The Vision of Death in Nordic Art – Emil Cioran, 1931

Translation from the Romanian "Singurătate și destin"

There exists in Nordic art a much more accentuated sensibility than in southern art. While in the latter one the tormenting vision of essential realities is reduced by way of an aesthetic mode of life, in Nordic art the rich problematics of life is lived all the way through to its ultimate elements. It matters not if this revelation of ultimate elements is conducted on the purely theoretical plane or in the domain of vision as such: what is essential is that it derives from the fact that this revelation is implicitly a revelation of death.

The one who thinks about life and doesn’t arrive to a sentiment and problematics of death is one who is incapable of any profound speculation. For a purely formal speculation the problem of death does not even exist, because formalism eliminates any existential datum.

Where existence is foremost and form is something vague and inconsistent, the problem of death becomes essential. The evidence? You must only cast your mind to Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger. Conversely, in the anachronistic and obsolete formalism of Kant such problems are completely unessential. When faced with the phenomenon of death, what value could the symmetrical and artificial division of categories continue to have?

This same idea of the vanity of any formal perfection when faced with death traverses the spirit of all Nordic art, and the art of the German Renaissance especially.

In the art of the Italian Renaissance this thought is annulled by the aesthetic perspective on the world. There exists in the structure of aesthetic being a depreciation of death, of misery, and suffering; obviously, in the structure of an aesthetic mode of life developed to its extremes as it is in ages with aestheticizing tendencies. What used to be painful disharmony, presentiment of death, and apocalyptic vision for primitive Italians was clothed with the forms of a pure idealization by the Renaissance, the concrete convulsions of being where transfigured by the light of an abstract beauty. The Holy Virgin is no longer the pained teary-eyed mother, she becomes a fashionable beauty with a mysterious and almost erotic smile.

The same happens in the case of Jesus and John the Evangelist. The Italian Baroque represents a revival of certain motifs belonging to primitive Italian peoples and through this it comes closer to certain elements expressed at full tension in Nordic art. If the southern Renaissance places death completely outside of life by the vision of its transcendence, such that life develops as if untouched by it, the Nordic Renaissance and all its art in general presents a strange vision where death is present together with life. There can be no talk of an immanent conception of death here per se, because death is here not a progressive effect of one’s inner stores being exhausted. In the case of immanence, the becoming of life implies by its unfolding a progressive entrance into death, such that time determines the prevalence of one against the other. I live, but in my living, death is already engraved as destiny. A step into life is also a step towards death. This sentiment of the immanence of death was given its most powerful expression by Rembrandt. In the vision where death is actualized together with life, which we meet in Hans Holbein, Matthias Grünewald, Lucas Cranach, Hans Baldung etc., and which is so specific to Nordic art, there exists a powerful and vibrant sentiment of the presence of death, which is not exterior to life, but determines its character and course. It has none of the charm of irrational expansion because death is an insurmountable barrier and is eternally present. For this reason, the form of the human body is devoid of the perfection and purity of classical lines, devoid of naive spirit and contemplative quietude, of sweet and serene reverie, of voluptuous abandon untouched by theological questioning, something that Antiquity and the Renaissance have cultivated in particular, and it develops the tormented aspects of life instead, carrying the impression of something tortured and destroyed. The motif of vanity so frequently present in the aforementioned artists is significant and revelatory in this respect, wherein a skeleton representing death appears in a scene that depicting an intense aspect of life. One always remains with an awkward and painful impression after a viewing of Baldung’s painting in which a skeleton of death appears behind a young girl admiring her naked body in the mirror. There is in that “Eitelkeit” [Vanity] which one finds so often in German painters a contempt full of hatred for life, a negation of the beautiful through art, a desperation in the face of any attempt to save the world by aesthetic means. If the aesthetic attitude towards life is unmediated, naive and lacking a normative element, then the attitude containing apocalyptic visions of these painters is the antipode of the aesthetic attitude. By considering it one is far away from any kind of satisfaction that could result from contemplating a work of art; on the contrary, an unsatisfaction neighbouring desperation cancels any kind of aesthetic joy. The pessimism of Holbein and the fantastical vision of Grünewald, for which the cross drowned in the immensity of night was the symbol of universal tragedy, presents elements yet more tormenting, all the more so for death is for them not a liberation, otherwise they would not have left behind such repulsive and terrible images of death. The entirety of Christian art is a protest against life, an escape from the folly of nature, proving the inability of the Christian to accept a purely terrestrial tragedy. Death, insofar as it helps with entering the transcendental world, carries for him the nature of salvation and redemption.

Nordic Christianity, however, has developed the tragic element to such an extent that it managed, by means of negating it, to reach a kind of pan-demonism which eliminates redemption, while death stops being a method of liberation. If that is not true for all of them, it at least seems to me to be an explanation for the aforementioned ones.

The taste of death is so pronounced in Holbein that skulls constitute almost a regular element in his paintings.

Even if one cannot talk about a total irreducibility between life and death from a metaphysical point of view, it is not any less true that practically speaking man behaves as if death is something outside the immanent flow of life. It is the fruit of a long desperation, of an enduring bloodied struggle of our whole being – the conception of immanent death in life. The conception of immanent death leads to resignation; that of the actuality of death together with life, which makes every moment of it be tortured by the perspective of death, that leads directly to desperation, to a desperation without liberation. The parallel character– so to speak – of death and life in Nordic art urges you to think of those marbled words exclaimed by that ancient tragedian: who knows but life be that which men call death, and death what men call life?