“Visitors were confronted with the skeletons of a child of four with a toy in its hands, a five-year-old holding a silk thread with an embalmed heart dangling from it, and a girl drying her eyes with a pocket handkerchief. Decorations, memento mori images and vanitas symbols put the horror of death in perspective by stressing the transience of life, by showing that the body was no more than an earthly frame for the soul. After death it no longer served its purpose – only an anatomist could still make it useful to the living.”
These are wonderful, wonderful images that embody the kind of feel I’m looking at. Something useful Astrid said in class the other day – my project could go for “an 1800s feel with a consciousness of contemporary work”.
