The Most Unsettling Self-Portrait

The painting you are about to see is, without a doubt, the most unsettling self-portrait ever created in history. In a self-portrait, the artist decides how they want to be seen by the world. They choose their best angle, their best clothes, and paint themselves as they wish to be remembered by history. And that is precisely why this image is so disturbing. Because when Arnold Bucklin decided to paint himself at 45 years old, at the peak of his career, he chose to include something that no artist in their right mind would include in the image that would immortalise them. Behind him, pressed against his back, death plays the violin directly into his ear. But the most terrifying thing about this is not just the presence of death, but the small detail this artist painted on the violin the skeleton holds. A detail that, once you discover its meaning, will make you see this work in a completely different way. This work is called Self-Portrait, with death playing the fiddle. It was painted by the Swiss artist Arnold Bucklin in 1872, and today it is held at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. In it, we see Bucklin standing at his easel, with a palette in one hand and a brush in the other. His gaze is directed toward us, or perhaps toward a mirror, because let us remember that he is painting himself. Everything in the lower half of the painting is normal. A painter in his studio, in the middle of his work. But from the upper half, emerging from the darkness of the background, there is death. But to understand why Bucklin painted himself accompanied by death, we first need to know the tragic life this man lived. Arnold Bucklin was born in Basel, Switzerland in 1827, and if there is one thing that defines his biography, it is that death accompanied him from very early on and never left him. Bucklin had 14 children throughout his life. Five of them died in childhood, and three more would die before him. By 1872, the year he painted this self-portrait, he had already buried two of them. He also survived cholera and typhus epidemics that devastated the cities where he lived, and his own health was fragile for decades. For most people, a life like that would have been reason enough to hate death. But Bucklin did exactly the opposite and turned it into the centre of his art. His paintings are filled with cemeteries, funerary islands, and spectral figures. Eight years after this self-portrait, he would paint Isle of the Dead, the work that would make him world famous, and that would become one of the most haunting images of the entire 19th century. When we look at this painting, the first thing we notice is the contrast between the two figures. Bucklin is painted in warm colours. His face is full of life, his beard is well-groomed, and his clothes are those of a respectable artist of his time. Death, on the other hand, emerges from a dark, cold background, almost dissolving into the shadows. The second thing that catches our attention is the artist's posture. Bucklin holds the brush and the palette, but if we look closely, he is not painting. His hand is still, and his head tilts slightly backward toward the violin, as if his entire body were in an attitude of listening, and this is where we arrive at the detail I mentioned at the beginning. When we get closer to the violin, we can see that it is incomplete and missing strings. This tells us that Death is not playing a full instrument, but playing on a single string, the G string, the lowest of them all, and the one that produces the deepest and darkest sound a violin can make. And here it is worth mentioning a curious fact about this artist. Bucklin was known to have the habit of listening to the strangest music while he painted. It was part of his creative process, and in fact, there is a story about this work that says the self-portrait originally did not include Death. According to that account, a friend visited his studio, saw the unfinished painting, and asked Bucklin what he was listening to, because of the distant expression in his eyes and the slight tilt of his head, and Bucklin's response was to add the skeleton behind him. We do not know if that story is completely true, but what we do know is that the decision to leave a single string on that violin was no coincidence. Many historians interpret that single string as a symbol of the passage of time. As if at birth, the violin had all of its strings, and over the years they broke one by one, each broken string could represent a piece of life left behind, until only the last one remains, the one playing the final melody. Something worth clarifying is that Bucklin did not invent this iconography from scratch. The image of Death as a musician comes from a medieval tradition known as the Danse Macabre, or the Dance of Death. After the great plagues that devastated Europe, artists began depicting Death as a figure that dances and plays music, taking kings, bishops, peasants, and children alike. The message these images conveyed was simple and democratic, as they tried to communicate to the world that death does not discriminate, but there is one specific work that historians point to as the direct precedent for this self-portrait. A 16th century portrait of Sir Brian Tuke, attributed to the circle of Hans Holbein, in which the figure of Death appears behind a sitter, pointing at an hourglass. It is quite possible that Bucklin knew this painting, since by the time he painted his self-portrait, this work was already in Munich, the same city where he created his own, but although he may have drawn inspiration from that work, Bucklin made a fundamental change. In Tuke's portrait, Death points to the time running out, while in Bucklin's, Death makes music, and the artist, instead of being terrified, listens. For centuries, the memento mori tradition used the image of Death to provoke fear, to remind us that we will die and that we must be prepared for that moment. However, Bucklin turned that tradition completely on its head. In this self-portrait, Death should not be understood as a threat. On the contrary, it is a muse. The artist is not being pursued, but rather being inspired by the melody playing in his ear, and when we consider the life this artist lived, it all begins to make sense. That constant awareness of mortality, shaped by the loss of his children and the epidemics he survived, may have been exactly what fuelled his art. This self-portrait was exhibited in Munich in 1872, and from the moment it was shown to the public, it established Bucklin's reputation in the German art world. Today, more than 150 years later, it is still considered one of the most unsettling self-portraits ever painted, not because of the skeleton, but because of what it tells us about the man who painted it, and perhaps that is the true question this work leaves us with, because each of us hears that melody in a different way. There are those who see Death as an inevitable punishment that all life is destined for, there are those who see it as a farewell they do not wish to give, and there are those who see it as a liberation, a way out of all the suffering that life has caused them. Bucklin chose to listen to it with serenity. I would love to know in the comments how you hear it. Thank you for watching the video until the end. As always, I would like to remind you that this painting is available in our catalogue if you would like to have it in your collection. In the link in the description, you will find more than 1000 carefully selected historical works so you can begin your own art collection at home. Shipping is free worldwide, and by purchasing from the store, you will be supporting me enormously in continuing to create videos like this every week. Thank you for your support, and I will see you in the next video.