An Allegory of Death and Beauty 1509

Hans Baldung painted this small panel, An Allegory of Death and Beauty, sometime in the first half of the 16th century. Here, we find a nude woman caught between an old crone presenting her own reflection in the mirror, and the figure of death who holds up an hourglass. Baldung was working in Germany at a time when the institutions of the Catholic Church were beginning to be challenged by those of the burgeoning reformation. Artists working at this time were keen to explore humanism and an interest in classical antiquity while reckoning with the religious upheaval around them. The naked figure of the woman, which recalls the classical ideal of female beauty, is an established trope in the visual arts, but here she is used to remind us of the brevity of life. This reflects contemporary anxieties about the conflict between earthly and spiritual values. To better understand the artwork, we can look at the role of the artist during the Reformation and how the development of printing and the mass media changed the function of imagery in society. The meaning of art is, after all, contingent on its social and institutional context.