Zadie Smith’s essay “Man vs. Corpse” explores the human relationship with our own mortality, and how we live our lives in tandem to this. The piece that initialized her thinking was Man Carrying Corpse on His Shoulders, a 16th century drawing by Luca Signorelli. It depicts a naked man with a strong …show more content…
She proposes that art “can waken us to truths about ourselves and our lives; truths that normally lie suffocated under the pressure of the 24-hour emergency zone called real life” (Winterson 2). Winterson furthers this with describing how art “challenges what we are...remind[ing] us of all the possibilities we are persuaded to forget” (3). It seems that this is what particularly struck Smith to write her essay in the first place, Signorelli’s drawing serving as a point of her awakening to the subject of her own mortality. Art serves as a vessel in which to display hard truths, and there is no harder truth for man to accept than