The Renaissance Obsession with
Mutability and Mortality
Without the benefits of modern medicine and technologies, people in Renaissance England, even in the cities, lived closer to nature and were more vulnerable to even the simplest of diseases than are we. Perhaps one reason they were so interested in order and hierarchy was that they were so close to the very chaos of the elements, to the essential mutability (capable of or subject to change or alteration; prone to frequent change; as in inconstant, mutable weather) of life. Once more, here is an emblem of "chaos" illustrating their idea of the confusion of elements lying beneath the thin surface of order in their lives.
The Latin on the top of the image, Sine iusititia, confusio, in this context can be translated as--without (divine) order, confusion. For us, perhaps the closest image of such a fear-inspiring chaos would be a thermonuclear mushroom cloud.
Here now is a "
Bill of Mortality"--a periodical publication announcing the number and causes of recent deaths in London. We have obituaries, but rarely do we regularly publish lists of who died from what such as you will see on the second image. Notice what killed people back then. The first image is of a publication specifically recounting the deaths from the plague in London, printed in 1665, the year of the last "visitation" of the plague.
Here is the obverse side of this Bill of Mortality, featuring the statistics of
who died from what.
Notice how several of the kinds of deaths seem mysterious--"Griping in the Guts" and "Stopping of the Stomach," for example. Rare or unknown causes of death like these are infrequent for us. Click here to see another Bill of Mortality from December 1665, with the end-of-year totals for deaths in London from the plague and other causes:
Example 2.(When the small image appears, place your cursor in the lower right corner and click on the button that will pop up, which will enlarge the image.) Finally, one more Bill of Mortality. Note the Latin tag at the top--memento mori: "remember death," a somber catch phrase never far from the Early Moderns' thoughts 
Below are two Renaissance portraits. The great art historian David Rosand has argued that portraiture of the time indicates their sensitivity to the extreme mutability of the human condition. Rosand argues in the article these portraits appeared in that the placement of stone pediments in front of, or around, the soft flesh of the person sitting for the portraits is meant to contrast the permanence of stone and the impermanence of human flesh. Notice the "V V" carved into the pediment at the bottom of the portrait on the left. Rosand argues it stands for both "vivo vivens" ( I'm alive) and
"vanitas vantitatum" from the Biblical phrase "vanity of vanities, all is vanity," which argues that this flesh and this life is just ephemeral and of little ultimate meaning, partly because it's so temporary.
Here is a color version of the portrait on the right, Raphael's magnificent depiction of Baldassare
Castiglione. Even in this reproduction, it's hard to see the stonework to the right of the figure, but it's there.
Click here to move on to the section on
Renaissance Cosmology.