Memento Mori

Bu çalışmada Geç Ortaçağ ve Fin de Siecle Viyana’sı (Yüzyıl Sonu) dönemleri içinde ölüm fikrinin ve onun görsel temsilinin geçirdiği aşamalar incelenecektir. Bu bağlamda çalışma, ölümün akılcı bir kültür içinde, Danse Macabre imgelerindeki kitlesel algılanışından, Femme Fatale imgesinin psişik katmanına kadar ne gibi paradigmatik değişimler geçirdiğini ve bu değişimlere neden olan sosyal ve zihinsel gelişimin izini sürecektir. Son bölümde Fin de Siecle Viyana’sında yaşamış ve üretmiş olan Gustav Klimt ve Egon Schiele’nin yapıtları üzerinden bu temsil geleneğinin sınırlarının ne şekilde genişlediği ve bu iki ressamın ölüm alegorilerinin modernizme geçişi sırasında oynadıkları rol ele alınacaktır.

In 1951 Swedish writer Stig Dagerman wrote an autobiographical essay titled "Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable." It is a remarkable poetic meditation on the life-and-death stakes of the literary imagination from a writer who was likely suffering from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder, fighting for his life through one depressive episode after another. Written when his critical reputation and fame as Sweden’s greatest new literary phenom had been firmly established following a remarkable outpouring of critically acclaimed work in the late 1940s, the essay marked a point in time when the tides had turned for Dagerman, who now struggled with the opposite of this productive streak in the form of a debilitating bout of writer’s block that would eventually contribute to his suicide two years later. "Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable" lays bare the writer’s fragile psyche, not only his faltering ego but his selfless and far from sure-footed ambition to offer something of lasting beauty and meaning to a world indifferent to his very existence. While writing the essay, Dagerman managed to rise temporarily from the depths of his depression and identify the sources of his own consolation and hope in terms that have continued to resonate powerfully with many readers, and fellow writers, over the following 60 years.

Originally published in 1952 in the improbable venue of Husmodern (a magazine dedicated to home economics for Swedish housewives, analogous to American magazines like Good Housekeeping or Better Homes and Gardens), the essay was a profound response to a trivial commission from the magazine’s editors, who asked Dagerman to send them “something on the art of living.” The soul- and psyche-searching tour de force that Dagerman composed was not likely what the editors had in mind, but to their credit—and also possibly owing to his celebrity—they published the essay as written. The essay has since been translated into 10 languages and published / reprinted a great many times. This is the first literary translation of the essay into English.

Abstract & Contents Page:
The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature seeks to understand the ways in which literature has engaged deeply with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise. It is the most comprehensive collection in this growing field of study and includes essays by Brian McHale, Catherine Belling, Ronald Schleifer, Helen Swift, and Ira Nadel, as well as the work of a generation of younger scholars from around the globe, who bring valuable transnational insights.

Encompassing a diverse range of mediums and genres – including biography and autobiography, documentary, drama, elegy, film, the novel and graphic novel, opera, picturebooks, poetry, television, and more – the contributors offer a dynamic mix of approaches that range from expansive perspectives on particular periods and genres to extended analyses of select case studies. Essays are included from every major Western period, including Classical, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and so on, right up to the contemporary.

This collection provides a telling demonstration of the myriad ways that humanity has learned to live with the inevitability of death, where “live with” itself might mean any number of things: from consoling, to memorializing, to rationalizing, to fending off, to evading, and, perhaps most compellingly of all, to escaping. Engagingly written and drawing on examples from around the world, this volume is indispensable to both students and scholars working in the fields of medical humanities, thanatography (death studies), life writing, Victorian studies, modernist studies, narrative, contemporary fiction, popular culture, and more.

Table of Contents
Introduction

          PART I Traversing the Ontological Divide
          – Introduction

The Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death
– Brian McHale

"Still I Danced": Performing Death in Ford’s The Broken Heart
– Donovan Sherman

Death and the Margins of Theatre in Luigi Pirandello
– Daniel K. Jernigan

Forbidden Mental Fruit? Dead Narrators and Characters from Medieval to Postmodernist Narratives
– Jan Alber

Literature and the Afterlife
– Alice Bennett

The Novel as Heartbeat: The Dead Narrator in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones
– Neil Murphy

Dead Man/and Woman Talking: Narratives from Beyond the Grave
– Philippe Carrard

The View from Upstream: Authority and Projection in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts
– Jessica Goodman

PART II Genres
– Introduction

Big Questions: Re-Visioning and Re-Scripting Death Narratives in Children’s Literature
– Lesley D. Clement

In the U-Bend with Moaning Myrtle: Thinking about Death in YA Literature
– Karen Coats

Death and Mourning in Graphic Narrative
– José Alaniz

Death and Documentaries: Heuristics for the Real in an Age of Simulation
– Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter

Death and the Fanciulla
– Reed Way Dasenbrock

Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension: Primary Emotions and the Neurological Basis of Genre
– Ronald Schleifer

PART III Site, Space, and Spatiality
– Introduction

Ecocide and the Anthropocene: Death and the Environment
– Flore Coulouma

A Disney Death: Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife
– Stacy Thompson

Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition
– Kelly McGuire

Institutions and Elegies: Viewing the Dead in W. B. Yeats and John Wieners
– Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh

Death "after Long Silence": Auditing Agamben’s Metaphysics of Negativity in Yeats’s Lyric
– Samuel Caleb Wee

The Spatialization of Death in the Novels of Virginia Woolf
– Ian Tan

"Memento Mori": memory, Death, and Posterity in Singapore’s Poetry
– Jen Crawford

PART IV Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs
– Introduction

Death and the Dead in Verse Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece
– Arianna Gullo

Fictional Will
– Helen Swift

Monumentalism, Death, and Genre in Shakespeare
– John Tangney

Death and Gothic Romanticism: Dilating in/upon the Graveyard, Meditating among the Tombs
– Carol Margaret Davison

Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era
– Jolene Zigarovich

The Aura of the Phonographic Relic: Hearing the Voices of the Dead
– Angela Frattarola

Anecdotal Death: Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets
– Laura Davies

Biography: Life after Death
– Ira Nadel

PART V Living with Death: Writing, Mourning, and Consolation
– Introduction

"An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing": Philosophy, Literature, and Death in Peter Weiss’s Abschied von den Eltern
– Christopher Hamilton

Paradox, Death, and the Divine
– Jamie Lin



Inner Seeing and Death Anxiety in Aidan Higgins’s Blind Man’s Bluff and Other Life Writing
– Lara O’Muirithe

Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry
– Ivan Callus

When Time Stops: Death and Autobiography in Contemporary Personal Narratives
– Rosalía Baena

"Grief made her insubstantial to herself": Illness, Aging, and Death in A. S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories
– Graham Matthews

PART VI Historical Engagements
– Introduction

On the Corpse of a Loved One in the Era of Brain Death: Bioethics and Fictions
– Catherine Belling

Death to the Music of Time: Reticence in Anthony Powell’s Mediated Narratives of Death
– Catherine Hoffmann

Death and Chinese War Television Dramas: (Re)configuring Ethical Judgments in The Disguiser
– W. Michelle Wang

Where Do the Disappeared Go? Writing the Genocide in East Timor
– Kit Ying Lye

"Doubtfull Drede": Dying at the End of the Middle Ages
– Walter Wadiak

Urbanization, Ambiguity, and Social Death in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn
          – Wanlin Li

  42.  Coda

          – Julian Gough

Pretende-se neste trabalho dar ênfase a categoria estética do macabro e do horror identificando esse conceito como denominador comum em diferentes momentos da História da Arte. Assim serão analisados de modo sucinto alguns casos desde o período renascentista dando ênfase especial ao contemporâneo. As representações da morte na arte, revelam mais do que um caráter inicial moralizante, há um propósito essencialmente estético, de deleite e fascínio pelo macabro assumindo na contemporaneidade contornos irônicos e até cínicos. Essas visões e emoções podem esconder uma negação diante desse fato inevitável e ceifador na existência humana.

RESİMDE ÖLÜM VE FANİLİK İMGELERİNİN GÖSTERGEBİLİM ÇÖZÜMLEMELERİ Özet Ölüm ve ayrılık insanlığın evrensel problemleri arasında yer alır. Yaşamın geçiciliği ve fanilik kavramı özellikle din ve edebiyatın öğretileri arasında özel bir anlam taşır. Sanat, insanı ve doğayı konu alan bir yaratımdır. Yaşam, güzellik, aşk ve kahramanlık sanatın ana imgelerini oluşturur. Sanatı duyguların dışavurumu olarak tanımlamak mümkündür. Ancak ayrılık ve ölüm gibi insana acı veren imgeler de sanatın konuları arasında yer almıştır. Avrupa resim sanatında ölüm, yeniden diriliş ve son yargı gibi temalar bilhassa Hristiyanlık sonrasında yaygınlaşır. Ortaçağ resimlerinde olduğu gibi Rönesans ve Barok dönemlerinde de bu temalar çoklukla işlenir. Sanat eserlerinde ölüm ve fanilik imgesini vurgulayan çok sayıda sembolik figür vardır. Resimdeki figürleri ikonografik anlamlarıyla çözümleyen sanat eleştiri yöntemleri gibi göstergebilim de resimdeki ikon ve sembolleri gösterge olarak anlamlandırır ve çözümler. Resimlerde yer alan kuru kafa, sönmüş mum ve kum saati gibi nesneler görünen düz anlamları yanı sıra yan anlamlar ve derin anlamlar içerir. Bu çalışmanın amacı Avrupa resim sanatında yer alan ölüm ve fanilik imgelerini birer gösterge olarak ele almak ve göstergebilim sanat eseri çözümleme yöntemiyle çözümlenmeye çalışmaktır. Yöntem olarak göstergebilim sanat eseri çözümleme şemalarından yararlanılacaktır.

This paper examines ways in which identity in the later Middle Ages could have been displayed through the means that paradoxically seemed to dissolve the very idea of identity – the image of the decomposed body. In the following pages it is argued that the transi monuments were considered to represent the true portraits of deceased individuals, emphasizing that those buried beneath were experiencing purgatorial pains. Special attention is devoted to the mechanisms which were employed in order for the transis to be fashioned as individual portraits. Even though cadaver monuments were not part of the experience of Italian art of Trecento and Quattrocento, it is argued that, albeit all the differences from its northern counterparts, the tomb slab of Antonio Amati should be considered as a true transi tomb as well as the true portrait of the deceased.

Chapters:
1. Purifying decay
2. Of flesh and clothes
3. Sum quod eris vs. memento mori
4. Epilogue

Roman objects and art has been a fruitful source for discussion between scholars and the development of subsequent theories. Traditional research has been influenced for instance by Winckelmann and the Kopienkritik. These theories have been useful in understanding Roman art, but lack an objective approach. Archaeology takes advantage of a multidisciplinary approach and this objective way is found in Panofsky’s work within art history. In 1939, Erwin Panofsky published his book Studies in Iconology. He introduced a three-levelled approach to get a structured iconographical analyses, applied to Renaissance art. This article investigates the application of Panofsky’s three-levelled approach to a Roman Memento-Mori mosaic to see whether it is useful for understanding archaeological objects. The aim is to develop a multidisciplinary, contextualised visual analysis of the object with a crossover of techniques between archaeology and art history, in order to assess its suitability for the interpretation of past material culture.

The practice of taking pictures of the dead is not only circumscribed to police reports or forensic studies, nor is it merely a footnote in the history of photography. Due to the country’s history and culture, this phenomenon is particularly prevailing in Mexico, and has even permeated the work of foreign artists working in the country. This paper analyzes postmortem photographs from different sources: an archive of Mexican memento mori, the work of Joel-Peter Witkin and the media coverage of the “War on Drugs,” in order to elucidate the role of this phenomenon in Mexican society.

The centrality of the embodiment of mind, self, and values for the later Nietzsche is widely acknowledged. Here, I reconstrue Nietzsche’s HL to show that he uses his drive model of the mind already in this early text. The “historical sickness” central to HL is diagnosed in the form of failures of embodiment and drive control. First, I argue that a precursor to Nietzsche’s figure of “the last human” is already the target in HL. Second, I offer working definitions for terms such as ‘drives’, ‘affects,’ and ‘values,’ which are crucial to Nietzsche’s heuristic diagnostic framework. I then focus on the neglected passage that contrasts the medieval memento mori with a modern memento vivere, showing that the former functions as an embodied mechanism of willing and self-control, which Nietzsche claims the moderns have been unsuccessful in replacing. Finally, I draw on recent research in embodied cognition and identify two causes—“overload” and “semantic embodiment”—of the modern “historical sickness” that undermines flourishing.

Cuban artist Félix González Torres (1957-1996) devised a physically consumable and fleeting artistic production in order to create a broad and spine-chilling symbolism infused with the transience of life. Although he is one of the most significant artists in the latter part of the 20th century, whose practice is related to Minimalism and Conceptual Art, his artwork and its dramatic intensity are deeply rooted in a Baroque painting genre par excellence: vanitas. Cloaking his artistic production in a moralizing tone, González Torres encourages viewers to take pieces of his artwork with themselves out of the galleries, thereby instilling in himself a detachment from material possessions, since these are ephemeral and do not remain after death.
Through an iconographic analysis comparing some key issues of this 17th century religious genre and González Torres’ installations, it is possible to draw a visual parallel between the characteristic elements of vanitas and this artist´s repertory of objects, which are a metaphor in absentia of the human body and flesh. Thus, these artistic objects (which include bulbs, candies, cheap wall clocks, photographs of an empty bed on billboards and large offset prints on paper) keep an ordinary and everyday appearance in the emptiness of the exhibition galleries or even on the streets. However, when the exhibition visitors are invited to take pieces of some of these installations, the artworks exhaust themselves, creating a heartbreaking metaphor: the relentless advancement of time, the deterioration of flesh, the dramatic loss of life and the pain caused by the absence of things we appreciate and people we love.

The recent trends in cinema navigate the audience towards an active viewing stance similar to how post-modern literature necessitates the reader’s active interpretive efforts. One of such so-called puzzle films is 'Memento', which presents a backwards narrative that gives the reader an inconclusive beginning of the fabula at the end of the film. This essay argues that both 'Memento' and its source, the short story “Memento Mori,” engage the viewer’s and reader’s interests and challenge them mentally to emphasise and bring the main themes to a more personal level. This is firstly done by employing a style and narrative structure that imitate the protagonists’ condition of anterograde amnesia, causing the reader to struggle with the sense-making of the fabula. Secondly, the fragmented structure corresponds to the protagonists’ construction of identity, in which the protagonists serve as an exaggerated mirror to the viewer’s own daily identity struggle. Lastly, the situation of narrator and focalisor present the viewer with the issue of not only constructed identity, but also constructed reality. The narrators and focalisors are unreliable and the audience is unable to reconstruct a coherent conclusive fabula from the fragments. While the short story provides less information about the fabula but some sense of closure, the film gives more and conflicting information and prevents closure. This is achieved by presenting different versions of reality through different characters, which denies the viewer the satisfaction of understanding the true nature of the fabula.

The vanitas theme with skulls, hourglasses and other reminders of man’s mortality is ubiquitous in portraits from the 16th century on, and also in still-life painting from the early 17th century, especially in the Low Countries. In 'Vanitas Still Life with Skulls' of around 1640-62 by the Utrecht painter Aelbert Jansz van der Schoor we see six skulls, bones, an hourglass, wilting roses and a nearly extinguished candle beneath a shelf with books and sealed documents – symbols of learning and authority. Musical instruments, empty glasses, coins or pearls, and perhaps a globe or crucifix are also often included and embody the transience of life, learning, beauty, wealth and earthly pleasure. In shrill contrast to the wealth displayed in Dutch homes, these sombre reminders suited the moralising tendencies of patrons in the Golden Age.
Yet while mortality is represented by the skull, Death himself does not appear in vanitas paintings as he does in the Danse macabre – and in Dutch genre scenes of the period. Much has been written about Peter Paul Rubens’s copies of Hans Holbein’s 'Images of Death', but scant attention has been paid to Dutch re-interpretations of the Danse macabre in the Golden Age. Nonetheless, this popular motif inspired major artists such as Rembrandt, Jan Lievens, Jan Steen, Abraham Bloemaert, Judith Leyster and Adriaen van de Venne. In paintings, but especially in drawings and prints, they show Death arriving unexpectedly to summon the rich miser, the lovers and the merrymakers: archetypal sinners oblivious of their own death or the hereafter. With hourglasses, flowers and coins as added symbols, these scenes have much in common with the vanitas genre.

In the Victorian era, photography was relatively a new invention which was taking over the paintings of the time to give a true picture of what is, rather than an interpretation. Spirit photography became the new medium of Memento Mori becoming the new vogue of the Victorian age even though this practice was seen as fraud. It wasn’t long before the ‘photographic artists’ were using skills of painters to manipulate photographs and the actual magical process was being diluted for self gain not for artistry yet the Victorians saw photographs as an aid to mourning and memory not as artistry.

The aim of the present paper is to show that the introductory miniatures in the Tomić Psalter and the Serbian Psalter in Munich, being the tools for meditation on human mortality, were devised to lessen the dread of the moment of death while simultaneously conveying the Christian forewarning. It is argued that, though representing the similar scene, the one in the Tomić Psalter was designed as a model of а good death, while the one in the Serbian Psalter was offering the message of hope through the dreadful pictorial narration.

Sundials in Roman and Byzantine Mosaics (1st – 9th Century AD). A scientific monograph. The sundials on ancient mosaics have not been the subject of scientific studies so far. The author has gathered together  in this  publication  the sundials  already known (Torre Anunzaiata, Sarsina, Trier, Saint-Romain-en-Gal, Antiochia and Brading; Figs. 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9) and those which have  not  previously  been  identified.  Thanks  to  the author’s  new  identifcations,  the  catalogue  has  been enlarged  by  six  new  sundials (Grand,Tarsus, Antioch – interpreted by H. Pamir; Figs.  3, 6,  8, and 10. Tayibat al-Imam, Jerusalem and Umm al-Rasas (Sebastis); Figs. 10, 11, 12) and three monumental gnomes-columns with multiple functions that were used as monumental sundials [Madaba (Jerusalem), Umm al-Rasas (Kastron Mefaa) and Rome (Jerusalem); Figs. 13–15]. In addition, recognizing fully John H. Humphrey’s  interpretations,  the  author  enriches  the catalogue  by  eight  ancient  mosaic  representations  of obelisks in  circuses (Lyon, Barcelona, Volubilis, Piazza Armerina - two mosaics, Girona, Carthage and Gafsa; Figs.  16–23).  They  performed the roles of monumental sundials. In this way, the catalogue includes  twenty-three  mosaics with  the representations of sundials. They come from the Western and Eastern Provinces of the Roman Empire. The first mosaic is dated to the beginning of the 1st century AD and the last dates to the 9th century AD. The author, after  a  short  description  of each monument,  summarizes the issue discussing the role of sundials in Roman and Byzantine society, their complex signifcance and symbolic difficult linked with the progress of time on which nature and human life are dependent.

This study is an attempt to make sense of family photographs that are circulating in antique markets in Turkey. The phenomenon of "dispossessed family photographs" is examined on the basis of the critical literature on photography mainly by Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. Depending on this theoretical framework, this study examines the discourse of antique sellers/collectors about "dispossessed family photographs" and the field that these photographs are circulating in. The discourse of antique sellers/collectors suggests that, "dispossessed photographs" have an elusive quality both in the minds of people and in the antique domain. That is why the word "specter" is used to emphasize the "spectral quality" of "dispossessed family photographs" as the word evokes the indefinite, untraceable and hard to frame quality of such images. Also the term "specter" invokes the physical state of family photographs in the sense that they fade and get pale as if referring their mysterious ghost-like presence in the market.

FOR THE FORMATTED VERSION WITH KENTRIDGE'S DRAWINGS GO TO: https://eternaltiber.net/triumphs-and-laments-research/

This is a guide to the iconography of William Kentridge’s Triumphs & Laments, the 500-meter-long frieze of colossal figures traced into the black accretions on the Tiber Embankments between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini in Rome in early Spring 2016:  http://www.tevereterno.it/arts/triumphs-and-laments/. The guide was compiled at the request of Kristin Jones, artistic director of the project, and was initially part of a Guidebook cell phone app, which has since been discontinued.

Prior to compiling the guide texts, with generous help from dozens of colleagues and students, I had the immense pleasure of serving as Curator of Historical Research for Triumphs & Laments, overseeing the research group at John Cabot University which formulated the chronological database ('timeline') of images from the history of art, cinema, and journalism provided to William Kentridge to inspire his drawings for the frieze. Our research continued and augmented that of Andrea Biagioni and Sara Spizzichino of Tevereterno.

Please share these texts with friends, colleagues, and students. Writing the guide was our labor of love for Rome, for William Kentridge and his work, and for the joy of collective creativity that made Triumphs & Laments a reality.

NOTE: In the pdf version available online before May 20, 2017, the hyperlinks were inoperative. In the current Word document, they work.

Since the 1960s, James Deetz and other archaeologists have attributed the appearance of the cherub icon on colonial-period gravemarkers to religious movements such as the Great Awakening or diminished Puritan influence during the eighteenth century. The cherub has been interpreted by many scholars as a symbol of a heavenly being that reflects freer perceptions on life and the afterlife. This article challenges the long-held religious connotations of the cherub icon. Instead, this article demonstrates that the icon relates to the wider Rococo artistic trend that was the prime influence on the forms and decorations of contemporary material culture. In this artistic fashion, the cherub is a putto, a Classical allegorical element that remained common in architectural and mortuary sculpture. The use of the putto comes with a number of additional contemporary elements and shows that consumer choice connected to the latest fashion instead of changing religious attitudes being the driver behind iconographic and decoration change on colonial gravemarkers.

The obsession with death is a constant and recurring theme in contemporary art. Not surprisingly, in some recent exhibitions, many works by Damien Hirst are displayed together with paintings and sculptures that belong to the tradition of memento mori. Apparently this is a legitimate comparison because the symbolic representation of the duality of life and death is a rigid designator of artistic representation. However, Jean Baudrillard accurately defined the different values taken on by death in modernity, when it was gradually marginalized as irreconcilable with the principles of bourgeois rationality: individual values, unlimited progress of science, domination of nature on everything. This world view created a sort of collective unconscious that is expressed in many of his recent works, including The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. It is a conceptual model reproduced in many of Damien Hirst works, also re-emerging in the “wreck aesthetic” of Kiefer and Boltanski that helps us understand the contemporary iconology Cogita mori, and the unavowed anxiety of the myth of progress. In order to evoke the icons and symbols of our time, artists do not only rely upon the use of images and objects, but make interpretation easier conveying its meaning and their intendments by the use of accurate captions, explanatory statements and interviews.

The idea of a big-budget Hollywood film with a narrative as baroque as that of The Fountain would have been laughable a little over a decade ago; yet films such as these continue to flow (or perhaps trickle, after the box-office failure of The Fountain) out of the production houses of the Inland Empire.

Masaccio’s famous fresco in Santa Maria Novella consists of two parts; the upper zone focuses on the three persons of the Trinity and the lower depicts a fictive tomb and a skeleton. The words uttered by the skeleton (“I was once what you are ....”) introduces a temporal aspect that adds specific meaning to the figures of the Trinity in the upper half. In fact, ancient philosophy saw time as tripartite and the Fathers of the Church considered the modalities of time to be united in an Eternal, triune God. This idea must have been familiar to Late Medieval and Renaissance visual culture since illustrators of Petrarch’s Trionfi always visualized the final triumph, that of Eternity, in the shape of the Trinity. In light of this, Masaccio’s Trinity fresco is just as much an image of Time and Eternity as Death and Salvation.

Nově objevená fresková výmalba krypty pod kostelem Narození Páně v pražské Loretě.
Text uvádí do literatury pozoruhodné nově objevené kvalitní nástěnné malby s makabrálními náměty náměty, které vytvořil zatím neznámý umělec v r. 1664 podle grafických vzorů převážně holandské a vlámské provenience. Zvlášť významný je objev fresky s výjevem Vzkříšení Lazara, která vznikla podle Rembrandtova leptu. Datovaná malba je zajímavým vodítkem pro datování jednotlivých stavů Rembrandtovy grafiky.

The 17 th century brings along in Transylvania fashionable art movements of the Western and Central Europe, especially of the new artistic current of the Mannerism, a constant of the funeral art to the 70's of the century, continued by the Proto-Baroque. They are an acquisition of aristocratic and urban forms submitted by Venetian and Dutch layers, which meant introducing a new and eclectic language of reassembling forms. The motifs do not hide 'horror vacui', strongly twisted tenants, 'putti', 'rotuli' (rolls), garlands of exotic fruit and flowers, trophies and allegories twined in the theme "vanitas vanitatum". The study proposes a contextual analysis of the motifs from the range of weapons and trophies emerging in this age in the Transylvanian funeral art. Rezumat: Secolul al XVII-lea aduce cu sine şi în Transilvania curente artistice la modă în apusul şi centrul Europei, manierismul, o constantă a plasticii funerare până spre anii `70 ai secolului, şi apoi protobarocul. Ele sunt o preluare a formelor aristocratice şi urbane ale epocii transmise prin filonul veneţian, dar şi cel de sorginte olandeză, care au însemnat introducerea unui limbaj nou şi eclectic al reasamblării formelor. Motivele nu ascund ‚horror vacui', tenanţi puternic contorsionaţi, ‚putti', ‚rotuli', ghirlande de fructe şi flori exotice, trofee şi alegorii îngemănate în tema ‚vanitas vanitatum'. Studiul îşi propune o analiză contextuală a motivelor din gama armelor şi trofeelor care ţâşnesc în această epocă în arta funerară transilvană, cu răsfrângeri în Ţara Românească.

This paper discusses the inclusion of the characteristic verses from the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead on funerary inscriptions of the Orthodox Christians in the Late Middle Ages. It also discusses reasons for the hostility toward the macabre images in the East, as well as the possibility of interpreting certain Byzantine depictions as the appropriate doubles for the western macabre imagery.

Chapters:
1. Byzantine Macabre?
2. Same Image, Different Meaning
3. Purgatory – Dividing Line.

La práctica de fotografiar a los muertos no está circunscrita a reportes policiales o estudios forenses solamente; tampoco es una simple nota al pie en la historia de la fotografía. Debido a su historia y cultura, este fenómeno es particularmente predominante en México, y ha incluso permeado el trabajo de artistas extranjeros que han trabajado en el país. Este ensayo analiza fotografías postmortem de diversas fuentes: una colección de memento mori mexicanos, el trabajo de Joel-Peter Witkin y la cobertura mediática de la “Guerra contra las drogas”, a fin de elucidar el papel de este fenómeno en la sociedad.

William Shakespeare approaches visual experience in most of his plays, either to privilege the power of sight over any other sense (“I might not this believe / Without the sensible and true avouch / Of mine eyes [Hamlet, 1.1 55-57]), or to mistrust images for its fictitious simulation of true objects or people, (“I see thee still […] / There’s not such thing [Macbeth, 2.1, 45-47]). The boundaries between illusion and reality are blurred through Lear’s madness, Macbeth’s hallucinations, and the Spectre of Hamlet’s father, among other instances. Remarkably enough, Shakespeare’s reflection on visual stimuli is often related to artistic imagery. When looking at his wife’s sculpture, Leontes observes that “the fixture of her eye has motion in’t / As we are mock’d with art” [The Winter’s Tale, 5. 3, 66-67]. Moreover, when the avid reader/spectator sees Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull, she is actually experiencing the incarnation of a memento mori, one of the most reproduced iconographies in European Art (mostly painting) since the 15th century. Turned into the most common among illustrations of Hamlet, including paintings and photographs, this memento mori has remerged throughout time, attracting artists of all periods. In the 20th century, Sergéi Eisenstein, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe portrayed themselves imitating Hamlet’s gesture. Likewise, Yorick’s skull has played a vital and ever-present role in the first decade of the 21st century. Just to mention an example, Damien Hirst not only designed a diamond skull to subvert the idea of vanitas but was also photographed holding it in his hand in the Hamlet-like style. In this context, this paper aims to examine the infinite circulation of energy from word to image and vice versa by focusing on the dialogic relations between Shakespeare’s plays and recent visual appropriations of Hamlet’s memento mori.

Nancy Spector, comisaria de la exhibición que protagonizó en el Museo Guggenheim de Nueva York en 1995 y encargada también del comisariado de su representación póstuma en el Pabellón de Estados Unidos en la Bienal de Venecia de 2007, arrancaba de Félix González Torres, solo un año antes de su muerte, la siguiente confesión (traduzco): "Este trabajo se originó en mi miedo a perderlo todo.

El propósito del presente texto es estudiar las imágenes de vanitas del barroco hispano como metaimágenes que proponen una reflexión moralizante sobre la propia práctica de la pintura. Tomando como punto de partida un lienzo anónimo cuzqueño que representa a Cristo niño pintando las postrimerías en el corazón del ser humano, el texto analiza la valoración de la práctica de la pintura como un memento mori que despliega distintas creencias sobre el papel de las imágenes y la memoria que la retórica visual barroca desplegó en su política propagandística y persuasiva.

The relevance and interpretative potential of understanding post- mortem photographs as fetishes has been established. Since a loss, an absence is the center of every fetish, and photographs, according to Barthes, are directly connected with death, the photograph of a dead body, of a corpse, as a fetish, constitutes an object particularly saturated with death. In accordance to the logic of the fetish, these objects are created in order to substitute an absence at the same time as they signal the void at their center.

Memento mori is a broad and understudied cultural phenomenon and experience. The term “memento mori” is a Latin injunction that means “remember mortality,” or more directly, “remember that you must die.” In art and cultural history, memento mori appears widely, especially in medieval folk culture and in the well-known Dutch still life vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet memento mori extends well beyond these points in art and cultural history. In Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience, Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter suggests that documentaries are an especially apt form of contemporary memento mori. Bennett-Carpenter shows that documentaries may offer composed transformative experiences in which a viewer may renew one’s consciousness of mortality – and thus renew one’s life.

Brill | Rodopi, 2018
ISBN: 978-90-04-35696-2

Размишљање о смрти спада у најважније мисаоне активности сваког монаха – подвижника... Сећање на смрт је „свеопшта монашка традиција Истока“, која, пре свега, „има педагошки значај“. „Медитирајући смрт, аскет жели да у живом сазнању пролазности свега земаљског живота постигне што потпуније одвајање од света, да достигне врлину непристрашћа.“ (стр. 62-3)

En la Iglesia Museo de la Santísima Trinidad de Atienza, se exhibe un catafalco de madera consistente en un cajón negro levemente trapezoidal. Está decorado en sus cuatro lados y el plano superior con pinturas populares, cuya tosquedad contrasta con la riqueza temática de la representación. Virtualmente inédito, se han publicado algunas fotografías en Internet, citando brevemente el objeto, al que, sin dar razones que avalen semejantes conclusiones, se considera del siglo XV y procedente de México, extremos ambos con los que no estamos de acuerdo. Por otra parte, y según datos que hemos recogido en la propia población, esta pieza estuvo en uso hasta hace unas décadas, empleada como parte de un ceremonial. Nuestro informante ha sido el sacristán D. Antonio Nogelades quien nos relató cómo se empleaba en las exequias locales, y para colocar ante el altar de Ánimas