This article accompanies the fable
The Age of Consent



The Dead Lovers

So much for love beyond the grave. So much for Adam and Eve. The late Renaissance German painters were not sentimentalists; they were moralists. This extraordinary oil painting is Les amants trépassés (The Deceased Lovers), associated with an unknown painter, possibly "the Master of the Upper Rhine," and it is one of a pair from around 1470. It is in the Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame in Strasbourg. The other, which shows A Bridal Couple, is in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Memento mori... Remember you will die... 

For Adam, a mouldering skeleton
Lay bleach'd on the garden of Eden;
And Noah as white as snow
On the mountains of Ararat.
 
  - William Blake (The Song of Los)