The following art works exhibit death and dying in a considerable variety of forms, ranging from the ignoble death of execution or suicide to the very most noble attempts by legendary heroes to transcend death altogether.
What most clearly identifies this mode of the Gothic in visual art is subject: dead bodies, skeletons, tombs, graveyards, hell, etc.
What most clearly identifies the visual expression of the connotative complex of death is darkness or black, usually accentuated by bursts, flashes, or rays of contrasting light. Red also dominates because of its associations with blood and fire. In the case of depictions of hell, particularly in the Northern Renaissance (Grunewald, Bosch), the dead are represented as grotesque and fantastic.
In the predominately Christian West, Christ is the central figure in a saga involving the transcendence of death. The imagery of Christ crucified dominates Gothic art in churches and cathedrals throughout the West. An often overlooked dimension of the full story of Christ's death is the so-called Harrowing of Hell. Following his death, Christ "descended into Hell. On the third day He rose again, in accordance with the scriptures . . ." According to oral tradition (not scripture), Christ spent these three days rescuing the righteous, mostly old testament patriarchs, from hell. Like Homer's Odysseus (Ulysses), Virgil's Aeneis, Dante's Pilgim and many other heroes of world myth and legend, Christ explores and eventually conquers the realm of the dead in what has to be the ultimate heroic achievement.
Death seems to have been a major preoccupation of the so-called Romantic painters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Goya, Gericault, Bocklin, Wiertz, and many others were fascinated by dead bodies, severed heads, and predatory animals depicted at the instant of their violent deaths. Much of this interest is a reaction to the restraint of the previous Age of Reason and shows the swinging of the pendulum of taste towards intense emotion.
Niccolo dell'Abbate (1509-1571), The Rape of Proserpine
Dirk Bouts the Elder, The Fall of the Damned, 1450
Hieronymous Bosch, The Haywain, Right Panel (Hell), 1485-90, Prado
Hieronymous Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross (1490)
Hieronymous Bosch, Death & the Miser (1490)
Albrecht Durer, Knight
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, 1562
Jan Beerstraten (1622-1666), Village of Nieukoop in Winter with Child Funeral
William Blake, Whirlwind of Lovers
William Blake, House of Death
Nicolai Abildgaard, Ossian, 1782
Jacques-Louis David, Marat Assassinated, 1793
Theodore Gericault, Heads of Guillotined Men, 1817-1820
Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-52
Arnold Bocklin (Boecklin, Boeklin), Isle of the Dead, 1880
Edvard Munch, Death in a Sick Room, 1895
Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), 1896
Salvador Dali, War
Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937
H. R. Giger, Landscape of Death: Babies, 1975