Often it was the custom, that when a powerful man died, his wives, servants, pets and slaves would be required to accompany him into the grave. They were sacrificed so that he should arrive in the beyond with a suitable entourage. Later, this practice was considered either too cruel or too costly and images and statues replaced the living souls.

For the Romantics, death was an important theme. For them death was experienced as exquisite emotion and the ultimate expression of love. "To die loving you is better than life itself," wrote Alferd de Musset. The Romantic era was a period of "beautiful death" in which death was perceived as a refuge, a  release, a reward and a rebirth. Death was associated with rebirth, conception, birth and sexual expression. The transition from death to eternal life was seen as a rebirth and came to be symbolized by a release of sensual pleasure expressed by the "petite death". It is no accident that the expression of morning by the women in many of the works is indistinguishable from sexual ecstasy. 2  One of the best examples of this theme is The Ecstasy of St. Teresa by Bernini, 1650. Bernini's work is a representation of Saint Teresa of Avila's writings in which she reports: "It pleased the Lord that I should sometimes see the  following vision. I would see beside me, on my left hand, an angel......He was not tall, but short, and very beautiful, his face so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest types of angel who seem to be all afire....In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it, and he left me completely afire with a great love of God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one's soul be content with anything less than God. It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it - indeed a great share. So sweet are the colloquies of love which pass between the soul and God that if anyone thinks I am lying I beseech God, in His Goodness, to give him the same experience. Amen" 13   To the left is The Ecstasy of St. Teresa by Bernini, 1650.

The moment of ecstasy corresponds t the self-annihilation spoken of by the mystics of the seventeenth century. Pierre de Berulle starts from the stage of "spiritual death" which the soul has to pass through during the "time of trials" in order to attain the "mystical marriage" with the Bridegroom. It is the Bridegroom who permeates the soul in the "abyss of greatness" and the "gulf of glory" in order to consummate the "spiritual marriage" Benoit de Canfield has written "the Bride of God (man's soul) "desires with all other creatures to be melted, liquefied, consumed, and annihilated." 16

Joseph Campbell states "Myths of the Great Goddess teach compassion for all living beings. There you come to appreciate the real sanctity of the earth itself, because it is the body of the Goddess.5 "And when you have a Goddess as the creator, it's her own body that is the universe. She is identical with the universe...She is the whole sphere of the life-enclosing heavens."6 Campbell goes on to state: "This is the an essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die   to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that  of which the vehicle is the carrier. That is the God." 7 Within the essential experience of birth and rebirth the female embodies the totality from conception to birth and renewal. As Mother Earth she embodies fertility and rebirth and out of death, the eternal renewal of life. The greater the beauty and perhaps the more sensuous, the more powerful the identity is of "Goddess as Mother Earth."   To the left is a "sarcophagus from second-century A.D. Thebes that reveals a symbolic connection with the archetypal Great Mother (the container of all life). The inside of the cover bears a portrait of the Egyptian goddess Nut; thus the goddess would "embrace" the body of the deceased."  14

It is interesting to note that the images "Of Flesh and Stone" differ from the anonymous female figures serving as surrogate mourners in much memorial art. Here the images are representations of the individual and as such are more naked than nude revealing a profound vulnerability and personal reality in their life like representations. 4  Camille observes: "Naked one came into the world and naked one left it was a cliché' of the preachers, but this lack of clothing evinced a deeper shame,  going back to the invention of death at the Fall in the Garden of Eden. For it had been only at the moment of original sin that Adam and Eve saw that they were naked and were ashamed." 8   It can be considered that nudity in which there is not shame, symbolizes innocence, the time of purity before the Fall as well as redemption after death. Hiram Powers sculpted Eve Tempted in 1843. Powers wanted to depict the innocence and complete absence of shame about her nudity immediately before the Fall. In Eve Tempted Eve is in metamorphosis, not yet ".. yielding to the seduction of the serpent, disobeying God's word, and tempting Adam to join her in disobedience representing ... the irrepressibility of humankind's sinful nature ". 12  

Similarly in some works the subjects are nude or are partially clothed and the works symbolize entry into heaven. The nude imagery of the human form expresses rebirth into heaven, as well as innocence and purity, leaving the fallen material world behind. In another perspective these images may be a return to Eden before the fall when man, like God was perfect and knew no shame. Perhaps entry into heaven adorned with clothes suggests a fallen state and the shame of Eden.  The exquisite beauty of some of the figures depicted in this work may also be an expression of God’s perfect beauty with man being created in the image of God a theme that has been expressed for millennium. (The image to the right is from Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington D.C.)

As early as 2500 BC, Egyptians used statuary, for religious purposes, to capture the essence of the individual represented and as a medium to hold the soul after death. Much of these sculptured images were nude depicting the expected rebirth from temporal life into eternity in God’s presence.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

A Death and Maiden theme emerged from a  long mythological tradition. In Greek  mythology the abduction of Persephone by Hades, god of Hell, is an  early expression of the clash between Eros and Thanatos. The young goddess Persephone gathers flowers while accompanied by carefree nymphs. When Persephone saw a pretty narcissus, she picked it and at that moment, the ground opened and Hades came out of the underworld and abducted Persephone carrying her into his underworld.

Within the Death and the Maiden Theme, a dark bound between sexuality and death is explored. In this iconography, the young girl is not involved in “the dance of death” but enters into a sensual relationship with death, which becomes increasingly erotic as time passes. Despite the sensuality of this genre, it maintained a moralistic goal for it is intended to remind us that life is short as is the exquisite beauty of a woman. The theme of Death and the maiden also serves as a moralistic pretext to depict female nudity. 24

Niklaus Manuel Deutsch completed this work in 1517. It demonstrates the transition between the Dance of Death and the theme of Death and the Maiden. Here Death, as a rotting corpse, caresses his young lover, takes her by the hand, grasps her by the neck, kisses her as she guides his hand under her dress. As his young lover she welcomes deaths touch and attention. 24 (click on image to enlarge)

In Angkor - Splendors of the Khmer Civilization, Marilla Albanese observes "The artistic perfection of the statue does not fulfill aesthetic so much as canonical and ritual requirements because manufacture in accordance with the rules induces the Deity to descend into the stone and animate it with its presence, while the beauty of its form attracts worshippers and gives them aesthetic pleasure, the first emotion that prepares them for the encounter with the sacred. The deeper the spirituality of he who contemplates, the greater his ability to go beyond the formal aspect of that specific deity, perceiving behind it the the ineffable presence of that which has no form and no name." 63.  

"The Khmer, as a megalithic civilization inaugurated a cult of stone that gradually increased over the centuries as a result of external (mainly Indian) influences and eventually acquired central importance in Khmer history. Menhirs were erected as funeral monuments, probably to commemorate the deceased and transfer his energy and charisma to his successor. The upward-pointing stones acted as an intermediary between heaven and earth and the emblem of a supernatural presence that controlled and fertilized the surrounding land. They consequently become a tangible symbol of the invisible genius loci, or local spirit. Ancestor worship and the cult of the chthonic powers this merged in the menhirs, which at the same time acquired land survey functions, marking the ownership and boundaries of land." 64.

The role of the stone statue as sacred Deity transitioned to becoming the image of the King who increasingly took on the identity of the Deity in the final stage of the Khmer Civilization.  62.

Albanese adds: "In his desire for immortality and revealed by his frenzied building campaign, Jayavarman erected statues of himself all over the country.  Jayavarman identified his mother with the goddess Prajnaparamita, the mistress of supreme Buddhist knowledge, and his father with the bodhisattva Lokeshvara, of whom the Emperor considered himself the incarnation. However, it was not only the royal family who sought immortality; as if they had had a presentiment of the end, princes, dignitaries, and officials filled the temples with their own statues, hoping in this way to cheat time as Angkor began its ineluctable decline" 62.  ... and flesh became stone.

In this framework one is interested to consider whether it matters if the subject of a fine art photograph is flesh or stone. Is it useful for the viewer to know the ultimate nature of the subject?  There is also a  fascinating dynamic, for in some venues a figurative image of a stone subject will be acceptable but not a similar image of a human subject. At some level are we repeating the Medusa myth in the transformation of beautiful women to stone? The warning of the Medusa myth is that one can lose all if one is too enamored with earthly beauty.

As the project has progressed intriguing questions about the nature of the stone figures emerge. Though they represent some of the most beautiful of young women, the marble and granite statues have none of the qualities of the flesh they represent. Yet, the stone figures communicate profound themes about mortality, renewal, birth, rebirth, salvation, transcendence and transformation. What are the perceptual qualities that allow a symbol of something to have a such a powerful transcendent message?  In some ways the symbol communicates ideas that the object cannot. Is there a connection with the biblical warning "for dust you are and to dust you will return." and a realization that flesh and stone are ultimately and profoundly connected.

The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Genesis 2:7

SUMMARY

In stone there is a reminder that all that makes flesh so different from granite and marble is profoundly transient and fleeting. The beautiful figures of the pyramids and the women of the cemetery are immune to the exquisite fragility of the flesh they represent and as such aspire to enduring themes. Yet, Auguste Rodin observed "The human body is first and foremost a mirror to the soul and its greatest beauty comes from that". Similarly Walt Whitman offered: "If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred." These images of flesh and stone explore a collective yearning to understand the human condition, our vulnerability, our mortality, our capacity for renewal and redemption and the terror of the unknown. These are the deep issues seeking transcendence and result in a profound desire to understand the meaning of our existence. Such passion is at the foundation of the great art of the Western World and our ultimate hope that the universe is not random.

Your death is always with you and it is the most attractive part of you. When people tell you they love your eyes, Or the way you walk, It is your mortality they're seeing.

                                                                                                                                 Paul Williams