Caput mortuum

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(Old Chem.)

The residuum after distillation or sublimation; hence, worthless residue.

See also: Caput

References in periodicals archive ?

The engaging flatscreen work Company of Colors, Shadow Box 9, 2009, meanwhile, reinterprets live images of viewers as an array of little rectangular palette chips; it informed at least one of them that his skin tone was an unfortunate combination of caput mortuum (literally "dead head") and bister (a brownish -gray pigment traditionally made from soot).

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: HAUNCH OF VENISON

In this regard, the exhibited trophy serves as what Marx calls a caput mortuum, the dead-head trace that remains to haunt all attempts at occluding the intimacy--or even the inextricability--of law and lawlessness, justice and injustice, in gold-rush California.

The public in pieces: representational crises in gold-rush California

The latter is a humanist, even a sentimentalist, in abstract disguise, whereas Soulages illustrates Adorno's idea that "abstractness in art signals a withdrawal from the objective world at a time when nothing remains of that world save its caput mortuum.