Vanitas Imagery
The contrast between Yorick as "a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy" and his grim remains is a variation on the theme of earthly vanity (cf Vanitas): death being unavoidable, the things of this life are inconsequential.
This theme of Memento mori ('Remember you shall die') is common in 16th and 17th century painting, appearing in art throughout Europe. Images of Mary Magdalene regularly showed her contemplating a skull. It is also a very common motif in 15th and 16th century British portraiture.
A more direct comparison is with pictures of playful children or young men, who are often depicted looking at a skull as a sign of the transience of life. It was also a familiar motif in emblem books and tombs.
Hamlet meditating upon the skull of Yorick has become the most lasting embodiment of this idea, and has been depicted by later artists as a continuation of the Vanitas tradition.
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“Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.”
—Richard Harter Fogle, U.S. critic, educator. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, ch. 1, University of North Carolina Press (1949)