World Art Day 2025: the depiction of death in art
Throughout the history of art, artists have utilised various mediums to explore universal human experiences. The one, inescapable human experience which has fascinated, horrified and captivated artists, is death.
While it is something we know that we all ultimately face, engaging with and understanding death can be difficult, but art offers us a channel to engage with it, though only briefly, in a reflective and private way.
Part of Life has created a list of art works that offer different representations of death and dying. We hope that they offer a spark to connect with questions around mortality, and space to reflect and consider the ultimate human experience.
Death and Life - Gustav Klimt, 1915
"Death and Life" is a 1910-1915 oil-on-canvas painting by Gustav Klimt, depicting an allegorical subject in an Art Nouveau style, now housed at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, and explores the cycle of life and death.
The painting contrasts a stream of naked human bodies, including a mother and child, an old woman, and a loving couple, with the figure of death on the left, clad in a blue ornamental coat and holding a club. The ‘life’ side is depicted with colourful ornaments and flowers, while the figure of death is portrayed as almost vigorous, yet the people in the ‘life’ side seem to be in a passive, sleep-like state, seemingly unwilling to accept the presence of death. ‘Death and Life’ is considered one of Klimt's central works and a masterpiece of the Art Nouveau movement.
Death of Cleopatra - Damià Campeny, c.1804
The death of Cleopatra has fascinated historians and artists for two thousand years. After the Battle of Actium 31 BC, in which Mark Antony and Cleopatra were defeated at sea by Octavian, Cleopatra tricked Antony in to believing she had killed herself. Antony proceeded to commit suicide but was able to die in Cleopatra’s arms. She later also committed suicide, famously known through Shakespeare’s play, by using a poisonous asp.
The work of art chosen by Part of Life is Damià Campeny's terracotta sculpture, ‘Death of Cleopatra’, created around 1804, depicting the death of the Egyptian queen, and currently housed at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. It is a life sized sculpture, capturing her moments after death, the venomous asp slithering along her arm.
The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb - Hans Holbein the Younger, 1521
The most familiar representation of death in the western world is that of Christ’s crucifixion. Innumerable works of art from traditional paintings, to triptychs, idols, and jewellery have depicted the biblical scene of the crucifixion and the aftermath of Jesus’s execution from the first century AD until the present day.
Of the many depictions, Part of Life has chosen ‘The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb’ by Hans Holbein the Younger. Painted between 1520 and 1522, it depicts a realistic, almost grotesque, image of the deceased Christ in his tomb, now housed at the Kunstmuseum Basel. The reason we have chosen this particular portrayal is because unusually, it focuses on the physical reality of death, rather than the divine, and the gruesome wounds of the crucifixion.
Dying Gaul - Ancient Rome, 250BCE
The ‘Dying Gaul’ (or ‘Galata Morente’) is an ancient Roman marble copy, from around 220 BCE, of a lost Greek bronze sculpture depicting a wounded, dying Celtic warrior, currently housed in the Capitoline Museums in Rome.
The sculpture is a Roman copy of a Hellenistic bronze statue, likely commissioned by King Attalos I of Pergamon to commemorate his victory over the Gauls (Celts) in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). It depicts a Celtic warrior succumbing to death, showing remarkable realism and pathos, particularly in his face.
Danse Macabre murals
Danse Macabre murals, also known as ‘Dance of Death’ murals, are medieval artistic representations depicting skeletons leading a procession of people of all social classes to their graves, serving as a reminder of mortality. The Danse Macabre emerged as a literary and artistic theme in Europe during the late medieval era, reflecting anxieties about death and the inevitability of mortality, when mortality rates were extremely high. These murals typically depict a chain of alternating dead and live dancers, with the dead leading the living, regardless of their social standing, from the highest to the lowest.
Probably one of the most famous depictions of the Danse Macabre is a painting by Bernt Notke. A fragment of the late fifteenth-century painting, originally some 30 meters wide, is displayed in the St. Nicholas Church, Tallinn. It is regarded as the best-known and as one of the most valuable medieval artworks in Estonia. It is the only surviving medieval Dance Macabre in the world painted on canvas.
The Danse Macabre serves as a powerful reminder that death is an inevitable part of life, regardless of social status or wealth.
The Pietà (Our Lady of Pity) – Michelangelo, 1499
Another lifelike sculpture, Michelangelo's ‘Pietà’, also known as ‘Madonna della Pietà’ or ‘Our Lady of Pity’, is a marble sculpture depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus, located in St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.
While this sculpture does portray the death of Christ, the focus is on the sorrow of Mary, whose serene grief and loss is deeply moving. Michelangelo's aesthetic interpretation of the Pietà was unprecedented in Italian sculpture, because rather than presenting Mary as a mature maternal fugure, she is young and beautiful.
Ophelia - John Everett Millais, 1852
Depicting the death of Ophelia drowning in a stream, this scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, painted by Millais, is one of the most popular works in the Tate collection.
The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood was a group of artists who aimed to revive British art by rejecting the Royal Academy's emphasis on Raphael and the Renaissance, instead embracing a "truth to nature" approach with bright colors, detailed realism, and subjects from literature and myth. They also painted from life, with models posing for the artists. The most famous of their models was Elizabeth Siddell, who posed for Ophelia. Lying in a bathtub of water heated by oil lamps, Millais was so engrossed in his work that he did not notice when the oil lamps went out, leaving Siddell in cold water for hours, and a legacy of ill health thereafter.
After the Storm - Sarah Bernhardt, 1876
Sarah Berhandt witnessed a tragic scene on the seashore; an old woman found her drowned grandson caught in a fishing net. Deeply moved by what she saw, Bernhardt created a sculpture of the moment, the peasant woman cradling the body of the child. The depiction of the death of a child is always particularly shocking, and Bernhardt’s anatomy lessons help to convey the physical reality and intensity of the subject. It also very clearly evokes Micahelangelo’s ‘Pieta’, which we previously looked at, highlighting the universality of the experience of death and grief, whether divine figures, or lowly Breton peasants.
Guernica - Pablo Picasso, 1937
"Guernica" is a powerful 1937 oil painting by Pablo Picasso, a visceral anti-war statement inspired by the German bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, now displayed at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.
On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the town of Guernica was razed to the ground by German aircraft belonging to the Condor Legion, sent by Hitler to support Franco’s troops. Bombs rained down on Guernica for hours in an "experiment" for blitzkrieg tactics. Since Monday was Guernica's market day, and most of its men were away fighting on behalf of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, at the time of the bombing the town was mostly filled with women and children.
The painting shows the carnage, panic, terror and utter horror of the attack on Guernica and the slaughter of the women and children, in surrealist style, though this does not detract from the reality of the bombing.
A Dead German in a Trench – William Orpen, 1918
During World War I, Irish artist, William Orpen, was the most prolific of the official war artists sent by Britain to the Western Front. While there, he depicted the reality of war, with stark visuals of dead bodies and decomposition in the aftermath of peace. He donated most of his works to the British government and they are now housed in the Imperial War Museum, London.
In ‘A Dead German in a Trench’, it depicts a view from inside a trench showing the skeleton of a German soldier hanging upside-down from the trench wall. The skeleton is partially covered by the remains of his uniform, and his helmet lies upturned on the trench floor.
World Art Day and death
This list is only a fraction of the many impressive, moving and shocking depictions of death in art over the millennia. Let us know if you think we’ve missed any works that depict death, dying and grief that have moved you, by leaving your recommendations in the comments below.
