In one Capuchin monastery in Sicily, the so-called Palermo Catacombs, locals used to buy a niche where their mummified corpse would one day stand erect, clothed and on display to visitors, the way we might now buy a burial plot. Would-be purchasers would pay a visit to select their niche and stand in it to make sure it fitted. Indeed, by way of voluntary penance, some would remain there for hours, contemplating their end.
At the same time, in the early 17th century, a related order of nuns in Rome, the Sepolta Vive or Buried Alive sisters, would sleep in coffins and hail each other with the observation: ‘Remember sister, we all have to die’. As a prelude to a complaint about domestic problems — the dinner or the drains — this would, one feels, put things in perspective.
These are just a couple of vignettes from a fascinating book, The Empire of Death, by Paul Koudounaris, subtitled ‘A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses’. Illustrated with the most fabulous skeletons you have ever seen, it is intended to bring home to us the extent to which our view of dead bodies differs from those of our forebears. And it does.
We like our deceased to look similar to their living selves when we look at them at all; most people rarely see a corpse and are increasingly likely to have it hygienically burned rather than buried, let alone put on display. Yet in parts of Catholic Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries, people would not only pay artists to paint their relations’ skulls with floral wreaths but would take their children to visit them as an introduction to the family tree.
Ossuaries, often arranged with the utmost artistry, are scattered throughout Europe and South America, but the rationale behind the display varies over time. In late antiquity the dead were thought to sleep with Christ; it was from the 12th century and in particular after the Black Death that the cult of corpses, of Death, began to take hold.
At about this time, the motif of the Three Living and the Three Dead became common — an encounter between three huntsmen and three skeletons, where the dead tell the living:
Such as ye are, so once were we As we now are, so shall you be.
This, like the bones of the dead, is a memento mori, whereby the living are reminded of their mortality, so as to make them live better. But it’s more than that: as the author makes clear, contemplating death meant reflecting on eternal life and resurrection. Usually the ossuaries were linked with the image of Christ crucified on Golgotha, whose blood flowed into the skull of Adam, buried below.
After the Counter-Reformation, the phenomenon took on an even more macabre turn. And the arrangements became even more artistic: in Waldsassen in Germany, bejewelled and brocaded skeletons from the Roman catacombs, in gilded glass coffins, made for an impressive rococo display. Indeed displays of bones echo the aesthetic of the times. In the 19th century, when the cult of corpses was embraced by Romanticism, a classical style of arrangement was evident.
This is overwhelmingly a Catholic (and to a lesser extent, Orthodox) phenomenon — Protestants after the Reformation had much the same oh yuk reaction as modern visitors might — and it does play to distinctive Catholic beliefs: in the communion between living and dead, in Purgatory. But as Koudounaris says, ‘the corridors filled with the accumulated bones of generations past provide us with an opportunity to affirm life by embracing death’.
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