The Kiss of Death

What you are looking at

A winged skeleton bends down over a young figure and presses its skull to the youth's forehead in a kiss. Its bony arms wrap around the body it holds; its great wings, every feather picked out, rise behind and frame the pair. The figure in its arms leans back, eyes closed and long hair falling, surrendering rather than struggling. The whole group is finished in a dark, antiqued bronze color, rubbed to highlight the ribs, feathers and strands of hair.

This version is a decorative statue produced by Veronese Designs, a maker of resin figurines, around 2020. It stands about 25 centimeters tall and is cast in resin and hand-painted to imitate bronze. It is not a unique artwork but a commercial reproduction, made in quantity.

The original

The composition comes from El Petó de la Mort, "the kiss of death," a marble funerary monument of 1930 in the Poblenou Cemetery in Barcelona. It marks the grave of a young man from the Llaudet family, who died young, and shows Death as a winged skeleton taking the youth with a kiss. The sculpture is usually attributed to Jaume Barba, though some credit Joan Fontbernat, his collaborator in the workshop. See El Petó de la Mort for the full story.

The original carries an inscription from the poet Jacint Verdaguer, lamenting a life ended so young. Its mix of tenderness and horror, Death as lover rather than reaper, made it one of the most photographed graves in Europe, and replicas like this one spread the image far beyond Barcelona.

Looking closely

Compared with the marble original, the replica exaggerates texture: the feathers are deeply cut and the skeleton's joints are crisp, because the bronze-effect finish needs edges to catch the highlights. The base is decorated with interlacing knots that do not appear on the original. Notice how the figure's hands are posed. One rests on the skeleton's arm, as though accepting the embrace.

Context

The image belongs to an old tradition. The medieval Danse Macabre showed Death leading people of every rank away, and nineteenth-century artists recast the encounter as a kind of seduction, from "Death and the Maiden" in German Romanticism to Symbolist painting. Barba's sculpture, and replicas of it, carry that idea into the twentieth century and into popular gothic taste.

Where to see it

The original sculpture is in the Poblenou Cemetery, Barcelona, and can be visited. See also Memento Mori & Vanitas and The Garden of Death.