Damien Hirst has chosen the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to start a world tour of the U.K. artist’s $100 million diamond skull.

“The theme of the skull is the aversion of death in art,” said Elles Kamphuis, Rijksmuseum spokeswoman in a telephone interview today. “That is also a popular theme in paintings from the Dutch Golden Age.”

The Dutch museum, which houses Rembrandt’s “Nightwatch,” pledged to clear an entire hall for the exhibition. Hirst, 43, is also making a selection of the Rijksmuseum’s paintings, which include so-called Vanitas — still lifes that depict skulls or other symbols of death — to show in a hall next to his work, Kamphuis said.

Hirst’s skull, called “For the Love of God,” is cast from platinum, encrusted with 8,601 diamonds and has its original teeth, the Rijksmuseum said in a statement on its Web site.

“As an artist I try to make things that people can believe in, that they can relate to, that they can experience,” Hirst, was quoted as saying in the statement. “You therefore have to show them as well as possible.”

The skull will be on display from Nov. 1 to Dec. 15, and the Rijksmuseum hopes to draw “a lot more” visitors than the average 2,000 who buy a ticket `on a normal day in fall,” said Kamphuis. “We have never showed something like this.”

Kamphuis doesn’t know where the next exhibition of the skull will be after it leaves Amsterdam.

In August 2007, London’s White Cube gallery said that Hirst, whom the Sunday Times’s 2008 Rich List estimates is worth 200 million pounds ($368 million), was part of the investment group that bought “For the Love of God.” The skull had been on sale at $100 million in the artist’s solo show “Beyond Belief.’

Credit is given to Jeroen Molenaar an Bloomberg.com