ARTS
Exhibitions 1
In the midst of life . . .
The Art of Death: Objects from the English Death Ritual 1500-1800 (V & A, till 22 March) In the midst of life we are in death.' These words from the Burial Service, writ- ten in 1552, remind us of our modern unpreparedness to contemplate the subject of death. In the present century, society's sense of the scope and range of art has also narrowed, becoming increasingly associat-
'Lydia Dwight on her Deaillb, (I', stoneware, made in Fulham c. 1674 ed with the idea of entertainment. The artefacts in this exhibition were made with very different intentions. They are all `designed' objects (no grisly relics from crypt or charnel house) having a strong visual appeal but created with the most emphatic and didactic purposes — to por- tray, to remind, to instruct, to enable expressions of mourning and grief.
Ten months ago, in the last stages of the war over Kuwait, this exhibition was sum- marily cancelled within weeks of its sched- uled opening by the trustees of the V & A, whose spokesman ignorantly stated: 'The V & A must not be aestheticising death at a time when some would be grieving'. But far from `aestheticising' death, the exhibi- tion serves to encapsulate those historical procedures by which the common man might translate, accept and finally tran- scend that most mysterious and ultimate experience.
Church and State exercised a powerful influence over those images of the dead created to stand as public memorials. When post-Reformation dictates made the belief in Purgatory and other devices of the Roman Church illegal and prohibited devotional images from England's church- es, representations tended to become more hierarchical and idealised. Certain exhibits illustrate this trend: Van Dyck's portrait of Lady Venetia Digby, made from her corpse two days after her sudden death in 1633, provided her husband with a beautiful, chaste emblem of uxorious virtue which belied her lively reputation; Roubilliac's model for the tremendous tomb of the 2nd Earl of Montagu portrays, in addition to the earl's grieving widow, the figure of Charity hanging up his portrait, who stands amongst a small arsenal of heaped-up mili- tary trophies. The young and virtuous female poor are more modestly represent- ed by an 18th-century 'Virgin's Crown' made from wood and paper, which was car- ried before the coffin in some rural areas and thereafter suspended from the church rafters, just as at an earlier period heraldic devices and helmets were hung over the tombs of knights. While the 'natural' body — the corporeal remains, suitably shroud- ed and coffined — passed from view for ever, the 'social' body continued in memo- riam, the artist's or craftsman's image sup- plying a moral instruction to the living.
Above all, this exhibition illustrates the numerous devices by which death was once recognised and the ritual tools whereby to eke out and publicise the process of mourning. Elaborately printed funeral invi- tations of the 17th century feature the stan- dard iconography of memento mori skulls, hourglasses and grave-diggers' tools — and similar motifs embellish mourning rings and brooches containing locks of hair. In 1828, each of the biscuits consumed at the funeral of a certain Mrs Oliver came in a paper wrapper bearing a moralising rhyme of three verses. Attendance at a funeral was a form of preparation for one's own rite of passage, death was inextricably a part of life: the Strickland family of York- shire ate with a silver mourning spoon, commissioned in 1670, inscribed with the legend 'Live to Die — Die to Live'.
Strange to say, this exhibition, with its powerful and universal message for our time, has not been launched with the V & A's customary trumpet-blare of pub- licity. Possibly this stems from its increas- ingly rare and elusive status, that of an exhibition without the backing of commer- cial sponsorship. The dedicated scholarship behind it is that of Nigel Llewellyn, its curator, who worked in collaboration with Julian Litten, an enigmatic figure whose 'fieldwork' has earned him the singular title of first Honorary Member of the British Institute of Funeral Directors. Since the funeral directors presumably baulked at the notion of corporate sponsorship, per- haps approaches should have been made to the increasingly beleaguered tobacco indus- try — Benson and Hedges, for instance, might have rallied for such a worthy cause and a little publicity. Certainly, this mes- sage demands a much wider audience than the nation's 'art-lovers'. I hope that there is an enlightened and altruistic television pro- ducer out there capable of conveying it to couch potatoes everywhere.
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