Hondoboot2
QUAESTOR PULCHRITUDINIS
Another great post Bobinder, I really like your explanations on what the inspiration was for your artwork. They are interesting, please keep them comingDepicting The Dead 3
VAC Gatrell notes that two hundred years ago, not only artists but the viewing public and society in general became, "more pathos-laden, more preoccupied with death's beauty" -
"In the gothic novel or in the art of Henri Fuseli and William Etty death and macabre desire were erotically bonded. The beautiful and desired corpse came to be encased in a morbidity which by the nineteenth century was in full flower. 'The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetic subject in the world' as Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1846." (VAC Gatrell 'The Hanging Tree' 1996.)
Poe, the acknowledged master of gothic horror, has perfectly anticipated my exploration of the tension between beauty and decay. Taken further, the artist's motivation in the portrayal of death goes beyond mere empathy and has to do with a fascination with a state and condition the living have yet to experience. Elisabeth Bronfen considers this in detail when she speculates about artists' strange compulsion to depict the death of beautiful women, and our pleasure in such images:
"How can we delight at, be fascinated, morally educated, emotionally elevated and psychologically reassured in our sense of self by virtue of the depiction of a horrible event in the life of another, which we would not have inflicted on ourselves? These depictions delight because we are confronted with death, yet it is the death of the other. We experience death by proxy. In the aesthetic enactment, we have a situation impossible in life, namely that we die with another and return to the living. Even as we are forced to acknowledge the ubiquitous presence of death in life, our belief in our own immortality is confirmed. There is death but it is not my own.
"The artistic representation of death expresses a displaced anxiety about death and a desire for death as well. It expresses something that is so dangerous to the health of the psyche that it must be repressed and yet so strong in its desire for articulation that it can't be. In a gesture of compromise, the artist deals with the danger by representing death in the body of another person and at another site." (Elisabeth Bronfen 'Over Her Dead Body: 'Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic' 1992.)
'Via Appia 4b' betrays my Pre-Raphaelite inclinations in the voluptuous, cascading locks of red hair. John Everett Millais' 'Ophelia' is arguably the best known Pre-Raphaelite painting of a beautiful dying woman, which illustrates Gatrell's thesis perfectly. The model, Lizzie Siddal (herself a somewhat overlooked Victorian artist and poet) posed immersed in a bath of cold water, which ironically nearly brought about her own death from pneumonia. 'Via Appia 12pp' is a variation in which the exhausted central figure is gratefully succumbing to death's release.