Death and transience

Everyone must die, and art has always tried to give death a form. It has shown grief and remembrance, but also dancing skeletons, skulls among flowers and a silent island where the dead rest. We follow the theme from the gravestones of antiquity by way of the medieval Dance of Death and Baroque vanitas to Böcklin, Munch, Hugo Simberg and the artists of our own time.

• Remembering the dead – antiquity
• The Triumph of Death and the Dance of Death – the Middle Ages
• Skeletons and skulls – the Renaissance
• All is vanity – the Baroque and vanitas
• Heroes, ruins and ordinary people – the 18th and 19th centuries
• Isle of the Dead – Symbolism and the Nordic countries
• Skeletons and ancestors – Japan, China and Mexico
• Grief and transience – the 20th century and today