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Editorial Reviews. From the Author. I wonder about not a very few years when A buddy (cemetery gardener) finds out a large way of living in the touch of a.
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But it has seldom made such a fabulous assault on the familiar. A reaction was inevitable. In October , the Independent published this piece on the "Sacred and Profane" exhibition of paintings by a 17th century woman. It showed that the divine could once be found in the most humdrum and even painful subjects. A trussed lamb makes an odd devotional image. There it lies, feet bound, caught in indignity and perhaps pain.

It wears a look - if a young sheep's look can be interpreted accurately - of mute appeal. At best, it's a baleful look. If this were the twentieth century, such an image would most likely be seen, grainily photographed, in a newspaper advertisement for the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals. It is, in a way, more shocking than anything essayed by Damien Hirst. This is a living creature portrayed not as a carcase on its way to be meat, but as the living embodiment of joyful spring on its way to slaughter.

Josefa of Obidos, rare in being a woman painter in early 17th century Portugal, was portraying an Agnus Dei - the lamb of god - and the creature, perhaps two or three months old, is hog-tied, ready for the knife on its stone slab, an altar with no cloth in sight.

The peculiarity of the thing is not merely that we are startled to see an animal's suffering transformed into an object of religious devotion, but that anything quite so commonplace could be thought likely to reward long reflection. The best of the paintings are still lifes, a kind of work which was quite new then. Its subjects were often routine to the point of banality. But the most humdrum of the scenes is capable of producing something like awe.

Josefa's work was part of a growing trend. Gabriele Finaldi, the curator of late Italian and Spanish painting at the National Gallery and of the Spanish Still Life show there , says, "Still life painting happened all over Europe from the end of the 16th century. Perhaps it arises partly because the technical accomplishment is in place: people could paint light falling through glass, and so on. And then, people were reading in Pliny about classical still life paintings which we no longer have.

People in the 17th century were interested in illusion: they were interested in the idea of paintings of grapes which fooled birds into pecking the picture, as they had read about in the classics.

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But there is something in the religious and intellectual temper of the time, too, which could use the new still life style. According to Finaldi: "These developments go with advances in the worlds of science and observation. Catholic countries had rather done down the senses as negative and dirty - and were perhaps rethinking that. In our own time, soup tins and dead animals have done this work. For Spanish and Portugese, more even than anywhere else in Europe, metaphysics came drenched in religion.

Josefa, at least in youth, was a sort of part-time nun. As a painter living in a small provincial city in a country which itself was provincial at least compared with Spain , she was heavily derivative of more accomplished Spanish painters. The trussed lamb is an example: the far more celebrated Francisco de Zurbaran [[[accent on the last 'a']]] painted several twenty or thirty years earlier.

She depended on commissions from religious and monastic orders, and thus worked within strict and pious conventions. But whilst she often worked from the engravings of better painters, she was also very Portugese and original in the almost peasant cheerfulness which usually eluded the masters of the austere, sunbaked plateaux to her country's east. She puts homely details into her versions of famous images of the holy family.

And when she comes to do still lifes of bigger collections of food, fruit and flowers, she showers the whole scene in petals, berries, and twigs, with a fine and joyous disregard of perspective or order. Angela Delaforce, the curator of Josefa's show, had a Portugese childhood herself, and remembers eating in a house whose table was supplied with cakes from a local convent. Josefa paints them very often and not so much well as with infectious excitement. It's tempting to see them as something like blessed bread. But Dr Delaforce doesn't approve of reading too much into the paintings.

All Souls: A day for hope and grief

The 17th century mind adored symbolism and hidden messages, which has provided American academics especially with the excuse to read a narrative into every petal and crumb of still lifes or any other old painting. In one famous case, a bunch of parsnips became, in one critic's imagination at least, the nails of Christ's crucifixion. But she stresses that objects in still lifes do "acquire a sort of mystery" because of the way we concentrate on these illusions of reality. Whether the nuns thought much more of the cakes than that they were a source of revenue, or Josefa painted them because they were spiritually as well as actually and visually appetising, cakes made in convents certainly did figure at Christmas and Easter tables.

A religious mind would have noted that the bible is stuffed with references to food of every sort. The snail and the butterfly which figure in one of Josefa's paintings may indeed be there as symbols of humility and transcendence, as the American catalogue for the show has it. The rest of Josefa's still lifes may or may not have been devotional, but her Agnus Dei very probably was.

The lamb powerfully speaks of sacrifice. It links the followers of the New Testament with the older beliefs of Judaism and beyond that with pre-historic practices. Abraham trussed his son Isaac and laid him on a makeshift altar before God accepted that his faith had been tested thoroughly. It was to Moses the shepherd that God outlined how the Passover sacrifice of lambs should be undertaken. Christ as a youngster is foretold as "the lamb of God which beareth away the sins of the world".

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Josefa's customers, less squeamish and more pious than anyone today, also lived far tougher physical lives than most of us now. What would the brief and probably slight suffering of the lamb matter if it served so grand a purpose as to further the work of the church in saving souls?

And if the animal's suffering was matched by human empathy, then was it not well vindicated? Memory and death 3 Top The taste for Vanitas painting is alive and well. Featuring Holbein. You'd think it was Easter approaching, not Christmas. Away from the shopping and the Yves St Laurent lights, London is awash with images of death and the vanity of human life. It's as though the capital was host to one huge exhibition, scattered over most of its galleries.

We have a severe case of de rigeur mortis, but it is more likely that the explanation lies more in the enduring power of the theme than zeitgeist or any other syncronicity. Thomas More wrote somewhere that a day is wasted in which there has been no serious remembrance of death. Contemplating death informs the way live our lives in rather the way that a fullstop reverse-engineers meaning into the half-formed order of the words which precede it. Vanitas painting - work which dwells on the vanity of human desires - has a long history in still-lifes, in portraiture and in allegorical work. So it is wrong to see death, and the discipline it imposes on life, as only mattering to people who have the horror of hell hanging over their heads.

And it would probably be wrong to look at the anamorphic skull in the dazzling double portrait of The Ambassadors at the National Gallery as merely a typical medieval image. Do the two men have it there, conveniently compressed, so as to make a tactful gesture to convention and the deity? Lots of piety is not much more than an insurance policy. It happens that at least one of the Ambassadors seems to have been deeply religious and in any case the skulls and its inimation of moratlity is given a central role in the drama of the painting.

Surely the anamorphosis has been precsiecly designed to say that life is lived with death as a major factor whose reality we suppress, but which is occasionally and usefully glimpsed in its real perspective? Nor is remembrance of mortality necessarily morbid, especially for the religious. Susan Foister, one of the curators of the show, point out: "the skull is there to remind one of mortality, but the cross is there, too, and it is best seen from the same position that restores the skull to normality.

So beyond mortality, there is eternity". The Ambassadors, with their exquisite scientific and astronomical instruments alongside the Cross, are spiritually humanist but religious, and their understanding of the world is similarly on the cusp between the classical and the modern.

At the Royal College of Art, The Quick and the Dead show seems at first, flinching, glance to be mostly about a post-religious Renaissance and modern curiosity about the aesthetics and mechanics of the human body as a strictly biological entity. These flayed bodies "ecorche" are not painted as martyrs but specimens. There's a moral point here, of course: namely, contemplating the flesh one is and the meat one will become holds a fascination which is instructive spiritually as well as medically.

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And it's worth noting that scientificity does not by itself dent piety. More to our point: the dissecting table was often protrayed, as were the victims of dissection, in a Vanitas context. In this show, Agostino Veneziano's Allegory of Death and Fame , a danse macabre depicting late arrivals at the pathologist's ball, makes the point. And showing that the point was felt across the centuries, there is Hogarth's "Reward for Cruelty", a mid Eighteenth century account of a dissection which draws on the fact that criminals paid their debt to society on the dissection table.

Their entrails become food for passing dogs, a recurring theme.

All Souls: A day for hope and grief – Catholic World Report

The tradition remains intact in the nineteenth century. G F Watts has a classical funeral bier, with a shrouded figure and the cast-off armour and glitter of a busy worldly life, in his "Sic Transit By now the vanities of the world can be seen in a socialist light, but the message written on to the painting "What I spent, I had; What I saved, I lost; What I gave, I have" is borrowed from a Fifteenth century tomb and speaks to the Victorian idealist's hunt for medieval spirituality.

The Symbolist show reminds us that however hard we devote ourselves to sex and shopping, sex and death haunt us really. Sir Joseph Noel Paton's erotic sprite in "The pursuit of pleasure: A vision of human life" in the Victorian Fairy Painting at the Royal Academy, gives us further clear evidence that the Nineteenth century was as interested as ever in the wages of sin and, more troubling still, the vanity of human aspirations this side of the veil.

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But it even more clearly shows a people about to name the subconscious, and begin the continuing process of hanging as much blame on it as possible. The fairy paintings, many of them lovely, are arguably about allegory taken to the point of evasion. The Sensation show next door is arguably about confrontation taken to the point of risibility.

It's not that the modern young painters aren't looking at the same subjects as all the other shows in London. The Quick and the Dead show, indeed, shows work both old and new which would fit perfectly well in Saatchi's collection. Amongst all the gore in Kensington, there is for instance, an Eighteenth century "Anatomical Virgin and Child", with both figures ripped open to display their insides, which bear irrestistable comparison with Jake and Dinos Chapman's Great Deeds Against the Dead.

Memory and death 4 Top Accidents and installations. Featuring Cornelia Parker and John Stathatos. The world and his wife turned out on a balmy evening last week to toast the opening of Cornelia Parker's show at the Serpentine Gallery. Here was a white wall with a suit with holes in it: "Suit Shot by Pearl necklace" Here, a couple of stumps: "Sculpture Made By Elephants" Here - in a sort of orangery, or conservatory - masses of silver objects crushed, in fact, by a steam roller were hung from wires "Thirty Pieces of Silver" They hung a foot or so above the floor, and were arranged, roughly, in circles: it was Busby Berkely wrought in table-settings.

Granted the unease one feels about much of the "Sensation Generation", or even the Serpentine's previous show, devoted to Piero Manzoni, Cornelia Parker's installations certainly do not seem designed to frighten the horses just for the fun of seeing the bourgeoisie in a state of shock. In fact, they are quite charming even though they come with attitude. They make edgy jokes. There is indeed some point to staring at a collection of objects rolled Times, deck of cards, etc which have it in common that they were incised by the guillotine blade which lopped Marie Antonoinette's head off.

It made a sort of jump-cut: the poor lady's neck was the unseen guest in the case. But it is much harder to see why one should look at materials which were at some point the backs of paintings by J M W Turner. One stands reverentially in front of them for a while and then one says, "Well, hang on.