Yikes

I am thinking of taking another pilgrimage to the The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I was looking around at their website and blogs and found this macabre instrument.

Lyre. Central Africa, 19th century. Human skull, antelope horn, skin, gut, hair; L. 36.5 cm, W. 14 cm, D. 13 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments, 1889 (89.4.1268)

It is not on exhibit at the Met, just held in their collections.  Apparently instruments made of human or animal skulls were also used in Tibet in meditation on the impermanence of life.

This is of course similar to Dutch vanitas paintings, which also focus on the fleeting meaninglessness of life.

Adriaen van Utrecht (1599-1652), Vanitas - Still Life with Bouquet and Skull

These paintings often incorporate symbols to get their point across, including skulls, broken eggs, cut or decaying flowers, money, dead animals or skins, etc.

The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting
Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age