Date: 28-01-1992
Owning Institution: Victoria & Albert Museum
Publication:     The Independent 1987 - 1999  
Subject:   16th Century    

THE V&A'S ''The Art of Death'' was postponed when the Gulf War broke out, presumably because it was felt that its subject was, er, a little close to the bone. But it is hard to see who could have been offended by this show, whose scholarly intent is manifest in its subtitle, ''Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c.1500-1800''. A cornucopia of memorial paintings and sculptures, as well as many other objects of more sociological than aesthetic interest, it is an exhibition that has, itself, something of the memorial service about it. It commemorates a buried part of our cultural past, a conception of death that is, itself, dead.

Although modern attitudes to mortality fall outside the scope of this show it does, inevitably, prompt comparisons between the way we feel about dying and the way our ancestors did. Looking at The Unton Memorial, for instance, it is hard not to see a measure of the gap between notions of death in the 1590s and the 1990s. Commissioned by Sir Henry Unton's widow at the end of the sixteenth century, the painting is both startling and alien. A memorial to the dead and an encouragement to the living, it is a work that begins to make sense of curator Nigel Llewellyn's bizarrely phrased remark, in the exhibition catalogue, about ''the positive aspects of death, as a learning process''.
Henry Unton was a British diplomat who died, in his early forties, on an ambassadorial mission to France. There are many Henry Untons in The Unton Memorial, but the largest of these figures, who stares out at you from the centre of the canvas, is the key to the nature of the painting. The pen in his hand hovers over a blank sheet of paper while, above him, hover Death with his hourglass and Fame with her trumpet. Death and Fame are collaborators: now that Unton has passed away, his story may begin to be written.
And what a dignified, illustrious story, the painter implies, it has been. Unton was, you deduce from the many little scenes that cover the canvas like painted embroidery, a tireless servant of King and Country, a well-loved and cultured man and a thoroughly responsible husband. You see Unton on horseback, making his way across tracts of schematically rendered terrain (one section of this is helpfully labelled ''France'') with his retinue; elsewhere, you see him surrounded by friends at table, while musicians play nearby; you see his wife, attended by servants, cradling a baby. But that is, literally, only the half of it. All these scenes occupy the right-hand side of the painting, while the entire left half is given over to the rituals surrounding Unton's death: you see the long funeral procession, the packed church service and the elaborate and costly tomb in which his remains were to be placed.

The painting's even-handedness, its equal aportionment of space to the living and the dead Sir Henry Unton, suggests that the impeccable life has permitted something even more important to succeed it: the impeccable death. And this implies that both, after all, are mere preludes to something far more significant and unrepresentable: the after-life.
The Unton Memorial is worth dwelling on because it makes a point that sometimes (in an exhibition that can seem distractingly crowded with objects of interest only to the specialist) risks being lost. The painting envisages death as part of a process, as a boundary that has to be crossed in the journey from one state to another. For most people now death has, rather, the character of an inexplicable and final event - not a threshold, but a terminus.

Whether funerary art is the best place to look for evidence of this remains a little doubtful. The richest meditations on death and its consequences in, for example, eighteenth-century England, are to be found in literature rather than the visual arts: in Gray's Elegy, or the greatest English novel not to be read any more, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, whose heroine spends the last 400 pages of that book in bed, preparing for death.
Clarissa remarks that ''There is such a vast superiority of weight and importance in the thought of death, and its hoped-for happy consequences, that it in a manner annihilates all other considerations and con-cerns.'' Richardson's novel is the locus classicus for certain older English attitudes to death - attitudes that an exhibition of paintings and objects, however carefully selected, can only shadow forth. Nevertheless, certain paintings do manage to convey the intense, virtually Puritan piety that lies behind Clarissa. Her sense of death as a task, a job demanding conscientiousness and a considerable aptitude for paperwork, can be sensed in a painting like the anonymous portrait of Thomas Braithwaite Making His Will at the V&A. The pal-lid, dying man sits up in bed, seemingly less concerned by his plight than by the need to get his will done and to write to all the people who need to be told of his forthcoming demise.

''The Art of Death'' is full of objects which give the impression that their makers were on first-name terms with the reaper whereas modern funerary art, by contrast, seems stiff and formal, politeness masking a fearful distance from the hard facts of mortality. Many modern memorials - park benches, for instance, inscribed with phrases like ''In memory of C.W.: she loved this spot'' - tend to be slighter than those of the past, as well as keener to avoid death itself, reading as poignant attempts to preserve the trace of the absent person. This is understandable. Now that we are no longer confident that the dead have gone to another place, such traces may be all that is left of them. The memorial (and this is even more apparent in the recent Californian vogue for ''video graves'', where you push a button and the deceased comes on screen to talk to you) has become a form of substitute, something which few of those at the V&A attempt to be.

The witty gravestone inscriptions in which the eighteenth-century seems to have specialised - a good example, at the V&A, speaks of a keen amateur bowls player being finally outpointed by ''the great Bowler, Death'' - suggest not just levity but a kind of proximity to Death that we have lost - that, and a refusal to be intimidated by him. He is cast as a close acquaintance about whom it is possible to make less than reverent jokes.

Thus it is that Death, frequently personified as an allegorical figure, the grim grinning skeleton of long precedent, is none the less often characterised as an almost benign figure. In Rowlandson's wonderful car-toon, Death Seated on the Globe, he is a blase character who looks exhausted by the daily, globetrotting grind of his job. In earlier epochs, death became a particularly popular subject among artists during wartime - and their explorations of the mythology of death may well have reflected a communal need to come to terms with bereavement. The simple fact of this show's postponement by nervous museum staff indicates the difference between then and now. We have become uneasy with the subject, perhaps, because we no longer have anything like a coherent mythology of it.

Much of the funerary art at the V&A may seem morbid to modern eyes, but often its apparent morbidity is really a form of keen anticipation. The message of many of the paintings here might be translated as being dead is really not that bad. The anonymous painting of John Tradescant on His Deathbed sees death as a form of repose, a release from the troubles of life. Van Dyck's Venetia Digby on her Deathbed is another such peaceful sleeper, the only indication that her doze is of the terminal kind being the colour of her skin. Its waxy pallour seems to have appealed to her husband, Sir Kenelm Digby, who even found ways of enhancing this: ''When I goe into my chamber I sett it close by my bed side, and by the faint light of the candle, me thinkes I see her dead indeed; for that maketh painted colours seem more pale and ghastly than they doe by daylight.'' Later, he is said to have erected a monument to her memory, bearing the text ''The pleasure is in loving a living wife; the dead one, I revere.'' This is a brief but fascinating insight into another world - a world where, if a man says he wishes his wife were dead, he may be paying her a strange kind of compliment.