Hieroglyphs of Death and Salvation: The Decoration of the Church of the Hermandad de la Caridad, Seville

Abstract

The Jeroglificos de nuestras postrimerías by Juan de Valdés Leal have held many a viewer in their grim thrall ever since the painter finished them for the Church of the Brotherhood of Charity in Seville in 1672. Rarely in art have the spectacles of death and the sepulcher been realized with such vividness. In the first painting, subtitled In Ictu Oculi (In the Twinkling of an Eye) (Fig. 1), the time-honored formula of a memento mori is observed with gruesome exactness. Death is a skeleton, carrying a coffin, shroud and scythe, who disdainfully extinguishes the candle of life. The eyeless sockets seem to leer with satisfaction as the light goes out on the symbols of human greatness and power. In the twinkling of an eye, the sum of life's achievement is obscured by dark death. The second painting, Finis Gloriae Mundi (The End of Worldly Glory) (Fig. 2), elaborates the theme of death by a chilling representation of sepulchral existence, where the fragile human substance is human no more, but merely decomposing matter. Worldly glory ends in rot and decay; bugs crawl over the human shell, nourishing their vile bodies with its mortal substance. Three open coffins reveal death's impartial destruction of life and fame. The power of these paintings is so considerable that it has been easy to forget a basic question about them: why were they commissioned for the church of a brotherhood devoted to the practice of charity? The answer leads us to an unusual religious society and its leader, thence to the time when it flourished and finally to the artistic cycle that epitomized them all.

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