From sacred body to waste

Abstract

There are many factors at work in the iconography of human remains. Some of those frequently discussed are aesthetic criteria, iconographic traditions and specific contingencies, whether political (for example in war paintings), symbolic (essential for transi images) or cultural. There is, however, one factor that is rarely mentioned, despite its centrality: the regime of value associated with corpses. Christ’s body is not painted in the same way as that of a departed relative or that used in a human dissection. Artists choose a suitable iconography depending on how the remains are perceived. This criterion became absolutely crucial in contexts such as nineteenth-century France, when attitudes to corpses underwent major changes.

Posthumous Portraits in Motion: Experimental Animation, Metamorphosis and Reflections on Mortality

“…These images include transi and memento mori images from the 15th century where the corpse is either skeletal or shrouded, the macabre tradition of the death mask, which proliferates from quattrocento Florence to well into the 19th century and 19th-century postmortem representations related to the anonymous dead, victims of crime, dissections, epidemic or execution. In the latter case, such images are often presented as human remains, separated from the individual that once was (Lahaeye, 2022). There are some final portraits (after the iconography of the corpse) and postmortem images from the 1500s to contemporary times that are persuasive in their empathy but do not deny the visible traces of suffering and pain of death.…”