Skeletons, also known as Allegory of Death and Fame (1518): Art, History and Details

Skeletons, also known as Allegory of Death and Fame (1518) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Agostino Veneziano (Italian, 1490–1540); Rosso Fiorentino (Italian, 1494–1540).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Although for centuries scholars have attempted to understand the allegorical meaning of this print, 16th-century artist and author Giorgio Vasari described it simply as “an anatomy of desiccated nudes and of bones of the dead.” A central figure of winged Death stands over an interred skeleton, surrounded by a variety of skeletal and living human figures who appear to debate the fate of the soul. At far left is a “marasmic” man, a type of sun-dried body used by anatomists to study the muscles without removing the skin. Rosso Fiorentino, who designed the composition of this print to be engraved by Agostino Veneziano, was a Florentine contemporary of Michelangelo who planned a book on anatomy that was never published.

Object facts

• Title: Skeletons, also known as Allegory of Death and Fame
• Date: 1518
• Creator attribution: Agostino Veneziano (Italian, 1490–1540); Rosso Fiorentino (Italian, 1494–1540)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Print
• Technique: engraving
• Dimensions: Sheet: 30.9 x 50.8 cm (12 3/16 x 20 in.); Secondary Support: 41.2 x 61.2 cm (16 1/4 x 24 1/8 in.)
• Collection: PR - Engraving
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1993.8

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• “1993 Annual Report.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 81, no. 6 (July 1994): 143–218.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.