This course forms an introduction to the theme of death and resurrection in European painting and sculpture from c.1400-1700. There will be three broad areas of study. Firstly we will look at images related to belief in the afterlife, and expectations of Heaven and Hell. This will be followed by painted and sculpted memorials that reflect individual responses to the nature of mortality, and the need for personal commemoration. The final area of focus will be the impact of the Reformation on painting and sculpture, and the way in which scientific discoveries led to an increasingly rational understanding of corporeal decay. 

This module examines death as a theme in European painting and sculpture during the period 1400-1700, and how art reflected shifting perceptions of mortality and the afterlife. There will be three broad areas of study: the first deals with images that reflect both ideological and eschatological responses to death in an age of religious reform. Topics include the iconography of the Last Judgment, Dives and Lazarus, and Danse Macabre themes, the development of Vanitas imagery and the ars moriendi – illustrated manuals for ‘dying well’. We shall then move on to address more individualistic responses to the nature of mortality with reference to the development of tomb monuments, effigies and memorial portraiture. The way in which both artists and patrons used commemorative and funerary imagery as a way of investigating and projecting their own sense of self and personality will be analysed. Topics include John Donne’s monument at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Michelangelo’s tomb designs, and the royal funeral effigies of Westminster Abbey. The final section of the module addresses an increasingly rational and scientific reaction to corporeal decay in the aftermath of the Reformation. Here we shall look at the imagery of disease and capital punishment in Renaissance and Baroque painting from the anatomical studies of Leonardo da Vinci to Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp.