Nicola Samorì's *Rigor Vitae* is a hauntingly visceral oil on copper painting that merges the Renaissance tradition of devotional portraiture with a deeply unsettling sense of physical decay and transformation. The luminous, reflective surface of the copper ground lends the work an almost otherworldly glow, amplifying the tension between beauty and putrefaction that defines Samorì's practice. Flesh appears to dissolve and reform, blurring the boundary between life and death in a meditation on the fragile, transient nature of the human body.