2 cm (16 1/4 x 24 1/8 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund 1993.8 Although for centuries scholars have attempted to understand the allegorical meaning of this print, 16th-century artist and author Giorgio Vasari described it simply as “an anatomy of desiccated nudes and of bones of the dead.” A central figure of winged Death stands over an interred skeleton, surrounded by a variety of skeletal and living human figures who appear to debate the fate of the soul. At far left is a “marasmic” man, a type of sun-dried body used by anatomists to study the muscles without removing the skin. Rosso Fiorentino, who designed the composition of this print to be engraved by Agostino Veneziano, was a Florentine contemporary of Michelangelo who planned a book on anatomy that was never published.