Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult - Living With the Dead in France, 1750-1870

Finely produced in a traditional scholarly style, this book takes an academic art historian's look at a subject that has some interest for general readers as well. Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries looks familiar to contemporary readers in many ways. One of the ways it does not is in its public treatment of the dead. As author Suzanne Glover Lindsay (history of art, U. of Pennsylvania) points out, France in the early modern era did not hide evidence of death; tombs could be publicly visited, and visitors will often find the occupants prominently displayed as life-sized effigies on coffin lids or marble slabs, dead bodies in bronze. In scholarly but clear language, Lindsay takes readers through the ways the funerary arts shaped and reflected the hopes and realities of French people in an era of violent change, both before and after the Revolution. Social and political controversy often stormed around whether particular individuals (like Voltaire) or groups (such as the royal family) should be disappeared or displayed. If evidence of their deaths (and therefore their lives) should remain in the public eye, how should they be made to look? In what context should they be seen? The book usefully includes discussion not only of funerary paintings, plaques, and sculpture, but the architecture and landscape arts associated with tombs and memorials. This is a strong positive choice, for their division is mandated by a contemporary academic system that divides art history from architecture and landscape architecture, but in reality all these elements are experienced together, both then and now. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Suzanne Glover Lindsay is Adjunct Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, USA.