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Macabre
optical illusions
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by
G. Sarcone and Marie-Jo Waeber
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"And
there the children of dark Night (Νύξ,
'Nyx') have their dwellings, Sleep (Ύπνος,
'Hypnos') and Death (θάνατος,
'Thanathos'), awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks
upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into
heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven. And the former
of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea's
broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a
heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless
as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds
fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods."
(Hesiod, Theogony,
Greek epic 8th or 7th Century B.C.)
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Skull/death's
head:
teschio (It), tête de mort (Fr), calavera (Sp), Totenkopf (Ger), caveira (Por), doodshoofd (Du), lebka (Cz), мёртвая голова (Ru), الجمجمة (Ar), κρανίο (Gr), 头骨 (Ch), どくろ (Jap).
The SKULL,
symbol of duality of life
 Often
symbols of MORTALITY (or some romantic notion of immortality
- as the belief that a spiritual part of a person survives death)
and POWER, skulls have
been employed in human rituals and art since the dawn of humanity:
from the ancient animal skulls in Paleolithic burial sites, to
the curlicued cattle skulls that haunt Georgia
O’Keeffe’s canvasses. Skulls
cannot be assumed to be only a mere symbol of death, they are
also used in initiation rituals as a symbol of REBIRTH, symbolizing
the ‘sephirah
daath’ (סְפִירָה -
sephirah, “enumeration” in Hebrew) on the cabalistic
tree of life, the gateway to a higher awareness only achievable
through spiritual death and rebirth.
Skulls
express the EQUALITY of all people in the face of death and
cause us to recognize our mortal nature and the transcendence
of our temporal existence. Think of the scene from Shakespeare's
Hamlet where the prince of Denmark holds the skull of Yorick,
a former servant, bemoaning, in his famous soliloquy (“to
be, or not to be?”), the aimlessness and temporary nature
of worldly matters. In
a Freudian sense, the skull with its sarcastic smile symbolizes
the awareness of someone who has crossed the threshold of the
unknown – the deliquescence and the transmutation of
our EGO into
the universal consciousness.
 Iconography
and popular imagery, from the Roman era and onwards, often
portrays the skull as ‘speaking’, delivering to
the observer a reflection about his present and future life.
The message can be heard as a specific philosophy of life or
as a moral monition. Generally, in illusive vanitas, the skull
says:
• “Memento mori”
(‘remember that you must die’)
• “Carpe diem”
(‘seize the day’, both quotes mean we should live
the present moment to the fullest)
• “Noi eravamo quello che voi siete, e quello che noi siamo voi sarete”
(‘we were what you are; and what we are, you will be’)
• “Vanitas vanitatum”
(‘vanity of vanities’ a reminder of the transitory
quality of earthly pleasure)
• “Et in Arcadia ego”
(‘I too am in Arcadia’, means the omnipresence and
unavoidability of death, even in places where man believes he
can avoid it)
• “Expecto te”
(‘I am awaiting you’)
• “Ubi sunt”
(‘where are those who were before us?’)
 More
latin quotes here.
Skulls
in art and in optical illusions
 Paintings
with a human skull as the centrepiece are known as ‘Vanitas
paintings’. Representations of skulls in art are legion
of course, from Hans Hans
Holbein's distorted death’s-head in his painting “The
Ambassadors” through to Andy
Warhol's paintings of screen-printed skulls in gory black
and white and overlaid with different colors. Skulls have their
place in optical
illusions too, as you can see in the gallery below.
They are often hidden or suggested in the whole ‘host’ image.
Source
of the text: Curiopticals,
Carlton Publishing.
SKULLS IMAGE
GALLERY 
Double-Click on the images to see enlarged versions
of the same.
Click
once to make them thumbnail size again!
Au
Revoir! (Vintage card) |
Children & pup |
Famille
Impériale (Vintage) |
Judge
Magazine cover, 1894 |
L'Amour
de Pierrot, 1905 |
All
is Vanity, C.A. Gilbert |
Voluptate
Mors, Dali |
Ballerina,
Dali |
The
descent, Poster |
Cher,
Album |
Shrooms,
horror |
The
Decemberists, Poster |
Monks |
The
New Yorker, cover |
Mothers
Against Drunk Driving |
H.P.
Lovecraft Expo |
House
on the Edge of the Park |
Pathology,
the film |
Istvan
Orosz's hidden skull |
Orosz's
hidden skull (2) |
Children
and skull, 19th, Germany |
Budi
Satria's hidden skull |
Reversible
animated skull
Merian Mathieu, XVII Century |
Flashing
skulls, Alex Grey
(The stationary image seems to move) |
The
property and the copyright of the images above
belong to the respective authors |
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