History of art and deat

[year2027]

God first

thanks everybody

History of art and death

A major tradition in the study of death across cultures and time has been to demarcate distinctive death time periods in Western history. The most notable illustration is Philippe Ariès's The Hour of Our Death, which propose an evolutionary model, in which death through several successive stages reverted from the tame to the savage state in the course of some fifteen centuries. He insisted on providing social context and maintaining methodological coherence, thus shifting from the study of attitudes towards death to a more sociological approach (mortuary customs and attitudes examined in their social context). One of the central themes developed by Ariès is the "relationship between man's attitude towards death and his awareness of self, of his degree of existence, or simply of his individuality." [3] According to him, the concept of death as a familiar and anonymous event was replaced by the suppression of death. Ariès traced the loss of the tame death to an increasing awareness of individual identity and a corresponding decline in the importance of the community, which he dated to the later Middle Ages.

Tame death

Here death was considered a process that was both familiar and near, featuring a simple public and ritualistic ceremony largely controlled by the dying person and for which friends and family, including the children, were present. This attitude is typical of primitive societies, where rituals about sex, life and death gave rhythm to the existence. Human beings started dying from the first hour of their lives. The death-in-life motif was hailed citing classical examples, for instance, the customs of Roman Caesars, who were asked immediately after their election, from what stone they would order their tombstone to be made.

Death of self

With the devastating Black Plague, increasing individualism, and the weakening of traditional community ties (with perhaps a growing collective sense of the demise of the old feudal order), dying became the time when the true essence of oneself was assumed to be revealed. Although in the seventeenth-century death was a frequent, familiar and expected phenomenon, there was an immense anxiety about death expressed through recurring images of morbidity. The macabre iconography of this era, often featuring speaking corpses, worms devouring cadavers, skeletons has been variously interpreted. For some they were patent signs of man's failure and the victory of death. For other, it was an era of a renewed appreciation of life and its possibilities. Indeed, a life was no longer subsumed within the collective destiny of the group, each moment of which would be judged by Christ after death. The Protestant Reformation contributed to this change, by shifting the locus of redemption from group ritual to personal conscience, and by challenging traditional ideas of the afterlife. It was at this time that people concerned themselves with their distinguishing characteristics, began writing autobiographies, became interested in drama and in the distinctions between roles and their occupants, and postulated the existence of an internal inner self. Philippe Ariès emphasized the relationship between the death of each individual and his awareness of being an individual. According to Ariès, attitudes toward death are intrinsically connected with the notion of individuality: in the mirror of his own death (in the speculum mortis) each man would discover the secret of his individuality. To assist in individuals' mastery of their own deaths, an instructional manual on the art of dying, entitled Ars Moriendi, was to be a best seller for two centuries.

In art, the shift from a religious and collective death to more frightful vision clearly reveals the heightened anxiety about death asociated with the heightened sense of personal identity. In the 1300’s, renowned Italian artists such as Giotto painted solid graceful figures, using tranquil pastel tones and a three-dimensional, balanced sense of light and space. A prime example is this panel in Padua’s Arena Chapel, entitled Anne and Joachim, the Virgin Mary’s parents, at the Gate.

However, immediately after the Black Plague of 1348, figures in Italian art began taking on a more wooden, Byzantine quality, seemingly to wipe out the sensitive artistic advances in shape and light made in the 14th century. In the eyes of these artists, the Deity was no longer kind but rigid and uncompromising. Death was final, and no one’s prayers could intercede. This new psychologically darker Sienese style of painting comprises the “Black Death theory” of art.

The horror and death they saw around them profoundly affected painters, their world was a colder place. Marked by crowded, paranoid compositions, ugly, menacing faces, bright colors and increased violence, Black Death art is unbalanced and uneasy.

Between the end of the fourteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries, the "baroque" model of death predominated, a model characterized by exteriorization, ostentation and by a wealth of multiple gestures (the baroque also meant exuberant and external piety, theatrical ceremonial and majestic funerals).

Remote and imminent death

The XVIIIth century, with increasing secularization and the rise of science, views death as some rupture or a break with life rather than as part of a continuum, a matter better put out of mind.

Death of the other

The 19th century introduced the present "cult of dying" where the burden of concern was shifted from the dying individual themself to the "survivors". Shifting from the death of oneself to the death of one's significant others, Death came to be romanticized. The graveyard became the locus of somber and mournful dispositions relative to death; a place to "pay one's respects". The headstone and the evolution of the casket mark an increasing return to a striving for material immortality (egyptian, even).

Great advances in science were inevitably accompanied by great reactions of mysticism. But to bring back the Christian methodology was not the aim of the Romantics. The Romantics wanted to rekindle humankind's sense of awe, which they felt was both lacking in and detrimental to the modern world; the frisson of the unknown. It became the self-imposed task of literature to perform the function no longer performed by religion, and certainly not by science.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood has been one of the most creative movement of the XIXth. Artists like Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, John Ruskin, Holman Hunt, Arthur Hughes, Gabriel Rossetti, Alma-Tadema, Waterhouse and Leighton, among others protested the outmoded academic conventions of the day and wanted to emulate the naturalism of the Italian Renaissance painters before Raphael. A similar task was performed by litterature with Herder, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis among the Germans, Baudelaire from the France, or Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats in England.

Invisible death.

With the increasing privatization of death and the institutionalization of the dying, by 1950 death denial was to become the reigning orientation. From the natural sciences came the perspective that, in the broad scheme of things, individuals' lives and deaths are inconsequential.

The existentialist contribution to the century is present in the work of Heidegger, Mallarmé, Blanchot for which death is the ground of art, language and man’s consciousness itself but cannot be explained by conventonial and descriptive methods.

Death today

with love and a holy kiss Roy

Edited March 27, 2010 by year2027

[sirguessalot]

Thanks, Roy

Seems to me this topic is very much worth raising...as it touches the root cause of many things, including religion, Christianity, and PFAL. Also seems safe to assume that it is the least-friendly topic of them all...especially now, in our days of "invisible death" and "death denial." As if the most insightful is also the most avoided.

While i'm not into pushing people over edges they are not ready for, there does seem a point when at least pointing to the edge seems an appropriate way to find out who is ready, especially since all are being pushed that direction, anyway.

Wondering...anyone have thoughts/feelings about how to talk about it when the majority of cultural and social attitudes are conditioned to avoid or resist it?

And is it even possible for someone to point out how far from this context we seem to have drifted...doctrinally and practically...without attracting some form of hostility?

...or simply chasing everyone off?

Holy kisses

[Gen-2]

Thanks, Roy

Seems to me this topic is very much worth raising...as it touches the root cause of many things, including religion, Christianity, and PFAL. Also seems safe to assume that it is the least-friendly topic of them all...especially now, in our days of "invisible death" and "death denial." As if the most insightful is also the most avoided.

While i'm not into pushing people over edges they are not ready for, there does seem a point when at least pointing to the edge seems an appropriate way to find out who is ready, especially since all are being pushed that direction, anyway.

Wondering...anyone have thoughts/feelings about how to talk about it when the majority of cultural and social attitudes are conditioned to avoid or resist it?

And is it even possible for someone to point out how far from this context we seem to have drifted...doctrinally and practically...without attracting some form of hostility?

...or simply chasing everyone off?

Holy kisses

Death is very much a part of the human condition. Everyone knows they shall die.

I watched a man shoot a girl in the face once, she fell like a sack of potatoes.

Some people delude themselves. Funerals are good for people in this sense. They remind you to not be a fool about death, that it's real.

Killing and God. Now there's a subject people really avoid. Does he? Christians have come up with some elaborate ways to explain how God doesn't kill.

The Way had a clever idiom,

I don't buy it. When fire comes out of heaven and consumes,... who sends it? The Devil?

Americans are sort of unique in the world as a people - how they see war, assisted death, they don't even like to kill their enemies. Other countries see you as weak fools for this. Not all, but quite a few.

Americans are disdained because they have the best toys to deal death, yet they usually choose to be compassionate when they can. On the other hand America is loved by millions all over the world. well that's fading... mostly because no one sees you lasting much longer - because you're becomming corrupt like them. America used to be so honorable. God that was annoying.

Sorry, I digress but it relates. What Roy put up and what you wrote, sirg, it's how death is viewed through the American Cultural filter today. Not everyone sees things the same way.

Where do you two (or anyone else) want to go with this?

Where's composer? I'd love to hear his take on this as well.

Oh and, is death evil in and of itself?

[year2027]

God first

thanks Todd and Gen-2

I see Gen-2 is join us with desire to learn

maybe you will be able to share with her

because you know more about this subject than me

I think Steve will join you later and cman and others

while some might not want to talk about death it only a stage

I hoping that geisha and Tom and others join us

with love and a holy kiss Roy

Edited April 12, 2010 by year2027

[sirguessalot]

Thanks, Gen-2...i appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

where do i want to go with it?

in light of historic developments sketched-out in the original post, and in my experiences bringing it up in doctrinal context, i feel like starting with the questions i posed...or something like them.

Edited April 12, 2010 by sirguessalot

[sirguessalot]

What Roy put up and what you wrote, sirg, it's how death is viewed through the American Cultural filter today. Not everyone sees things the same way.

maybe you can help me out...because i'm still not clear as to what you are referring to with the "it's" here

what's been posted is not limited to the American Cultural filter. And the initial post is referring to 1500 years of changes...i'm pointing to these changes as relating to changes in religion, Christianity, including PFAL.

[Gen-2]

OH, Okay,....

Now I understand that sirg,

Most of the world,.... Hasn't made it all the way through those stages Roy Posted, only in the western world

Many countries have a callous attitude toward death. some embrace it but that stuff Roy posted isn't global.

In China, the common attitude is "Oh well" unless you knew the person. There are 2-3 Billion people there

They can't freak when someone die on some days, over a million deaths can occur there daily.

That history,... only belongs to some of the world's inhabitants.

"it" IS ROY'S LIST.

Hope that helps

[sirguessalot]

thanks Gen...helps a little

edited to clarify...helps me see your opinions a little better

i am aware of the scope of the initial post..as well as differences around the world

Edited April 13, 2010 by sirguessalot

[sirguessalot]

wondering if anyone feels/thinks it's possible that the changes in our attitudes towards death and dying (in the west or elsewhere) are related to (or reflected by) our changes in religious thought and experience, doctrine and practice?

and if so, how?

...or if not, how?

Edited April 13, 2010 by sirguessalot

[Gen-2]

wondering if anyone feels/thinks it's possible that the changes in our attitudes towards death and dying (in the west or elsewhere) are related to (or reflected by) our changes in religious thought and experience, doctrine and practice?

and if so, how?

...or if not, how?

Most of our concepts on death have changed along with our increasing knowledge in, oh,... say, the last 200 years

In 1810 beliefs that we now treat as natural, and recognize as just part of the background of what we know, were quite radical. People were only beginning to understand that the earth was very very old and not just a handful of millenia old. The beginning was much further back than we thought. New studies of the text of the Bible in the 19th century, pressed against a literal acceptance of biblical truth too. Many of Humanity's rock solid principles of what the world was, toppled and Science grew by leaps and bounds medicine refined itself beyond bloodletting and sawbones and We explored spiritualism and psychiatry. God was even proclaimed dead in the early 1900's and each of these things bore on how we viewed death.

Today, increasing numbers of people believe that your death is the end of the line and you cease to exist. Religious views of any life after death are seen as Hocus Pocus to poke fun at... the opium of the people, the bread ans circuses for the masses.

[year2027]

God first

thanks Todd and Gen-2

the book of the dead was a Egyptian book

helping the dead die well is old custom

but here in America it got lost

I wanted to have Todd into good debate were I could and learn from Todd

because am feeling a little odd these days myself

because I do not see my as a christian anymore too

I see myself as christian/Atheism or God-child/Serpent

i hear people and they sound like children

and I sound like a child too

i see something that makes me think than i move to another subject

will I will now

with love and a holy kiss Roy

Edited April 13, 2010 by year2027

[sirguessalot]

Thanks, Gen-2, for your thoughts on the matter. While I agree with some points you’ve made so far, I strongly disagree with others…enough to question whether or not to enter the hypertextual fray and speak my mind. Not that we won’t all learn something from each other…but reading around, I get a sense it will cost more than I currently have to give, in terms of time and energy and other things. Perhaps you understand. Maybe some other day.

And thanks for the vote of confidence, Roy...and again for starting the thread. Sometimes I wish we lived down the street from each other...maybe talk about Spinoza and Christ while building something.

As the Celts might say…”May you have a happy death!”

[year2027]

God first

thanks Todd

yes my friend

”May you have a happy death!”

with love and a holy kiss Roy

[sirguessalot]

ok...trying again to clarify why i hesitate so often about this...

…basically because my doctrinal views on the matter are currently so different than the views of most Christians who post here, and the typical reaction to this (here and elsewhere) seems to be some form of fight or flight (or preach in order to convert). Not that I only want to have a conversation with those who agree…I value a robust debate…but sometimes the responses include so many points of disagreement I honestly don’t know where to begin.

Please accept my apologies, Gen-2, for inviting the conversation then backing off. Maybe i will find a better way to participate here some day.

Thanks again for trying.

[year2027]

God first

thanks Todd

yes I see the written on the wall

people things say that hurt them self at times

because they doctrine are as black and white

but death is more than that or more than they will ever know and less than

it is like saying Serpent is your God but he is not

do you understand what i am saying my friend

with love and a holy kiss Roy

[sirguessalot]

do you understand what i am saying my friend

maybe...you tell me

when i read what you wrote...seems to me that you are unable to reduce to "either-or" type answers...and are more-or-less "stuck" with a "both-and" kind of answer.

reminds me of an old saying about how a wise rabbi might answer a "yes or no" type question...with a "well...yes, and no."

[year2027]

God first

thanks Todd

Yes its that way

God the more and the Serpent is the less

or

God is the good we learn the evil the Serpent

it is like saying Serpent is your God but he is not

we learn about God's love by the Serpent hate

I love you

with love and a holy kiss Roy

[sirguessalot]

this article on Nondualism might interest you, Roy

[Gen-2]

Please accept my apologies, Gen-2, for inviting the conversation then backing off. Maybe i will find a better way to participate here some day.

No worries. I just sort of stayed away a bit. I thought I might have offended you, infact. I don't mind debate on points but I'll give any strong opinions I have. That doesn't mean I don't value your opinions or Roy's or anyone else's. No one here is dead, so none of us are authorities on the subject, and I hope none of us want to be. When Roy originally started steering the conversations he was having towards death, I didn't know, wasn't sure if he was considering doing something stupid in that regard. That's mainly why I backed away. I hope you understand (I can only guess at what people really think), I try to be careful about that kind of thing.

At any rate, it wasn't some adverse reaction to you, or anyone's views.

This topic is actually being touched on in other threads at present

[year2027]

God first

thanks Todd and Gen-2

Thank you Todd yes I enjoy that

No I was not thinking about harming myself Gen-2 but I was thinking how we can prepare the mind for what will happen to people one day like others used to do for dying and other things

with love and a holy kiss Roy