Above is an amazing image by the 19th-Century Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin — Self Portrait With Death.  I stumbled across it while looking for another Böcklin painting, The Isle Of the Dead, which Hitchcock reportedly used as a visual frame of reference for Vertigo.

The Isle Of the Dead (below) is almost as spooky as the self-portrait, and while it’s not referenced directly in Vertigo, its mood and basic visual strategy obviously informed a lot of the film’s compositions involving Madeleine, the ghostly, morbidly-obsessed heroine, who often appears as a distant, deathly-still figure set against backgrounds of dark trees and the sea.