Young Man with a Skull

Prints and Drawings

c. 1519

Lucas van Leyden
Netherlandish, c. 1494-1533

Once interpreted as Lucas van Leyden’s self-portrait, this print is sometimes entitled Memento Mori (Remember you must die). The well-dressed, anonymous figure considers his mortality while pointing at the human skull (which may or may not be real) tucked under his cloak. This image predates by eighty years Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with his famous speech on poor Yorick’s fate, traditionally delivered with the jester’s actual skull in hand. If the round Dürer Crucifixion (1956.951) was printed from Emperor Maximilian’s hatpin, which was also made in 1519, it would have resembled the tiny face stylishly worn on the cap of this unidentified man.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Prints and Drawings

Artist: Lucas van Leyden
Title: Young Man with a Skull
Place: Netherlands (Artist's nationality)
Date: 1514–1524
Medium: Engraving in black on ivory laid paper
Inscriptions: Signed recto lower left corner, in plate in image: “L” (monogram)
Dimensions: Image/sheet, trimmed within platemark: 18.3 × 14.4 cm (7 1/4 × 5 11/16 in.)
Credit Line: Clarence Buckingham Collection
Reference Number: 1940.1314
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/40355/manifest.json

Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 95-96, 103-06, fig. 11 (ill.).
Jan Piet Filedt Kok, edited by Ger Luijten, The New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts: 1450-1700. Lucas van Leyden (Roosendaal: Koninklijke van Poll; Amsterdam: Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, 1996), pp. 156.
Ellen S. Jacobowitz and Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, The Prints of Lucas van Leyden & His Contemporaries (Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, 1983), pp. 197-198, cat. 73 (ill.).

Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, “Lucas van Leyden & His Contemporaries,” June 5-August 14, 1983; also traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, September 14-November 20, 1983.
The Art Institute of Chicago, “Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life,” April 30-July 10, 2011, pp. 23-24, fig. 16 (ill.).

Volbehr 158 I/I

Bartsch 174 I/I

Hollstein 174 I/II

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