Two figures are locked in a battle of wills.
One – a bearded, winged man – lifts a coffin away from the other: a hunched sepulchral figure, rearing up and grasping in response like a carrion feeder robbed of its prize.
The sculpture is named for its two figures, ‘Time and Death’.
It’s closer to a sketch or a maquette than a finished piece of art. It’s a bozzetti, a preliminary terracotta model made as part of the process for a large marble commission. It was created circa 1670, probably by the great Italian sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini.
It’s striking and dramatic. So arresting, in fact, that you may not notice that a contentious assertion is being made in the scene.
The artist is making a particular statement about human existence. It’s there in the gaze between these two figures and the symbolism of the casket being raised out of Death’s reach.
The vulture and the lion
According to the description accompanying it, the bozzetti embodies a recurrent theme in Bernini’s work: “It depicts the victory of Time over Death, asserting the triumph of immortality – of fame and reputation – while reminding the viewer of mortality.”
The piece (preserved today in the Victoria & Albert Museum) may have been made in connection with a tomb, a catafalque, or a temporary structure for a funeral decoration.
As compelling as the work is, I find its message fundamentally unpersuasive.
If you look hard enough, Death almost looks cowed. He’s not the Alpha anymore. Someone’s stolen his lunch. He’s a vulture, being put in his place by a lion.
The very idea that fame and reputation will triumph over death seems vainglorious
Depicting Death in this manner – dominated by Father Time, overwhelmed by star power – feels like wishful thinking at best, and hubris at the worst.
Now, it could be that I don’t understand the nested nuances and dynamic contradictions of Baroque sculpture. The curators hold out the possibility that the piece may indicate “a belief in the immortality of the soul through redemption” – a separate philosophical conviction that I find equally unpersuasive.
The assertion that fame and reputation can, or will, triumph over death seems vainglorious. I’ve been convinced of that for several years now.
In my mid-thirties, I began to notice that the celebrities of my era were steadily ageing out of contemporary relevance. That process has accelerated as I coast into my fifth decade.
I’ve seen Natalie Portman described in a subreddit as ‘an attractive older woman’. I’ve listened as a relative in her mid-20s read out the name of INXS letter by letter, rather than as a phonetic play. Such experiences put years on a man.
The wisdom of Albert Brooks
One anecdote in particular brought home the comic futility of imagining Fame’s victory over Death.
It came from a 2019 interview with Conan O’Brien. He was then relaunching the latest iteration of his talk show, in a new 30-minute format.
The interview touched on whether he felt this reduction in running time – as well as in pomp and circumstance – reflected a decline in his own cultural relevance.
O’Brien pointed out that whenever and however he retired from the waning late-night talk show format, he would rapidly become culturally irrelevant.
“This is going to sound grim,” he pointed out, “but eventually, all our graves go unattended.”
O’Brien then related a telling encounter with the actor Albert Brooks:
I said, you make movies, they live on forever. I just do these late-night shows, they get lost, they’re never seen again and who cares?
And he looked at me and he said, [Albert Brooks voice] “What are you talking about? None of it matters.”
None of it matters?
“No, that’s the secret. In 1940, people said Clark Gable is the face of the 20th Century. Who [expletive] thinks about Clark Gable? It doesn’t matter. You’ll be forgotten. I’ll be forgotten. We’ll all be forgotten.”
And Brooks is right.
Who the [expletive] really spends time thinking about Gable, other than occasionally as a quotable avatar of Golden Age Hollywood?
No one is saying Gone with the Wind isn’t a touchstone in Western popular culture. But who do you know – other than a film nerd – that could name two more Clark Gable pictures? Really, would the average person be aware of the historic multi-Oscar winner, or even Marilyn Monroe’s final flick?
In a comic twist that underscores the ephemerality of fame, my initial attempt to relocate this story online was thwarted by the false recollection that Larry King, not Albert Brooks had made this assertion.
Mother Cabrini and the Queen of Pop
I see clear evidence of the Clark Gable effect when I look at the cultural landscape of past decades.
In recent years, I started listening to old editions of Letter from America dating from the mid-1970s.
I found them fascinating, not least because they’re stuffed with references to people (Mother Cabrini) and characters (Frank Merriwell) that presumably were comprehensible to Alistair Cooke’s audience but that are frequently impenetrable to a 21st-century listener.
If even the Queen of Pop can find herself drifting to the sidelines then what hope is there for the rest of us?
Meanwhile, in the present, I notice the Clark Gable effect happening to the megastars of my youth.
With the possible exception of Princess Diana, when I was growing up there was no living woman more famous than Madonna. Certainly there was no one more influential.
Her impact on popular culture – from music to movies to fashion – was without comparison. As that stranglehold continued through the 90s and even well into the 2000s, her dominance started to seem immutable.
But as Conan O’Brien prophesied, when the end comes, it comes quickly.
One metric offers a concise summary of how the winds of fame have changed. Madonna has 2.7m Twitter followers. Her spiritual successor can boast a number 30 times as large.
In the 2020s there must be swathes of young people who have at best only a vague idea who Madonna is, and consider her as roughly as relevant to their world as Vera Lynn.
If even the Queen of Pop can find herself drifting to the sidelines of our oversaturated over-platformed popular culture, then what hope is there for the rest of us?
The Shakespeare of Sculpture
Yet maybe having no hope is a good thing. After all, Conan O’Brien said that Brooks’ anecdote about Clark Gable left him ‘walking on air’.
Reading further into his comment, it seems that in the moment of epiphany – “none of it matters” – he was freed from unreasonable expectations about his legacy. He was therefore, in a sense, free of Death – or at least the fear of it.
Of course, one can scramble to bring up counterexamples of fame transcending death.
Founding a religion, building a really, really big tomb, or committing crimes against humanity might ensure you stay remembered for a few hundred years longer (albeit while incurring moral costs that don’t bear consideration).
Yet it’s difficult to escape the sense that there is no immarcescible glory. Almost everyone, no matter how unique and iconoclastic, is destined to be forgotten.
Cleopatra, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Einstein: hard as it is to believe, many of them could be largely forgotten – either in a few hundred years, or when the Sun finally runs out of hydrogen.
If you’re still not convinced, then consider for a moment the stature that Gianlorenzo Bernini enjoyed in his day. As well as mixing with wealthy and powerful patrons, including a Pope, Bernini invented an art form.
One scholar wrote that ‘What Shakespeare is to drama, Bernini may be to sculpture: the first pan-European sculptor whose name is instantaneously identifiable with a particular manner and vision, and whose influence was inordinately powerful.’
But being the ‘Michelangelo of his century’ hasn’t been enough to ensure Bernini remains a bona fide household name in the 21st century.
The silent grave of Silent Cal
When Conan O’Brien said that eventually ‘all our graves go unattended,’ he wasn’t speaking hypothetically. He had a specific grave in mind: that of US President Calvin Coolidge.
‘Silent Cal’ was a highly popular leader and undoubtedly one of the most famous and powerful men of his age. His death is not even a century past.
Yet O’Brien found himself the lone visitor to Coolidge’s grave. The world had moved on.
All graves will go unattended. But that’s okay. Graveyards contain a plethora of illegible or broken tombstones, some of them dating from just a few hundred years ago. Eventually there is no marker left to attend.
Fame can’t be frozen in time and reputation can’t be preserved in terracotta, marble or quartz. It’s better to attend to the present moment rather than hope for a solemn vigil when you’re gone.
