Death

Memento Mori - Remember you must die

In this section you can see visual responses to these words - words that have inspired artists for centuries: paintings by Salvator Rosa and 'Velvet' Brueghel, and a medal by Quentin Metsys made for his friend, the philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Here you can view moving depictions of the deaths of men from myth, religion and history: Rubens' Death of Hippolytus, images by Géricault and Turner of the victims of the Napoleonic wars, and Graham Sutherland's remarkable depiction of the Deposition of Christ, inspired by the Holocaust.

This section also contains various richly decorated objects in which the remains of the dead have been kept - an Egyptian coffin, a Roman sarcophagus and a medieval reliquary.