For centuries, the human skull in art has stood as a symbol of the marriage between morality and mortality. In many ways, mortality marks the birth of human morals.
Our knowledge of our own death is what makes us human, while our awareness of the inevitability of death gives rise to an urge to deal with the moral consequences and meanings of our actions, thoughts and life itself.
In art, the skull and, at times, the whole human skeleton have often played the part of a crude and cruel reminder of this link between the vanities and the termination of life, or between death and the consequences of evil. This is what we mean when we call a painting a memento mori, a reminder of death.
It is also true that at an individual level, some works of art do not combine morality and mortality in this way, while at a wider, social level, some societies have tended to stress one more than the other. For instance, religious moralisers seem to fit more comfortably into medieval societies than into most modern societies.
People appear to have found moralising less bothersome then. One of the great art historians of the th century, Erwin Panofsky, observed “a radical break with the medieval, moralising tradition” in Nicolas Poussin’s second version of Et in Arcadia Ego, now hanging in the Louvre. The skull is no longer present as it was in the artist’s first version, while the four figures in Poussin’s second painting appear to be calmly discussing the Latin inscription etched into the simple, stone tomb.
Panofsky read this as a transition from “thinly veiled moralism” to “a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality”. In Panofsky’s reading of Poussin’s Louvre painting, the customary, moralistic encounter with an implacable death and the afterlife is transformed into an intellectual discussion about the death of someone which took place in the distant past.
Poussin’s picture lies between its interpretation as mortality rather than morality and its other, possible interpretation as the death of an individual rather than the transient nature of human life. Its ultimate meaning is undefinable; Panofsky called this a typical “Romantic fusion” of interpretations.
Similarly undefinable are the skulls, bones and animal skeletons in the collection of Italian artist Renato Meneghetti’s X-ray paintings currently being shown at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta. Born in the northern Veneto region of Italy in 1947, Meneghetti has worked in various art-forms, including film, music and visual art. During the last two decades, his visual art output has concentrated on the use of X-rays which are transferred photographically onto canvas and coloured with alcohol-based hues. The collection at the National Museum of Fine Arts is a representative selection of some of the directions his research into the use of X-ray imagery has taken between 1981 and the present.
Naturally, Renato Meneghetti is not the only artist to have used X-rays of the human body in his work. Even in Malta, local artist Vince Briffa recently produced a small series of monochromatic, mixed-media works on paper, with fragments of the human skeleton reproduced from hospital records, what makes Meneghetti’s works “undefinable” is his introduction of luminous passages of colour on certain areas of the canvas. This is a very Warholian technique, combining manual work with mechanical reproduction and flat colour with the more three-dimensional effect of a black-and-white photographic print. The juxtaposition of tragic human fate, represented by the human fragments in Meneghetti’s work, and bright, almost festive colouring is also present in some of Andy Warhol’s better-known pop imagery think of his Red Race Riot of 1963, for instance.
In Meneghetti, there is no medieval moralising, no evident relationship between the awareness of the finality of human life and the urge to live a “good” life. His work has often been said to represent “silence”, and it is true that Meneghetti’s X-ray paintings remain silent about how the artist expects us to read his images (assuming that he expects us to do anything of the sort).
At times, his work evokes a brooding mood: a series of four, related works at the museum in Valletta show a half-moon against a deep blue background change in stages into a full-moon-shaped skull. At other times, the mood is less easy to confirm. Is an X-ray painting of Meneghetti’s hand holding a paintbrush, complete with metacarpal bones and phalanxes, a reference to the artist’s own death? And how does the cool, detached and occasionally brilliant colouring fit into this literal rendering of morbidity? How are we to read an enlarges version of a set of human teeth juxtapose I with a similarly oversized and luminous slice of kiwi fruit? Is the human body a graphic sign like any other?

Raphael Vella