Death in the Getty's Online Open Content Project

On Monday, the Getty, the world famous California-based institution dedicated to the understanding and collecting of art, announced its Open Content Program, a developing effort to make its digital resources open to the public. The program will occur in stages, the first being the release two days ago of 4,600 images of artwork from the Getty Museum collection.

“The Getty was founded on the conviction that understanding art makes the world a better place, and sharing our digital resources is the natural extension of that belief,” wrote James Cuno, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, on the institution’s website. He also noted that the open source initiative was an “educational imperative” as well, designed to help interested parties have access to art that had previously been cloistered away.

With over four thousand images, it’s easy to see what you want to see in the already uploaded files of this open source collection. When I was browsing yesterday, what I saw, apparently, is death. And lots of it, too!

Getty also provides the background to each, which are inevitably macabre:

"This gruesome scene depicts the unpleasant job of burying the remains of fallen Union soldiers from the June 1864 battles of Gaines' Mill and Cold Harbor. … Already reduced to nothing more than a pile of bones, these bodies lay unburied for ten months until the war's end, while the blistering heat and humidity of the Virginia summer hastened their decomposition." -Getty

"This daguerreotype stereograph image by Thomas Richard Williams is a still life memento mori composition. An assemblage of a human skull, an hourglass with the sand running out, an extended compass, and a book abandoned mid-read with eyeglasses placed upside down on the page, the image evokes the temporary nature of mortal life and the inevitability of death. The objects also refer to intellectual pursuits and to the inevitable triumph of the soul over the mind." -Getty

"Dramatically lit behind dark, parted curtains, a group of figures encircle an old man and brutally stab him. Starkly opposing areas of dark and light intensify the drama: the paper's brilliant whiteness contrasts with the black curtains and the murderers' menacing shadows. This drawing typifies the horrific scenes in which Fuseli specialized." -Getty

"This scene of the Secundra Bagh palace courtyard at Lucknow, India shows the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion by the native soldiers (sepoys) of the Bengal Army of the British East India Company. The story goes that the Bengalese soldiers feared that their foreign employer was trying to force Christianity upon them by violating their cultural taboo. They had purportedly been issued rifle cartridges lubricated with pork and beef lard, which was in violation of Hindu and Moslem laws. In defense of their beliefs, the soldiers attacked an English garrison and colony at Cawnpore. The British retaliated in November 1857, and the scattered bones of some of the 2,000 rebels killed were intentionally left unburied in the courtyard." -Getty

"The brown mare fastens her teeth on his arm, while another sinks her jaw into his leg. Bodies of the horses' previous victims lie piled to the right, above a pool of blood-stained water. This scene shows the dramatic climax from the eighth labor of Hercules, who was ordered to capture the four flesh-eating horses belonging to King Diomedes. Hercules killed the king in battle and fed his body to the horses, which tamed them." -Getty

"Lying on his back with his lifeless limbs spread wide, this small bronze figure of a youth shows the release of death. … The dead youth may have been one of the children of Niobe, a mortal woman who was punished by the gods Apollo and Artemis, the children of the goddess Leto. Niobe offended the goddess by bragging that she had fourteen children, whereas Leto had only two. Leto punished Niobe by sending her children to kill all of Niobe's sons and daughters. Niobe was turned into a weeping stone." -Getty

That there are this many portraits of death makes sense, of course: art is a major way we relate to and express our mortality. But if you're not feeling all that grim today, the Open Content Program also has photographs of New York City from the 1800s, ornate medieval manuscripts, the story of Jesus illustrated a million different ways, notable Grecian terracotta pieces, and high-resolution images of many other awesome pieces of art.

All digital images courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.