La Tête-Crâne d’Alberto Giacometti

There is no skull in Dürer’s Melancholia, although one might have been expected. But this great thing, blind as a stone, closed as a tomb, this geometrical block which seems to have allen into the engraving like a meteor, as a speculation of the most abstract intellect into the midst of what should have been a place of life and confidence, is surely the nearest thing to a death’s head, to a skull. And it induced Alberto to perceive in his own geometrical form, first conceived, who knows, as an innocent abstraction, this head which may be either living or dead, this token of presence but assailed by nothingness, which was increasingly to obsess his mind, exploring like a modern Hamlet, the eternal mystery. On the same page of Minotaure in 1934, like another apparition on the same dark night pierced by a single moonbeam, there was, moreover, a sculpture that is now, explicitly a skull like poor Yorick’s: the Man’s Head—gender specified, although there is nothing but sexless bone and…