The Skull
Día de los Muertos
Mexican tradition takes the same symbol and turns it inside out. The calavera, the decorated skull, appears on altars, in face paint, in sugar and silver, not to grieve but to welcome the dead home for a night. Life and death sit at the same table. It's one of the few skull traditions in the world that's built entirely around joy, and I think about that a lot.
José Guadalupe Posada's depiction of La Calavera Catrina - ArtDaily.org, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1485430
The Death Card
Tarot has the same trick built in. Draw the Death card in a reading and it rarely means someone is going to die. Fortune tellers have spent centuries explaining this to nervous clients: it means an ending that clears the way for something else. Victorian sideshows and parlour fortune tellers understood exactly how to hold an audience with that kind of symbol, unsettling and honest at the same time. As an amateur Tarot reader, I'm often inspired to bring the symbolism, or meaning, into my collections.
Vanitas: The Skull as Still Life
By the 1600s, Dutch and Flemish painters were building entire still lifes around a skull set among flowers, wine, and open books.
The term originally comes from the opening lines of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’
Vanitas are closely related to memento mori still lifes which are artworks that remind the viewer of the shortness and fragility of life (memento mori is a Latin phrase meaning ‘remember you must die’) and include symbols such as skulls and extinguished candles. However vanitas still-lifes also include other symbols such as musical instruments, wine and books to remind us explicitly of the vanity (in the sense of worthlessness) of worldly pleasures and goods.
Skull in a Niche(c. first half of 16th century) by Barthel Bruyn the Elder, where we see an anatomically correct skull placed in a niche of stone. The sheet of paper can be translated to read “With no shield to save you from death, live until you die”; Barthel Bruyn the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Alas, poor Yorick
No skull in English literature carries more weight than the one Hamlet holds. It belonged to his father's jester, a man he'd known and loved as a child. "Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy." The skull isn't a prop in that scene. It's a reckoning. Shakespeare understood exactly what the Romans knew. A skull asks you what you're doing with your time, right now, while you still have it.
Victorian Mourning Jewellery
Victorian Mourning Jewellery
The Victorians didn't hide from grief, they wore it. Mourning jewellery, often set with a lock of hair or a miniature portrait, was worn publicly as a mark of love that had outlived the person it was for. Skulls and skeletons sat alongside hearts and flowers because to the Victorian mind, death and love were never separate stories. Queen Victoria wore mourning dress and jewellery for forty years after Prince Albert died. That's not melodrama, that's fidelity.
The ring shown is a gold mourning ring, decorated with black enamel, inscribed ‘Sam Forth obt 9 Aug 1724 æta 36’ from the London Museum
Rock, Punk & the Counter-Culture Skull
The twentieth century picked the skull up and gave it a different job. Bikers, punks, and metal stripped away the philosophy and left the edge. It became shorthand for standing outside the mainstream on purpose.
Vivienne Westwood owned the punk movement, and her shop on Kings Road, Too Fast to Live, too Young to Die used skulls prominently, before becoming Sex, then the home of Punk: Seditionaries.
Damien Hirst
In 2007, Damien Hirst unveiled For the Love of God, a platinum cast of an eighteenth-century human skull set with 8,601 diamonds, including a 52.4 carat pink diamond at the centre. It was reported at the time as the most expensive work ever made by a living artist, valued at £50 million. Hirst had spent decades circling mortality as a subject, and this was the most direct version of it he'd ever made: the most extreme wealth we know how to produce, wrapped around the one thing none of it can buy its way out of. It raises a fair question. If you cover death in the most valuable material on earth, does that make it less frightening, or does it just make the fear more expensive to look at?
Why I make skull jewellery
The skull sits at the middle of everything I make. It's philosophical and personal, ancient and current, all at once. I make skull jewellery for people who already understand something most people take years to work out: wearing a skull isn't dark, it's deliberate. It's a decision to carry a reminder on your body rather than leave it in a book somewhere. To remember what actually matters, and to stop collecting things that don't.
Every piece is made by hand in my studio in Hastings, hallmarked, and built to outlast trends. Some of them will outlast me too. I like that.
— Maxime
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