Et in Arcadia ego
Posted by Richard Rawlinson I first came across this Latin phrase as a teenager reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Narrator Charles Ryder finds the words inscribed on a skull displayed in his bedroom. ‘Even in Arcadia, there I am,’ is the translation. Death, the great equaliser, prevails even in the most utopian lands, as certain in […]
Publishing event of the year!
The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook. Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, […]
Funnybones
Posted by Vale What is it with this fascination with bones and skeletons? Faced with a pile of them and one man plasters into the walls and cornices, another creates chandeliers and shields while elsewhere anonymous skulls are given names, cleaned, polished and even appealed to for information. Bones seem to be the acceptable face […]
The sisterhood of the skulls
Posted by Vale If Kutna Hora and Capela dos Ossos show anything it is that we cannot let bones lie. Buried and disinterred, stacked and stored these vast collections become places where the living can meet and marvel at the dead. In Naples, at the charnel house in the middle of its Fontanelle Cemetary, this […]
Frantisek Rint – baroque and berserk?
Posted by Vale Back in 1278 an Abbot of Sedlec came back to Kutna Hora with some earth from Golgotha in his travel bags. He scattered it in the cemetery and created the most famous and popular necropolis in Bohemia and Central Europe. Grave space was at a premium and, sometime after 1400, a chapel […]
Welcome to Capela dos Ossos
Posted by Vale An ossuary is a chest, building, well, or site made to serve as the final resting place of human skeletal remains. These are photographs of the ossuary in the ancient town of Evora in Portugal. It is estimated to contains the remains of over 5000 people as well as two mummified corpses. […]
