Fetzentödlein, Death in tatters, South German, ca 1670. Boxwood. Height 29 cm. KUNSTKAMMER GEORG LAUE at TEFAF 2024. © 2024 TEFAF

 

Provenance: Germany, Rudolf Theodor Edler von Jaschke Collection (1881–1963).

Representations of skeletal figures were not rare in the Late Middle Ages: personifications of Death as the Grim Reaper with a scythe as his attribute or as an archer in the Dance of Death contexts appeared increasingly from the fifteenth century in frescoes, paintings and reliefs in churches. As a small piece of sculpture of a domestic character, on the other hand, the Fetzentödlein (literally ‘Small Death in tatters’) does not surface until the sixteenth century. The motif is Death depicted fully in the round in a small format as a skeletal figure from which scraps of decayed skin are dangling.

The earliest known work of this kind is a statuette carved before 1519, which is now in the Kunstkammer at Ambras Castle in Innsbruck and is attributed to the Landshut sculptor Hans Leinberger. The type of skeletal figure wearing its decaying skin like a tattered garment would undergo a sharp upturn in popularity in the latter half of the seventeenth century: several statuettes of this kind are kept by public and private collections, including the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and the Busch-Reisinger Museum, which is part of the Harvard University Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This small group of works is stylistically and structurally homogeneous, and dated to ca 1670 because the work in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum bears the date numerals 1673 on its plinth. A pronounced delight in morbid details is flaunted in this small statue: decaying skin detaches itself from the cranial bones like a hood and encases the figure’s feet like decrepit old shoes; the abdominal wall gapes open to reveal the entrails, some of which bulge out and are crawling with vermin. The deliberately gruesome mode of representation contrasts with the virtuosity of execution that marks this boxwood statuette as an exquisite work of art.