The use of death iconography, especially in the mode of memento mori, was a prevalent and effective means of conveying the Roman Catholic Church’s message of eternal reward through faith to provide hope to those who would follow. This contributed to the success of the Church’s internal reformation in the 16th century. This dissertation will explore a heretofore unexamined shift in the specific artistic mode of memento mori and its rhetorical function in ameliorating the image of the Church during the Counter- Reformation. Specifically, it examines in the mode of sculpture, the works of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the Ossuary of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini; for the mode of painting, the works of Michelangelo Caravaggio and Pietro da Cortona; and for the mode of literature, the works of Giambattista Marino and Cesare Ripa. The artists and works selected for this study provide salient examples of memento mori of the Italian Baroque and its rhetorical function in the preservation of the Catholic faith. These works mark a distinct shift from the medieval modes of death representation which also indicates a shift in presentation of teleological theology in the eschatological message of the Church that is at the core of the faith. This change in rhetorical approach had a positive effect on the Church’s image and reputation that would comfort followers and encourage new converts. Close reading is performed on each of the sample works and their embedded rhetoric is examined. Since the fear of death and the hope for eternal life are the driving sentiments that these works evoke, their power to influence people is strong. Naturally, this increased the chances of the message of the Church being recognized, remembered, and spread. The use of transformed death iconography, especially in the mode of memento mori, was a prevalent and effective means of conveying the Church’s message of eternal reward through faith to provide hope to those who would follow. This contributed, in part, to the success of the Roman Catholic Church’s internal reformation at the time of the Protestant Schism in the 16th century. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Within a year I lost three close family members. My grandfather, my grandmother and my stepfather. Three very different deaths and therefore very different mourning periods were entangled and intertwined. Death suddenly became a ubiquitous part of my life, and the sorrow an overshadowing part of my everyday. This period in my life became the starting point for my thesis 'Dying Traditions'. In todays Western Society we have become so good at prolonging life, that most people get to live a long life and die of old age. But the advancements in medical science have, together with the institutionalization, removed death from our daily life. We are no longer in contact with death aside from what we see through media and movies. We are missing a way of coping with the natural death, which makes it difficult to grasp and surrounds it with a taboo. With my work I want to facilitate a conversation surrounding death. By the use of contemporary jewellery and silversmithing work I want to place the conversation and presence of death in both the public, private and personal space. I want to create a starting point for new rituals to work through a mourning period. I make use of my own personal experiences as a starting point to create contemporary Memento Mori objects fitting for todays Northern European Society. / <p>Photos are removed due to copy rights.</p>

Death, as a subject, has been treated extensively throughout history, both in literature as well as in music. The focus of Memento mori is to portray the inevitability of death through music. The first part of the document is an essay exploring the topic of death, its inevitability, unpredictability and the fragility of life. This section also includes a number of examples of composer's whose works have influenced the composition of the piece. The title of the work is meant to reflect that death catches up with all of us and that humans no matter how invincible they feel at certain stages of life will, eventually, succumb to death. The second part of the document is the notated orchestral score. The work is for full orchestra and solo violoncello. It is in three acts that loosely resemble three stages of life; Youth followed by life in adulthood and finally death. The work is not programmatic and the piece's formal structure varies from a traditional concerto, for although comprised of three distinct acts, there are no pauses between them. The entire work is meant to be dark and morbid and the specter of death looms throughout the piece.

Le portrait captive lorsqu’il est envisagé comme présence humaine et qu’il tend à se soustraire à l’interprétation analytique. Prenant appui sur ce constat, le mémoire se penche sur la réponse spectatorielle induite par des portraits photographiques dont l’opacité pose un défi à l’attribution de significations précises. Ces portraits, qui abordent le thème de la mort, appartiennent au corpus "What Remains" (2000-2004) de l’artiste américaine Sally Mann. Ils réactualisent le procédé obsolète du collodion, revisitent le vocabulaire formel du pictorialisme et évoquent l’imagerie mortuaire du 19e siècle. Par ces citations historiques, les œuvres gênent la lecture du référent et introduisent des renversements de sens: elles troublent toute certitude dans la perception et toute littéralité dans l’interprétation. Le mémoire étudie les diverses stratégies citationnelles à la source de cette opacification et examine comment celles-ci tendent à établir les conditions de l’expérience esthétique. Après avoir réévalué certains présupposés théoriques sur la photographie, les paramètres techniques, formels et iconographiques des œuvres sont passés en revue afin d’évaluer leur impact respectif. En s’appuyant sur un cadre issu de la théorie des médias et de la psychanalyse, le travail du médium émerge comme le principal déterminant de l’expérience de ces portraits contemporains. / Portraits captivate when they are considered as human presence and they tend to evade analytical interpretation. Building on this observation, the dissertation addresses the viewer’s response to photographic portraits whose ambiguity challenges attribution of precise meanings. These portraits, which deal with the theme of death, belong to the "What Remains" corpus (2000-2004) of American artist Sally Mann. They re-actualize the old wet collodion process, revisit the formal vocabulary of Pictorialism and evoke 19th century mortuary imagery. Through these historical quotations, the artworks hinder the readability of the referent and produce reversals of meaning: they blur any certainty in perception and any literal interpretation. The dissertation first discusses the various quotation strategies leading to this ambiguity and then examines how they tend to establish the conditions of the aesthetic experience. After re-evaluating some theoretical assumptions about photography, the technical, formal and iconographic parameters are reviewed to assess their respective impact. Based on a framework derived from media theory and psychoanalysis, the work of the medium emerges as the key determinant of the experience of these contemporary portraits.

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Syftet med min uppsats är att jag vill påminna om människans egen förgänglighet. Jag vill upplysa att allting lever under samma princip. Förgängligheten finns i allt, att allting är underständig förändring och att det bara är en fråga om olika lång tid innan allt försvinner. Jag vill att människan ska bli mer påmind om att allt och alla, människor, naturen, och alla ting lever undersamma principer och på så sätt inte är särskilt skilda från varandra.Jag vill påvisa hur förgängligheten har analyserats och analyseras, samt ge en inblick i vad förgänglighetsteori handlar om. Förgängligheten har flitigt avbildats inom konsten.Jag kommer undersöka varför två betydelsefulla konstnärer har arbetat med förgängligheten och jämföraderas tolkningar. Mina frågeställningar är följande: • Hur definieras idén om förgängligheten historiskt och symboliskt? • Varför har Andy Warhol och Damien Hirst arbetat med förgängligheten?

My degree project has been developed through my research on the topics of originality, consumption, vanitas and consumer culture. It referneces the politics of consumption, desire, pollution, waste, the passing of time, the effect of decay, and death. The scene is a reconstruction of a "still life" scene, referencing Baroque painting. The light-box installation comprises coloured sculptures which are emblems of consumerism. The hanmade and the organic are joined in composition, as if united in ruin and decay. The sculptures resemble the still life genre and allude to memento-mori. The project also addresses the industrial food system. It emphasises efficiency, profit and power in ways that are narrowly constructed, sometimes at the expense of other environmental and social values. It consist of a glass-cast modern cornucopia. The glass captures decomposing traces and makes them solid and everlasting. Even with something so fragile and temporary as life, the material can freeze it in time. The glass captures life.

The development of ethics with samples of period fine art pieces with the emphasis on Christian view. (Range 14.-16. century). The base of this thesis is a brief description of eschatology, developing in the frame of Christian ethics in the midstream of the pestilence's apocalypse of the late Middle Ages. The main part of the thesis is focused on changes in individual as well as social perception of death during the very demanding era of extreme wave of pestilence's epidemic in late Middle Ages even early modern history. The changes in approach and coping with the attribute of death are being observed. The aim of the thesis, on the basis of literary studies, is to gather and analyze the changes in interpretation of death during the mentioned period, evaluate their influence of people's behavior by verification or denial of given hypothesis. The accessible materials are supplemented by previews of period fine art pieces showing the attitude of people in given era towards the perception of their own death. Key words Ars moriendi, Bible, carpe diem, pestilence, eschatology, flagellant, macabre art, dying memento mori, death, death dances, vanitas.

Hamlet's tragedy is constructed as a perspective of matter that is destined for decay, and this "objective," or "object-focused," mode of viewing the material world enhances theatrical and theological understandings of the play's props, figurative language, and characters. Hamlet's "objective mode" evokes early modern materialist philosophies of vanitas and memento mori, and it is communicated in theatre through semiotic means, whereby material items stand for moral ideas according to an established sign-signified relation. Extending an objective reading to Hamlet's characters reveals their function as images, or two-dimensional emblems, in moments of slowing narrative time. In the graveyard scene (5.1), characters and theatrical props cooperate to materialize the objective perspective. As a prop, Ophelia's corpse complicates the objective mode through its semantic complexity. Thus, she stands apart from other characters as one that both serves to construct and to deconstruct the objective mode. Hamlet's tragic outlook, which depends upon an understanding of matter as destined for decay, and of material items as ends in themselves rather than vehicles for spiritual transformation, is an early modern notion concurrent with theological debates surrounding the Eucharist. Drawing upon art-historical, linguistic, feminist, theological, and theatrical approaches, this thesis contributes to concurrent discourse on Hamlet's tragic genre.

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