Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Art of Suicide - Ron Brown
The Art of Suicide - Ron Brown
The Art of Suicide - Ron Brown
"
rr c+tar o nr s +oav
Series Editors
Peter Burke, Sander L. Gilman, Ludmilla Jordanova,
Roy Porter, Bob Scribner (+j8)
In the same series
Health and Illness
Images of Difference
s+nra r. or r+
Men in Black
J on n+avrv
Dismembering the Male
Mens Bodies, Britain and the Great War
J o++ uotakr
Eyes of Love
The Gaze in English and French Painting
and Novels .S,c.,cc
s+rrnr kra
The Destruction of Art
Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French
Revolution
n+ar o o+uor
The Feminine Ideal
+ar +r +nrs+nra
Maps and Politics
J rarv ur+ck
Trading Territories
Mapping the Early Modern World
J raav uao++o
Picturing Empire
Photography and the Visualization of the
British Empire
J+rs av+
Pictures and Visuality in Early
Modern China
ca+r o crt+s
Mirror in Parchment
The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of
Medieval England
r cn+rr c+r rrr
Landscape and Englishness
n+vr n ++rrss
The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel
Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in
Medieval and Renaissance Europe
r +cnrrr u. rau+ck
Down with the Crown
British Anti-monarchism and Debates about
Royalty since .,,c
++ov ++vroa
The Jewish Self-Image
American and British Perspectives
.SS..,,
r cn+rr urakowr +z
Global Interests
Renaissance Art between East and West
rr s+ J+anr r +n J raav uao++o
Picturing Tropical Nature
+cv rrvs s+rr+
Representing the Republic
Mapping the United States .6cc.,cc
J on arr r snoa+
Bodies Politic
Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain,
.6,c.,cc
aov roa+ra
Eyewitnessing
The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence
rr+ra utakr
The Art of Suicide
Ron M. Brown
ar+k+r o uooks
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
y Farringdon Road, London rc+ Jt, tk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published :oo+
Copyright Ron Brown :oo+
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publishers.
Series design by Humphrey Stone
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd,
Guildford and Kings Lynn
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Brown, Ron
The art of suicide. (Picturing history)
+. Suicide in art. :. Art History
I. Title
yo. '::8
rsu + 8+8 +oj
Title page: John Flaxman, Chatterton taking the Bowl of Poison
from the Spirit of Despair, c. +y8o, pen and ink and wash.
British Museum, London.
Contents
Introduction y
+ Representing Voluntary Death in Classical Antiquity :+
: Self-killing from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance
Conict and Change in Early Modern Europe 88
An English Dance of Death? +:
j Preserving Life and Punishing Death +
The Century of Destruction +
Postscript :+j
References ::
Select Bibliography :o
Acknowledgements :
Photographic Acknowledgements :j
Index :y
Introduction
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
wr rrr + sn+krsrr+ar, Hamlet III.i.j
Here, in one evocative piece of writing, are called up many of the
issues which cluster around the notion of suicide. Hamlets question
goes to the very heart of the matter: is there a moment when life, the
most precious of human possessions, becomes a burden which is too
heavy to bear? And, in that moment, does one have the right to make
ones own quietus? What stays the hand: fear of pain, of oblivion, of
an unknown afterlife, of eternal damnation? And what drives the
bodkin home: courage, despair or madness?
Shakespeare lends his protagonist a religious sensibility: for
Hamlet, suicide is a moral issue, validating the position arrived at by
the Christian Church by the end of the sixteenth century. The
complexity of his argument, however, has more to do with the long
history of self-slaughter, ranging as it does between the binary poles
of suicide as heroic and suicide as sinful, and of humankind as a ratio-
nal subject endowed with ultimate free will even unto death, or as a
prisoner caught in a web, woven equally of doubt and prohibition,
from which only madness can offer release.
The plays two central deaths bring the oppositions together:
Hamlet, by choosing confrontation, seeks out an end which is volun-
tary, without being self-inicted; thus, he avoids the stigma of self-
slaughter and, in true heroic fashion, ights of angels are invoked to
bear him in triumph to the rest he has craved throughout. Ophelia, his
female counterpart, validates the persistent inscription of sensibility
on the body of woman: her self-chosen death stems from loss, frailty
and the disintegration of reason, which demeans the act and dimin-
ishes her from the tragic to the pathetic.
The effective tension which surrounds the issue of self-murder in
Hamlet echoes a conict that has existed since antiquity. The status of
y
suicide has always been open to question. The historian of suicide can
discern little consensus in any of the issues which emerge in the
course of its long history: rather, the range of social, political and
cultural responses with which it has been greeted has reected, with
uncanny accuracy, the shifting patterns of human thought over more
than two millennia. Its representations: tragic, epic, heroic, pathetic,
judgemental, moral, didactic, comic and satiric, paint a picture of a
European culture grappling with the almost impossible task of under-
standing and coming to terms with this strangest and most persistent
of phenomena.
The imaging of suicide can be found across a wide geography, but
the parameters of the following investigation embrace a Western and
specically European cultural ambience. That my title contains a pun
and an anachronism reects on the one hand a wicked sense of
humour and a particular view of arts history, and on the other, a
central and tormenting linguistic problem. Both will eventually
become clear to the careful reader. My title also brings together two
terms which require care, both dynamic, both abstract. How they
relate to each other is a delicate question. The simple answer is that
this is a story about suicide-as-represented. It is about human death as
read through the myriad meanings given to self-slaughter. As an
answer, I realize it is also artful, as it avoids crucial questions about the
writing contained within. Sufce to say, for the time being, that given
the inestimable number of contexts for the art of suicidal death, one
must be highly dubious of any claims to universality.
The object of this book is thus to investigate how the act and the
agents of suicidal death have been described, interpreted and
constructed in images from antiquity to the close of the twentieth
century. The eld of investigation embraces sculpture, painting, illu-
mination, print, book and newspaper illustration, cartoons, and
ceramics from antiquity. I have yet to come across a suicidal image on
stained glass. In order to complete and close the narrative frame, I
have included examples from mechanical reproduction, though I have
not concerned myself with photography or television on the whole.
Factual or lmic images of suicides in the age of mechanical repro-
duction merit a separate study.
In the course of this history I shall also examine how, from Plato
and Socrates onwards, and in pursuit of its time-honoured concern
for questions of life and death, philosophy has mediated suicides
meanings in parallel with this creative process. As recently as +o the
psychiatrist Marguerite von Andics claimed that the history of
suicide is part of the philosophical tradition of the meaning of life.
8
Yet suicide also has a history of its own.
In order to chronicle how the act and agents of suicide have been
conceived in art, I have recognized the importance of the philosophi-
cal tradition in ascribing meaning, but the current study has put many
preconceptions aside, and has quite different objectives to theorizing
the meaning of life. Moreover, it is concerned with the historical
production and relations of meanings of suicide as they interrelate
with gender and nation, and with the dynamics of power between
words and images in high art and popular culture, as they articulate
meanings of suicide in an arc which stretches from the epic and the
tragic to the satirical and comic. The long historical span aims to
examine suicides mobility in order to hold onto the visual traces as
they connect and collide with philosophies both intellectual and
esoteric, or as they confront meaning in the abstract.
In this context, I would contend that the coexistence of the differ-
ing sign systems of art history and philosophy, and the divergent but
interrelated roles they play in making sense of suicide, provide valu-
able clues to an understanding of the underlying grammar of suicide
as it is reconstituted over time. I have chosen to ask the question of
how suicide and the suicide is imagined in visual terms. Intertwined
with this is the question of how art history and philosophy have func-
tioned together over many centuries to produce, articulate and project
notions of why people choose to take their own lives.
While the history of philosophy is well documented, and has
allowed me to discern major shifts in suicidal discourse, the objects
and images from visual culture that form the central focus of this
particular area of art history are less familiar and more difcult to
trace. In this respect I have been considerably helped in my task by
Fred Cutters Art and the Wish to Die which provides a ready cata-
logue of +8o images. His research has unearthed a vast amount of
representations of suicide, though some are concerned with self-
injury and death-by-instalments through drink or drugs rather than
self-killing per se. There is a further issue of his association of suicide
with self-destructive behaviour. I am convinced that it does not help
to knit them so closely together. My focus is on suicide alone.
The main problem with Cutters work is a fundamental art histori-
cal one. To examine images with a view to revealing how cultural atti-
tudes towards suicide are reected in art, denies the images a creative
role. My work will thus move away from seeing images as reective
and examine visual works as refractive, or perhaps extend this useful
metaphor from physics further to see these images as splitting and
diffusing meaning. Though Cutters work is a groundbreaking piece
These
divisions offer a manageable framework for analysis
Self-killing (autoktonos) implied a violent death, but not necessarily
a crime; earlier Greek expressions also connote a dying rather than a
::
killing or a murder. To die voluntarily (hekousios apotheisko), or to
grasp death (lambano thanaton), implied not just a sophistication in
terms of method (the hemlock), but also a method that indicated a
passive form of suicide.
+o
The notion of a self-murderer (auto-
phoneutes) which arose in the later classical period signied an
offence,
++
and though hanging was considered a bad death, the viola-
tion in this case had more to do with motive than method. It must be
borne in mind that the syntax and meanings of voluntary death in this
period were linguistically complex, and an expression such as auto-
phoneutes could also mean one who instigates the suicide of another,
someone who authorizes someone elses death, even though that
death might subsequently be by their own hand.
+:
The indications
are, then, that at the very beginning of the recorded history of the act,
active and passive suicides were linguistically differentiated. All these
terms were effectively to be replaced by one: suicide. The attendant
problems of the history of suicide are to some extent linguistic, and
for the actual analysis of those who take their lives, the capacious
vocabulary of antiquity may be more propitious.
The dominant linguistic expressions of antiquity implied a mode
of dying, in preference to a mode of killing, the notion of self-murder
arose much later. It is generally believed that suicidium is a Latinism,
constructed in the seventeenth century +n from Latin sui (of oneself)
and cidium (from caedere to kill). Yet its earliest traces can be found in
the use of the word suicida in monastic writing in the twelfth
century.
+
From the early part of the seventeenth century, the legal
and popular use of the term marks a period of severity towards self-
killers which does not seem to have had the same prevalence in Greek
or Roman culture.
Close examination of its linguistic development reveals that the
concept of suicide has been represented as a product of Augustinian
severity; this in turn suggests that suicide is signicatory of such, and
therefore replete with meaning in itself. However, the historical thesis
that Augustine of Hippos Neoplatonism alone could have reversed
the perspectives of antiquity is highly dubious.
+
From the Early Christian era (c. uc) to the beginning of the
fteenth century, a Christian millennium, suicide was, among other
designations, seen as a product of diabolical despair which, together
with presumption, was proscribed by the Church as one of the two
sins against the Holy Ghost. For the Christian believer, then, self-
murder was already invested with a religious signicance; but
MacDonald and Murphy advance the proposition that beyond this
period, the sixteenth-century revolution in government and religion
:
in England had a further, and very signicant, impact on attitudes.
They argue that as a consequence of this upheaval both crown and
church derived prot from self-murder.
+j
By emphasizing the sinful
nature of suicide, the new Protestant Church was able to attract
followers through the offer of salvation, while the monarch acquired
material benets from the forfeiture of the suicides goods. Suicides
link with the supernatural was thus established for Christian congre-
gations, and the state, which could acquire riches through the process
of forfeiture, was well aware of its social and legal implications. It was
into this climate of repression that the legal term suicide was born.
Therefore, by the early modern period in England, perceptions of
the deed and its consequences were both clear and generally under-
stood. As a consequence, its representation, as we shall see, was
largely unambiguous. When, however, one turns to the period of
antiquity, the picture is more opaque. What then did representations
of suicide mean for antiquity?
In the rst place, the frequent references in literature and extensive
dictionary entries on suicide suggest that there was no formal exclu-
sion of the subject. Indeed, as others have noted, towards the end of
the period of Greek and Roman domination the degree of literary
reference and the actual occurrence of suicide increased.
+
However,
although there are numerous verbal references, particularly in the
writing of the Stoics, visual reference is muted.
+y
Suicidal imagery in antiquity was limited. Only with the insertion
of suicide into a religious discourse did images begin to proliferate.
This lack of images in antiquity must be considered as having a deter-
mining role in generating meanings of suicide since, if suicide is seen
as being shaped through publication, then due acknowledgement must
also be paid to absence. Images may well have been lost or destroyed,
but the infrequency of the depiction of self-killing in pre-Christian
and pagan society may imply that the visual representation of suicide
was actually taboo. Although on the face of it, images of self-killing
appear to have been prohibited during this period, production clearly
did occur; and there are still enough discursive traces for the historian
to begin to analyse their typology and circulation.
Van Hooff cites Philostratos appreciative references in Eikones to
paintings of self-killing near Naples, images which are now lost, or
which may never have existed in the rst place.
+8
The collection
described by Philostratos included the heroic death of Menoikeus,
who threw himself on his sword in order to save Thebes, and two
others representing mythical women, Euadne and Laodameia, who
both chose death by re. Philostratos text also signies that, from the
:
very beginning of its recorded history, the visualization of suicide for
women and for men was given differing ascriptions.
For men, suicide signied a more active death. I would go further
and hypothesize that in the period of antiquity the graphic treatment
of certain aspects of these constructions was culturally proscribed,
and that clever articulations of nation and gender were written in to
them. Philostratos, for instance, inscribes Euadnes death on the
funeral pyre with a heroic and gendered meaning. Preferring as she
did the pyre to the rope, Euadne earned the writers commendation,
since she did not hang herself as other women did in response to
loss. Philostratos also reports an image of the death of Pantheia,
whose suicide was attributed to her feelings of responsibility for the
death of her husband, and a panorama of a rocky coast where a boy
and girl, united in a suicide pact, ew into the sea in a rst and last
embrace.
+
Motivated variously by love for ones country, for ones
husband, or love unrealized, these images of death were highly valued
by Philostratos. It is not clear at this point if the method and the
motive were consciously interconnected, though for Philostratos
hanging clearly had feminine connotations. Thus, it appears that even
before the emblematic suicide of Judas, hanging was regarded as a
bad, faint-hearted, or feminine death. From the beginning of
suicides representation, however, there is some evidence of a struc-
tural disagreement between good and bad deaths that depended on
motive and method; and throughout the long history this disagree-
ment is constantly in ux.
Chronologically, suicides depiction begins with the death of Ajax
and my reading of these early images begins with a small seal record-
ing the death of Ajax (illus. ). This, the earliest image of suicide
uncovered, appears to designate suicide as gladiatorial, and thus the
history of the depiction of suicide begins with a death which is both
male and heroic. Although the sword, which is the rst method to be
represented as employed in self-killing, may be read as a symbol of
death, extermination and also of psychic decision, any analysis of
suicidal method would need to acknowledge that the perpetrator
probably used whatever was immediately to hand. Further, any study
of suicide is bedevilled by the fact that, from its inception, suicidal
discourse is enmeshed with mythology. People are born and people
die. In-between is what ction and history call life, and life itself is
continually ctionalized. To interrupt or snare the ction creates
further myths. With suicide, the unarticulated chain of concepts by
which it is understood changes from decade to decade, death to death.
However, it is possible to make some general statements.
:j
In his +oy work The Ajax of Sophocles A. C. Pearson testies to the
fact that Ajaxs story has its own history and development. Two
versions exist of Ajaxs suicide, one by Pindar in which Troys most
famous hero commits his self-killing as a result of dishonour, and
Sophocles more detailed version, where Ajax son of Telamon, insane
with vexation when the armour of Achilles won from Hector was
awarded to his companion Ulysses, falls on his own sword. In Pindars
version of the story Ajax immediately kills himself. In Sophocles tale
he is driven mad and slaughters a ock of sheep which he takes for the
Greeks.
:o
Only on regaining his senses and realizing his actions does
he kill himself.
The initial image of Ajax (illus. ), on a small seal about two
centimetres across and dated c. yoo uc, contains few narrative details.
It simply shows the aftermath of the killing, and gives no clue as to
which story it might belong. The seal shows Ajax impaled on his
sword. How do we know it is Ajax? Other images conrm his identity
by offering the reader the same pose, and tell the Homeric story by the
inclusion of Ulysses and Diomedes standing over the body of the
dying hero. The total number of images is small, but together they
portray a recognizable typology of Ajaxs death. He is represented
either as impaled by his sword or kneeling over it with the blade facing
up and the handle buried in the ground (illus. , j). Encoded in the
images is the story through a representation of its ending or a repre-
sentation of intention. In several of the images of Ajax, his madness
and instability are denoted in the images by his falling, unstable body.
:
The Death of Ajax,
seal from Corinth,
c. yoo BC. Muse du
Louvre, Paris.
Ajax Preparing for His Death, painting on a black-gure krater attributed to Exekias,
c. jo BC. Muse des Beaux-Arts et dArchologie, Boulogne.
j Ajax Impaled by His Sword, painting on a black-gure krater from Corinth, c. oo BC.
Muse du Louvre, Paris.
The seal shows the naked body of Ajax falling on his sword. His
physical imbalance is caught by the raised toes and muscular tension
of the calf muscles, the front of the thighs and the curved back
circling the outside of the seal. The sprawled outstretched hands
reach down almost as far on the opposite radial of the seal to his toes
and complete the tension. The sword is piercing his middle. A scene
attributed to Exekias and painted on a krater (c. jo uc) shows what
appears to be a more composed and deliberate suicide (illus. ). Ajax
is on his haunches planting the sword in a small mound in the ground.
A palm tree traces the curve of Ajaxs spinal cord to give emphasis to
his brokenness and his defeat. His body is depicted as cumbersome,
supported as it is by two tiny feet. The sheer weight of body ratio to
feet indicates that Ajax will fall on the sword. It may be that mental
instability is shown by bodily physical proportion. In this tiny relief,
the commensurability of body parts which give rise to ideal beauty
and its theorizing in the canon of Polyclitus are relevant only in that
the constituent parts of the body do not match. The imbalance
appears to serve two purposes: one, he will fall, two, he is physically
and perhaps mentally unstable.
To the right of Ajax and looking down is what appears at rst to be
a helmeted gure holding a shield. Closer examination shows a helmet
and a shield only. This probably represents the armour of Hector, or is
a representation of Ulysses who won the armour. It is a strange motif,
suggesting a human presence where none exists. Further clues are
provided on the shield. In the centre is depicted the stark white head
of Medusa, the Gorgon. The shield and helmet might be a reference
to Perseus and his victory over the Gorgon, or to the shield of
Achilles, a symbol of mans attempts to overcome death and the
futility of such efforts.
:+
Originally the Gorgons head portrayed on
shields served to frighten off the enemy or to ward off evil spirits.
Since Freud, the Gorgon has signied castration.
::
In this latter
sense Ajax is emasculated. If we wished to extend that reading,
woman is the cause of a particular masculine death. To the modern
reader, Ajaxs petrifaction is connoted, as is his inability to intervene
in destiny.
A Corinthian black-gure krater (c. oo uc) (illus. j) depicts Ajaxs
suicide at the moment of its discovery by his friends Odysseus
(Ulysses) and Diomedes and shows the body pierced by his sword. An
identical image, carved on the metope from the temple of Hera, is now
in the museum at Paestum.
:
The crucial difference between this
image and the representations we will consider is that while they
depict either the moments immediately preceding death or the
:8
moment itself, this one shows Ajaxs corpse.
The unclad body is supported by hands, elbows and knees. The
blade of the sword is embedded in the ground. Ajax is impaled with
the handle appearing at the base of the spine. It is likely that the male
gure on the right in front of his shield is Ulysses, the winner of the
shield. Ulysses offers a gesture of dismay, expressed by a hand placed
on the nape of his neck. The expression is meaningful, for it signals
both despair and disbelief. Here, then, despair is not conned to the
suicide, but is also keenly felt by those left behind: the interlinking of
despair and dismay is a central theme in suicides history. In this case,
the shield and helmet shown must be those taken from Hector.
Diomedes is stooping over the gure covered by his shield, and the tip
of his spear forms an arch with the tip of Ulysses helmet to position
the fallen Ajax in the centre of the triangle.
A gem from Etruria shows Ajax falling on his sword (illus. ) and a
bronze from Populonia depicts him holding his sword with his right
hand. His body leans at j degrees, his right leg is bent at the knee
and his head turned away while his left arm is thrown out in despair
(illus. :). Ajaxs insanity is evident.
So what, in fact, do these earliest images tell us about voluntary
death in the period? It is probably too simplistic to make the connec-
tion between the temporary insanity induced by a female goddess,
Athena, and a gendered position, but the myth of woman and
:
Ajax Falling on His Sword, carved sard gem from Etruria, rst quarter of jth century BC.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
induced insanity has resonances elsewhere in literature and art that
will be explored below. Be that as it may, death itself had a feminine
aspect in Greek mythology where it was imagined that death was the
sister of sleep or the daughter of the night. In truth, however, the
story of Ajax is one of a guilt-ridden hero outclassed by his father.
The story also illustrates and confounds the complex nature of
suicides motives, as it combines all three of Durkheims motivational
categories, anomic, altruistic and egoistic.
On the obverse of the krater there is a painting of Iole and Herak-
les. The image of the latter is revealing, since in myth he was the most
popular of heroes. Herakles was the man who always chose the most
difcult but correct path.
:
In myth Herakles overcame obstacle after
obstacle leading towards the realization of self. Nonetheless Herakles
destroyed self too, though the suicidal elements of his death by self-
burning are not as obvious as Ajaxs suicide. In some respects the
heros survival is ensured by the lack of imagery of his death (illus. y).
The single image referred to above shows the bearded Herakles in
several states leading to his apotheosis. The image serializes the story
of Herakles, beginning around the base with a running gure, a gure
in action with a club, then a torso on a burning pyre and, nally, his
transportation to the seat of the gods in heaven.
Standing over Herakles pyre is the goddess Athena who guides
him upwards while a further divinity (Jupiter) escorts an unbearded
Herakles, still with his symbolic club, to heaven in a chariot. This is a
very different representation from the images of Ajax. The scene is
not a simple voluntary death but a translation. Herakles life is to
continue in heaven where Juno is to give him the hand of her daughter
Hebe in marriage. His is a removal that has been engineered by the
gods, and is connoted by his gure rising from the base up the right
side of the vase and across the top. Herakles is guided on this journey
by a divine cortege. If the depictions of Ajax show a death, or a mode
of dying that displays a psychodynamic understanding of suicidal
death, Herakles story shows a comprehension of the very nature of
suicidal thought and the illogicality of the split in the suicides orien-
tation. The suicides belief in immortality is signied. In the myth it
is his mothers share that perishes, and then Jupiter takes him up in
cloud.
:j
The earthly body dies but the myth of Herakles lives on.
This idiosyncratic image is not an image of a suicide at all. It is an
example of exagoge. The self-murderers in this case were the gods
themselves who ordered this son of Zeus to kill himself . The
absence of imagery of Socrates suicide might imply a similar depar-
ture. The pictorial unfolding of the story thus signies a continuation
o
of life. Herakles transmutation by re and cloud is clearly serialized
on this fascinating vase.
The generality of images remaining from antiquity show, for both
women and men, the body portrayed intact, and what is chiey shown
is intent, rather than the deed itself. In antiquity, where death was
seen as a separation of body and soul, the image transcends death. In
such a culture the mutilated body was not depicted. This is contra-
dicted somewhat by those artists of antiquity whose artistic devices
operated carefully to show that Ajax was, in fact, impaled on his
sword, though no wound or blood is apparent.
As reported by Philostratos, Euadne was seen to be descending to
the pyre, but not actually in the ames. In a drawing by Reinach,
derived from earlier sources, Fedra is pictured holding the rope, but
not hanging, and in a scene from the Aiolas of Euripides on a vase by
the Amykos Painter (c. +o uc), Canace is shown draped across a sofa,
clutching a short sword. Her brother, the father of her child, is shown
to the left, his hands bound behind him (illus. 8). In the depiction of
Herakles (illus. y), however, his torso is seen in the ames, although,
+
y The Apotheosis of
Herakles, red-gure pelice
found at Vulci and attributed
to Cadmos, c. jo BC. Museum
Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich.
as the same image also depicts his ascent to heaven, this witnesses the
redundancy of his earthly body.
It is feasible to assume that in the ancient world the cultivation of
self, and the objectication of oneself as a eld of action, would limit
the depiction of self-killing to sanitized images. The history of
suicides representations shows that the discrete notions of self-
killing, dying and self-murder are deployed in very different ways. In
a way it is the nature of this deployment that helped in the construc-
tion of a system of good and bad deaths. Ironically, one of the
earliest images of a suicidal death was that of Socrates, whose own
teaching helped give rise to the cultivation of self.
:
Ordered to take
his own life, Socrates was the victim of a self-murderer, but his trial
and condemnation to death meant his self-murder was ordered by
the State.
:y
Hitherto, in order to kill her/his self , the suicide had to see
her/himself as object, which to some extent contradicts the world
view of the societies with which we are dealing. The notion of self is
a modern one and alien to these cultures. This too may explain the
limited number of representations in antiquity. In addition, certain
superstructural differences existed in the artistic ideologies of ancient
Rome and Greece. In the latter, art was predominantly ofcial, in the
former it was not; thus in Greek art the public imagery of suicide
would require the support of governmental patronage while in Rome
such patronage was private. My survey indicates that in neither case
:
8 The Suicide of Canace, scene from Euripides Aiolas painted on a red-gure hydria by the
Amykos Painter, c. +o BC. Museo Provinciale, Bari.
was the public imagery of suicide at all common.
In fact, Socrates death had become mythologized by the time its
rst extant image, a carved relief, was crafted, over two hundred years
after Socrates entry into the world of ideal presences of which
earthly reality is a mere shadow.
:8
The chronological gap between
the event and its rst surviving image indicates a silence, a suppres-
sion in the visual eld of this obligatory death. Evidently it was not
easy, or perhaps not even possible, for visual representations of
Socrates death to be produced until the underpinning ideology of
the Hellenistic era had eroded away. By then, the rational values of
Socrates thought were being displaced by the emergent Christian
ideology, and ironically, the growth of values inimical to suicide.
Historically there is an overlap of pagan and Early Christian
philosophy, and it is clear that the agreements and disagreements
between the cultures are complex in that in both Graeco-Roman and
Judaeo-Christian cultural life was perceived as being given meaning
by death. This was especially true of Christianity, whose foundations
were laid by those martyrs who died voluntarily for their faith.
:
However, before this era of interface, public works depicting
voluntary death were commissioned; but in both Greek and Roman
culture, public imagery tends to fall into the category of what
Durkheim and Halbwachs termed suicides obsidionaux: an enemy
about to kill himself rather than suffer capture.
o
The reading will
show these categories to be simplistic and incomplete. Two important
examples of such images have come to light: rst, a statue which has
been identied by Visconti as a Gaul slaying himself and his wife, and
second, the death of Decebulus on Trajans column and on an earth-
enware cup from Southern Gaul.
Presumed to have been carved in the original by Epigonus, the
anonymous Gaul belongs to the Hellenistic period, and is deemed by
Visconti to have been a central feature of a monument erected by
Attalos the First to celebrate his victory over the Gauls at Pergamon
(c. :o uc), though only a Roman copy remains in the Palazzo Altemps
in Rome (illus. ).
+
The site of the original statue has not been deter-
mined. Art-historical reconstructions of the monument show a dying
gladiator, a dying trumpeter and three other gures around the Gaul
(illus. +o). The defeated gladiator supports his sinking body on one
hand, one leg is outstretched, his shield is discarded to his left and his
head hangs down. Round his neck is a rope. Winckelmanns claim that
the rope around the neck was a strategy used by heralds to prevent
burst blood vessels may be relevant, but it is a curious attribute in this
case. The Ludovisi Gaul, as it is often referred to, depicts a man who
A Gaul Slaying Himself and His Wife, Roman copy after a Greek original of the
Pergamon school, c. :o BC, marble. Palazzo Altemps, Rome.
+o The Victory Monument of Attalos, rd century BC, reconstruction by
Arnold Schober.
BArII\EYIATTAl\oL: N r1< HL:Al:MAXHlToA!Ho
has slain his wife and who is holding onto her with his left hand. The
intensity of her death is emphasized by the fact it is perpetrated by
her husband rather than by herself. Having made sure of her death,
he has plunged his sword into his own heart with his right hand. That
blood is bursting from the wound clearly contradicts the notion that
there was a risk that the formal and moral perfection expected in
works of art in classical antiquity would be contravened by the depic-
tion of a mutilated body.
While it may be debatable whether or not the statue actually repre-
sents a Gaul, the varying interpretations of the work which have been
advanced themselves indicate not just the dextrous attempts of the
connoisseur to assess the statues style and subject matter, but also the
equivocal nature of responses to suicide. Haskell and Pennys Taste
and the Antique lists a variety of such explanations. Named and
renamed in different inventories from +: it took three titles
between + and +yo, a fourth by +8, and a fth in +yo. The
image in Haskell and Pennys text carries the title Paetus and Arria;
:
thus they give credence to Seignelays reading of the statue as the
representation of the death of Paetus and his wife Arria (+yo). Paetus
was sentenced to death for treason by Nero in +n j. Other titles
include Fulvius and his Wife (+), Gaul and his Wife (+yo),
Macareus and Canace (+8), Pyramus and Thisbe (+8) and Sextus
Marius (+).
I would suggest that there is a further level of meaning in the work.
The Gauls wife is sinking slowly in passive defeat. This is signied
by the limp arm of the dead or dying woman still held by the man. In
contrast, even though he is mortally wounded, the Gaul himself is
animated, looking over his shoulder in fearful expectation. The pitch
and intensity of his attempt to kill himself is clear. To the modern
reader, it is a gesture of deance as much as of defeat, an indictment
of his enemy as well as an escape from him. On the one hand it is an
acceptance of death, on the other a denial; an apt sign of the dilemma
of the analysis of suicide. In this sense it foregrounds the ambiguous
nature of suicide. It is unlike the representations of the death of
Herakles in that it does not represent a Greek removed from life
(exagoge), but something more physical, more substantial. It may be
that the Gaul symbolizes his nation, is a personication of Gaul. In
any case, what we see is a violent portrayal of a man killing himself
and his wife where her death is not of her volition, though we might
assume it is by her consent.
That this statue is reckoned to be part of Attalos victory monu-
ment does not provide an entirely satisfactory explanation of its func-
j
tion. In the light of the humanistic philosophy which permeated
Hellenistic culture it has been suggested by Germaine Bazin that the
statue might have two functions. One, as a symbol of victory; two, as a
gesture of pity from the victor to the vanquished, who must suffer the
degradation of defeat.
The opinion is
that the physical attributes portrayed are not those generally repre-
sented of a Greek.
This would further support Viscontis argument that the statue
represents either a Gaul or a German who had died heroically on the
battleeld.
j
To represent the differences between this and other
contemporary works as stemming from a new realism, or as reecting
a new frankness of style, while at the same time describing the image
as unusual is to avoid a critical engagement with its meaning.
To
describe the sculpture as baroque is pointless.
y
There is no
sustained discussion in any of these works of the links between these
physical characteristics and the subject matter. In this respect it is
worth considering momentarily the medium of sculpture and its abil-
ity to capture reality.
In a discussion on sculptures power in respect of its verisimilitude
Richard Brilliant, in his book Portraiture, shows how sculpture lends
itself more readily to referentiality than does painting and, effected by
the autoicon, offers a more immediate, more convincing image of
something once-living.
8
In Brilliants thesis, sculpture replicates
reality and stands in for the original. The stark reality of the statue of
the Gaul may capture what appears to be a naturalistic body, but in
these early carved images of death their iconic nature is made prob-
lematic by the social aspect and its increasing arbitrariness.
provided valuable clues for a critical reading of the work. The sculp-
ture has a contradictory logic contained within it. The variety of
scholastic interpretations indicates the nature of these writings as a
supplement to the statue, which defer and produce their own mean-
ings of suicide in the sense Derrida describes.
o
The writing operates
only to replace the sculpture. What is radically different to other
images in antiquity is that this is an image of voluntary death that is
dened by the act where the agent connotes an enemy.
The Ludovisi Gaul is thus situated within language, and that
language not only denotes the complexity of suicidal imagery, but also
constructs otherness. It is a self-killing which does not reect the acad-
emic avour of its contemporaries, and it does not simply depict own-
handedness. The Gauls sidelong glance gives an indication of his
motive. Rather than fall into his enemys hands he kills his wife and
then himself. Inscribed in the statue there appears to be a shift in
representation from subject to object. The Gaul and his wife are objec-
tied; the death, though noble, is nevertheless a suicide. There is
confusion here between the act, the appraisal of that act and its desig-
nation: a problem with act and object. The depiction of blood also
emphasizes the Gauls mortality. Arguably, we are presented with both
a killing and a mode of dying. Also signicant is that this statue, one of
the most powerfully realistic expressions of suicidal death in antiquity,
represents neither a Greek nor a Roman. Acceptable as such a death
might have been in this period, it is nevertheless inscribed upon
another national body. In effect, it offers the beginning of an alphabet
for additional readings of visual representations of suicidal death.
A further important image, that of the Dacian king Decebulus, can
be found on Trajans Column in Rome (illus. ++). The relief, a symbol
of the violence of Roman society, was a tribute to Trajan and wound
around the column in the form of a strip. Illustrations show Decebu-
lus under a tree about to be seized by four Romans, three on horse-
back and one on foot. Decebulus is depicted as a defeated man
sprawled on the oor in the well-known icon of the dying gladiator,
later named Myrmillo. The Roman foot soldier to the right of Dece-
bulus has his sword ready, aimed at Decebulus head. Van Hooff s
work also cites the case of the death of Decebulus on an earthenware
cup, and conrms that the depiction of historical scenes is rare on
these objects. The cup (illus. +:), from Southern Gaul, depicts a
contorted gure reeling back from a leaping lion. His shield is behind
him and his sword turned towards his midriff. Between the leonine
symbol of Rome and the king is scrawled the name Decebulus. The
victim is thus named, and the image commandeered by the signa-
y
ture. The ideas of nation and manliness encapsulated in these works
of art indicate the power relations at work in suicidal representation.
The heroic nature of Decebulus suicide is questioned in the image:
according to the history books, the Roman soldier who took the head
of Decebulus to Rome was the true celebrity.
+
Alongside this, the much restored and much copied sculptural
image of the death of Seneca (illus. +), found on an estate between S.
Matteo and S. Guiliano in Rome, provides the reader with a further
unit for evaluating representations of suicidal death. Regarded by
Winckelmann in +yy as similar to images of slaves,
:
it has subse-
quently been described by Bieber, drawing on Visconti, as The Fisher-
man and by others as The Slave.
There is no doubt that the aged gure, the bath and the
blood lend weight to the theory that the sculpture relates the story of
Senecas death. Seneca, an old man, opened his veins; but his old age
8
++ Decebulus, detail of
Trajans Column, Rome,
c. ++j AD.
meant his blood ran very slowly. In order to hasten the process, he
stood in a bath of hot water.
In the image, the bath serves to dene the gure more closely as
Seneca, and in this respect it is an intriguing addition. That the gure
might not in fact represent Seneca, but simply an old man, was spot-
ted by the sceptical Scottish traveller Joseph Forsyth in +8o:.
j
The
tendency of the art historical connoisseur to nominalize, and in this
case to perpetuate the ambiguity that is suicide, is clearly an aspect of
the historiography of both Seneca and The Gaul.
Although several images of suicide survive from the Etruscan
period (yjo:oo uc), the range is small, and they are found mainly on
vases. If suicide was not readily apparent in public works it was more
so in household objects. In recent years the gendered identity of the
private domain (oikos) and the public domain (polis) has been the
source of several inuential studies.
and Pyramus was interpreted as the son of God who allowed his own
death. Later, in Renaissance texts, the heroic aspect was restored.
Metamorphoses also provided the literary source for the second
painting at Pompeii. In Ovids text, Narcissus sees his own reection
in a fountain and thinks it to be the nymph of the place. In another
version of the story he jumps in to the fountain trying to reach the
image and dies. It is generally accepted that he fell in love with his
reection and pined away. When the nymphs came for the body they
found only a ower in its place. Michael Grant also mentions a
painted image of Narcissus, contemporary to Ovids text, from
Hermopolis Magna in Egypt.
jo
In the earliest known example of a
short story, a tale from Egypt from the workshop of the scribe Anena,
there is a suicide. Probably written during the reign of Rameses II,
The Two Brothers: Anpu and Bata dates from c. +oo uc.
However, in effect, Narcissus dies twice. He rst becomes dead to
the real world, and then he fuses with nature. But can this double
death be categorized as suicide? His real death, the result of idle
dreams, goes through a series of translations, from a Neoplatonist
belief that the soul had found no satisfaction in the body of Narcissus
to a modern psychoanalytical diagnosis. Clearly each is socialized
within its historical context. In contrast to these depictions of men or
lovers, images of lone women in the period are few and far between.
Of single women only four images have been brought to notice: those
of Jokaste, Canace, Dido and Phaedra.
j+
What is unusual in suicidal discourse in the period of antiquity is
that voluntary death as a masculine death dominates the visual eld,
whereas in the literary canon women abound. There do not appear to
be many female images at all. Lucretias death (dated c. jo uc), is the
earliest entry in Griss table of frequency,
j:
but even she is not
portrayed in visual terms until much later. By the fourteenth century
:
+n she was exceedingly popular. Cleopatra (o uc), Sophonisba (third
century uc), Portia (c. : uc) and Elektra (who symbolizes the values of
the private domain) are found only in writing. Visual images of Dido, a
Phoenician, and the Greeks Jokaste and Phaedra are still existent.
Phaedra, or Fedra as she is named in this particular sketch by
Reinach from a ancient painting, is shown with a rope in her right
hand, her head hanging down to one side, and her left hand holding
her gown loosely across her lower body (illus. +j). The drawing, taken
from the Virgilius Vaticanus, is a copy of the primary image of a
woman hanging. Like Decebulus, the protagonist is labelled by her
name scrawled above her left shoulder: Fedra, a signature which
brings together hanging and a feminine death associated with incestu-
ous wrongdoing. The image is of a youthful woman, and though it
gives nothing away, her evil might well be signied in the method,
which in turn might reect on the motive. Hanging was taboo in
Hellenistic culture and even more so in Roman culture. The Romans
regarded it as crude and perdious, a death t only for wrongdoers
and women. A later Roman version of the play Phaedra by Seneca
heroicizes Phaedra by replacing the problematic rope with a gladiato-
rial sword.
j
his feet, reversing the biblical story, and allows the king the stage. In
the biblical story Saul dies rst. In +8, the Nuremberg Bible shows
Sauls killing and beheading. In the ultimate face-saver, an engraving
from the Drer Bible shows Abimelech dead at the feet of his
armour-bearer and excludes the woman. Much later, on a Delft tile,
Ahitophel is seen hanging in the background.
From the twelfth century Christian aesthetics thus incited the
viewer to follow in the ways of God, and the powerful notion of self-
sacrice that was carried in these images contradicted the heroic
aspect of voluntary death. It was however, the New Testament story
of Judas above all that attracted the patrons and painters.
In the New Testament one suicide is featured; that of Judas. The
very beginning of Christianitys story in the New Testament evolves
from the death of Jesus and the accompanying death of Judas. Judass
suicide is plainly reported in the biblical texts of Matthew (:y:j) and
Acts (+:+8) and lends itself to a simple visual representation. Matthew
ends with the story of the crucixion and Judass death. The rst
book after the gospels, Acts, begins with Judass suicide. In the visual
iconography of Christianitys story there is clearly a desire to separate
these two deaths and in the process of separation Judass death
becomes the death of a sinner, and gradually a suicide. How is this
done? Matthew tells the story as follows: And he cast down the pieces
of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.
In Acts, however, there is a difference: Now this man purchased a
eld with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asun-
der in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out. Acts does not actually
mention hanging unless we take the expression fall headlong to be a
euphemism for it. Both versions refer to Aceldama, The Field of
Blood (Matthew :y:8; Acts +:+).
Most illustrations (illus. :y) show Judas hanging, as in the
Matthew version, though one image has been identied, an eleventh-
century painting in the Vatican, where Judas is shown hanging and
disembowelled (illus. j). However, the subjects popularity in the
Middle Ages, especially with miniaturists, means a full survey has yet
to be done. The latter image reconciles the two accounts. Judass
disunity, multiplicity or duplicity is represented in this disembow-
elling. Judas is not caught between heaven and earth, as his bowels
return to the earth.
Where Augustinian philosophy does break from the biblical text is
to add to the original crime, that of betrayal, the further crime of self-
killing. Augustines City of God misrepresents the account in
Matthew by referring to the traitor Judas and, crucially, by seeing
IlOlilllDttOncmula
p!lhlplJlillllolli
p'.oplplllO.IAfJrI!I
.alDOlan.
6U1f
" )0"" ~ ....,,...., """ll<d', ;""''';''0 f..... ~ ~ 11,.,.".. /A. ... &-m
, " ."M.""e-Jr,o..,.,,;I1.
.. ~ . _ .. do. I_Cloopd..-. 'JO<
..., w ~ , , , ,U"",., n, 1),." .fr.,.<, ",.u, ,;,"" "'"" 'J """ Gel" M",."m,
~ -
'< T;..... 1>.. ..... ./1....." .... ' .;<>X-:"'.nJ ."o.,,.. .. _; Il ...M"""'''
3.1 " "" <>t. "" 'lo!>' '""'" . " , v..'..n"",..... " 'J, "', '''' ,_,.
H ) .... ' .....n "M;, D>J. .. ", 1'"" p.,.,. ';1" ..1." ""... '''' ''-,<0", I ~ .
. \ ~ . ~ " "'m
y
the death as a sin and not an atonement. Judas, according to Augustine,
was heaping up further sin by his hanging. Augustinian terminology is
of interest here, as he offers no term that indicates a deprecatory argu-
ment. Augustines work describes such a death as rushing towards
ones death (ad mortem festinatio), or voluntary destruction (interitus
voluntarias).
+y
Though the term destruction might carry pejorative
connotations, Judass hanging was seen as a sign of his criminal nature:
not a release; nor a determination by God, but a rebuttal of Gods
laws.
+8
In Augustines polemic, not to condemn this death was to limit
Gods power. The surviving images however, do not simply portray
the act of his death; suicide is a powerful sub-presence.
The extent to which Judass story became embedded in Christian
attitudes to self-killing was given further emphasis by the fact that by
the sixth century Augustinian philosophy became canonical law. In
particular, three church councils turned philosophy into law. In j
the Spanish Council of Orleans denied funeral rites to self-killers
accused of crime; in j the Council of Braga declared that any self-
killer must be denied funeral rites; and nally, in jy8, the Council of
Auxerre ensured the penalties were strengthened in relation to views
on suicide in Christian doctrine. In the Council of Toledo rein-
forced these laws. In Spain, at least, suicide was not deemed to be as
severe as murder and this was indicated by the severity of punishment
j Judas Hanged, ++th century,
manuscript illumination. Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana, Rome.
for the latter. Theology thus broke from its fundamental text, that is
to say the New Testament. Such a breaking occurred on many points
but a central feature of debate in this respect was Judass hanging.
Two signicant elements are brought together in images of Judas:
the rope as a tting end for the execution of a villain and the stigmati-
zation of suicide. His desperation is connoted and often his sin
prompted by the Devil. Though hanging was already signicatory of
despair, desperatio, the most blameworthy of motives, this is signied
in Judass death by other means such as the inclusion of a demon. The
visual evidence implies by the repetition of this one image of Judas
that his self-hanging was censured, and the depictions serve to act as a
sign of his personality.
The irreducibility of suicides meanings is evident in this case and
in spite of the variations and the differing appropriation of the Judas
theme, Judas himself remains recognized essentially by the rope. It is
far too reductive to associate the quantity of images of Judas with
Augustine severity, though the canonical acceptance of Augustinian
thought and the proliferation of images do appear to coincide. Augus-
tines Neoplatonism and his apparent loathing of the fourth and fth-
century Donatists and their wish to die meant that voluntary death
was given meanings that wove together vanity and cowardice with a
demonic death by people who gave place to the demon within them-
selves and whose daily sport was to kill themselves.
+
Yet for four
centuries after Augustine there were no real decisions made on volun-
tary death.
The presumed intensity of feeling towards voluntary death by
Christians cannot be explained by biblical references to suicide. To
question the orthodox belief that the period from the fourth century
uc to the fteenth century +n gave a negative image to self-injury
would be a pointless exercise, but that there was much in this period
that later bore fruit within the medieval period is obvious; so too is the
fact that the Judas image forms a prototype for self-killing as an evil
death, but, I would extend this argument to examine the establish-
ment of suicidal motive and method as intertwined. It is too simplistic
to argue that the biblical suicides were seen as the consequence of sin,
though, as an alternative, there is some mileage in the development of
suicidal law as part of a growth of antagonism to barbarian rule.
The books of the Bible may break from what is deemed a pagan
belief, but so too does the imaging, from its original tone and author-
ity to invoke other narratives. From the third to the seventh century,
the period of schism in Christianity, there is no evidence of suicidal
imagery and it was not until after +oj, when the breach became
y
permanent, that the regular imaging of suicide occurs. These images
reinforced canonical law from the twelfth century, when the notion of
punishment tting the crime of satanic martyrdom meant different
methods might invoke different punishment. The growth of images
of Satans martyrs thus coincides with the rise of religious and civil
condemnation of suicide.
The ivory casket panel with the earliest-known image of Judas
shows Christ on the right surrounded by two male gures and one
female (Mary), and on the left Judas hanging, as a reminder of his
treachery the bag of silver is spilled at his feet (illus. :o). Judass isola-
tion is enhanced by his being placed separately from the rest of the
group, whose heads are turned from him, leaving a visible space
between him and the disciples around Christ. The central space is
nearly empty, but the uncomfortable gure of Mary, mother of mercy,
stands frozen in the artful gap.
In keeping with the scriptures and prophecies, the image evokes a
sense of desolation.
:o
The presence on the same plane of the hanging
and the crucixion functions as a constant memorial of his motive, his
betrayal of Jesus, and of its result. For Jesus, the cross afrms his rela-
tionship with heaven and performs the role of a bridge to God. One
does not get the sense of a Marian myth at work here, rather she is
bound to the earth, separated from her son.
In death, images of Judas must illustrate his misdemeanour, his
treason towards Jesus. Both Jesus and Judas are shown between
heaven and earth. Jesus looks straight ahead, Judass head is broken
and twisted upwards. By placing him in company with his victim, and
adding the silver, his crime is evidenced and his punishment illus-
trated. The cross must point upwards and the rope must hang down.
The tree acts as a scaffold. The placing of the two events together in
this early image of a hanging is close to the written text in Acts and
establishes a format for many of the images of Judas, though the bulk
of them show him separate from Christ. Later, the format was also
used in the imaging of traitors deaths which were seen as a Judass
death. The conguration of dual personications allows the artist to
depict a simple binary opposition, separating the inferior from the
superior. Towards the end of the period in question, Judass motive
and his duality is shown in a fourteenth-century Italo-Hungarian illu-
mination
:+
where he is seen hanging from a black frame by what
appears to be part of his garment (illus. ). The frame cuts him off
from all around and amplies his desolation. He appears to be dead,
yet clutched in his hand is the bag containing his o pieces of silver.
To his right is a group of four gures, which at rst glance could be
yj
y
the chief priests and elders. The nearest to Judas holds an identical
bag and unlike the others looks sideways. The hair and the undergar-
ment are the same as Judass; and though the sidelong glance is turned
across the priests, the feet are carefully directed towards the hanging
gure. The hand holding the bag is a replica of the hand of the hang-
ing Judas. It can be assumed that both gures represent Judas. This
clever identikit picture places him in the frame.
These intelligent visual tricks of time appear to negate continuity.
The ivory casket panel of Judass death and Jesuss crucixion place
two events occurring at different times together in the same space:
though one a consequence of the other, they are woven synchronously
Judas Hanging, Italo-Hungarian manuscript illumination, c. +th century.
on the same plane. Yet the fourteenth-century manuscript places
Judas in two different time frames within one in order to show a
continuity, to tell the story, to depict one act as the trigger for the
other. Synchronicity, often designated as a property of modernism,
is employed in these cases to reect what was written, not to illumi-
nate what was seen. The conguration foregrounds Judass material-
ism and in this case the transaction forms the foundation of the story.
The image is not entirely what-is-written-to-be and breaks from the
former images in another way. In this sense it denies its own redun-
dancy by adding to the biblical story and giving meaning to suicide by
adding the motive and tying it with the method.
In the illumination, the inclusion of a small black demon above
Judass right shoulder is signicatory of the demonization of suicide
in the medieval period or of the satanic instigation of death: Judass
temptation by the devil and his eternal damnation. Satanic instigation
is not inferred in the early images, though a woodcut from the
fteenth century shows a winged demon pulling Judass soul, imaged
as a child, from his belly. In the medieval period these images mingle
old folk stories, lay religious superstition and clerical thought. With
print culture these horae were disseminated throughout Europe. The
actual historicization of demonic suicide comes later in the early
modern period when demons began to act as metaphors for other
anxieties than psychical or spiritual ones. By +yy William Gilpins
Daemonologia placed suicide amongst discourses on demons and
witches. Part of a dynamics of oppression, his text makes links with
witchcraft, and therefore interweaves conceptualizations of Woman
with demonic and suicidal discourse.
Judass imagery was thus subject to variations, rst schism, and
then later in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sectarian rivalry.
If the nature of the biblical texts reportage thwarted those who
sought in the bible a justication for the condemnation of self-killing,
they inevitably turned to the visual, and to the sixth of the ten
commandments. Thus the law of God was used to proclaim the fact
that Judas had taken the law into his own hands. He had, in changing
Christian belief, either committed murder on himself or usurped the
power of death which the Lord alone had the right to exercise.
Nowhere is patriarchal power more obvious than in the few images
of women from the period, and these occur mostly at the end of this
long history. In one of the series of paintings by Giotto in the Arena
Chapel in Padua, a personication of despair, Desperatio, the binary
of Hope, is represented as a hanged woman (illus. :8).
::
A later image,
of the impatient man throwing himself on his sword, can be found in
yy
y8
Comenius seventeenth century Latin dictionary. Published in
Nuremberg, the Orbis Sensualium Pictus
:
shows a woman with a lamb
praying on the right and in the middle ground the frenzied man
impaling himself on his sword. An exaggerated lightning bolt,
symbolizing the stormy outcome of his impatience, erupts from a
cloud above him (illus. y).
The personications of anger and despair by Giotto negate any
authority of likeness and deny the woman a nation and a name. This
removes any referential aspect to anyone in particular, but refers to
woman in general. Giottos Desperatio is an iconic image where
signier and signied are problematized and the nature of what is
signied (desperatio) appears to have a necessary relationship with the
signier (a woman hanging). Despair is also synonymous with suicide.
In this example the heroic death of the besieged (the no way out of
antiquity or Durkheims suicides obsidionaux) is replaced by a death
caused by desperation that offers no clues to motive or cause other
than hopelessness itself. It would be difcult to apply Durkheimian
notions of anomic, altruistic or egoistic suicide to these personica-
tions, though it is tempting to infer that for women a particular no
way out is constructed in these images.
Despair as a motive for suicide was in evidence throughout the
late medieval to early modern period. Ovids story of Procris and
y The Impatient Man, illustration from Johann Amos Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus
(c. +j8).
_ ~
. ........
y
Cephalus is one which has some similarities to Pyramus and Thisbe,
though in this case it is Cephalus who kills his wife, thinking she is a
wild animal. Procris has been informed that Cephalus meets a young
maiden after hunting, though in truth he has been talking to Zephyr,
the breeze. She hides herself in the bushes to watch and wait and
hears him talking. Cephalus hears her sobbing, and thinking it is a
wild animal he throws his javelin (which Procris gave him) into the
bushes. Procris dying words are to beg him not to marry Zephyr.
Bernadino Luinis colourful fresco appends Ovids story with the
visual tale of Cephalus despair leading to attempted suicide with a
cord around his neck. His attempt is thwarted by a shepherd. The
pictures romantic theme is enhanced by the fact that Luini has
painted blossoms and leaves on the plaster (illus. 8).
The bind in which woman is placed is unequivocally illustrated by
an exceptional image of the death of Haman, his sons and his daugh-
ter derived from the Old Testament. It is a most meaningful visual
example that features a family: a father, his twelve sons and his
daughter. From the book of Esther, the fourteenth-century visualiza-
tion of the story shows Hamans daughter sprawled dead at the foot of
8 Bernardino Luini, The Despair
of Cephalus, c. +j:o::, fresco.
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC.
a tree, her arms indicating the tree with her ten brothers hanging life-
less from the branches. The tree is a parody of a family tree, the sort
one still nds containing the precious family portraits on household
shelves, and of the Tree of Life. However, the daughter does not
appear in the seminal text. On the face of things, the legendary story
is one of mistaken identity and tragedy. The girl, who is nameless,
empties a slop bucket on her fathers head in the belief he is Morde-
cai, and then in shame and guilt hangs herself. Mordecai is described
in the biblical text as an earthly representation of a chief Babylonian
god, and cousin to Esther. He is the son of Hammedatha, the Agagite,
a Jew, and he takes charge of Hamans estates (Esther 8::). Haman, a
plotter, and persecutor of the Jews, had built a gallows to hang
Mordecai, but is victim of his own plot and is hung on his own
gallows, his ten sons are then killed. This illumination adds to the
biblical story by including the sons in Hamans hanging, and supple-
ments it with a tale of a silly woman who commits suicide as the result
of a foolish error.
The Hebraic illuminated manuscript shows the incident leading to
her death in the bottom left corner. Dominating the right is the tree,
and hanging on the top of the tree is Haman. On each of the ten
branches hang one of his sons. This isolated image descending from
Jewish culture, dated +:j, depicts a persecutor of the Jews and is
evidence of the fact that in the Jewish world there was no set testimony
on suicide. In the visual, Haman is humiliated by his daughter and
death results for him and all his family. The condemnation of suicide
is not evident in the image, indeed there is humour in the story. The
self-killing of the daughter in this case is ctional. The unsigned
mythical daughter is seen as the stimulus for the whole episode.
Where these images are connotative, Judass image is in a sense
denotative. Though not a portrait nor iconic, his images have a name
which distinguishes Judas Iscariot from all others. At the same time his
name and his death connote human failing. The myth of hanging as a
bad death is also strengthened by the image, though equally it has to be
recognized that suicide may have been condemned under Christianity
because Judas, the arch-villain of the Christian story, died that way.
Accordingly biblical suicide was an all-male phenomenon. In a
non-biblical text, Prudentius War of the Soul, Ira in a battle with
Patentia has a t of rage, smashes her sword to pieces and stabs herself
with the remaining sharp piece.
:
Wrath turned inward as a cause of
suicide goes back to Ajax, but no two deaths seem to be the same. No
representations of these stories are known until the medieval period.
In fact, visualizations of the biblical stories and of Prudentius arose
8o
8+
only when image-makers and image-making established themselves
as part of an ongoing debate against iconophobia in the Middle Ages.
Though Lucretias suicide was much discussed in the period of
Early Christianity, no images of that period have been traced. It is
with the advent of the Renaissance and an artistic consideration for
the beauty of the female body, and for the destructive outcome of her
act (or positive in the birth of the republic), that the image is popular-
ized. In a frustrating piece of scholarship The Rapes of Lucretia. A
Myth and its Transformations, Ian Donaldson refers to several heroic
images of Lucretia but gives no clues at all to their whereabouts.
:j
We
have to wait till the medieval period, where it is not always her hero-
ism that is pictured. In the hands of the medieval translator of
Valerius Maximus Facta et dicta memorabilia, Lucretias antique
virtue is coloured, tinged with vice (illus. ). Remiets picture illus-
trating the text shows Lucretia in front of rather nonchalant rapist
Sextus Tarquinius with his arms folded, confronting a crowd of male
onlookers.
:
Like the Augustinian condemnation of the raped woman
this illumination questions Lucretias virtue and breaches the
convention of her death as heroic. Augustine attacked and under-
mined the heroic view to argue that Lucretia was guilt-laden, and the
guilt was the pleasure she received from her rape.
:y
Despite Augustines antagonistic references, Lucretias heroism
survives the medieval period, and in the Gesta romanorumher sacrice
is compared to that of Christ. However, the heroism takes on a
gendered aspect where, in literature, reference is made to a male soul
in a female body.
:8
Plinys Naturalis Historia states quite emphatically
Pierre Remiet, The Suicide
of Lucretia, illumination from
Valerius Maximus, Faits et dits
mmorables, +th century.
Bibliothque Municipale de
Troyes.
8:
that there are no statues of women among the Roman heroes.
:
Three
depictions can be found on Etruscan funerary urns from the rst
century uc.
o
The rst statues appear to be dated from the twelfth
century +n, though it is indicated that the growth period of painting
was from the fteenth century.
+
The statue of Cleopatra that spawned so many poems and copies
indicates a differing iconography to that of Lucretia (illus. o).
:
First
recorded in +j+:, it has been identied as Cleopatra by the snake
bracelet wound around the upper part of the left arm. It has also been
identied as the nymph Ariadne and as Dido.
though this may well have been the case for Germany too. It
constructs a body that is contorted and a likeness which has negative
physiognomic properties.
Writing a chapter on Christianitys impact on suicides images is
highly problematic. The writer is continually obliged to look for
images in later periods to illustrate the biblical stories. The relation-
+ Lucretia, c. +yj, woodcut.
1tucreOJ
: Albrecht Drer, The Suicide of Lucretia, +j+8, oil on lime panel.
Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
ship between the stories and pictures is also problematic, as the visual
imagery acts as a supplement to the written word in the same way that
the written acts as a supplement to speech. The images of suicide
traced from later periods, then, tend to not just call up the gap in
visual evidence but at the same time to ll it. There is clearly a histor-
ical danger in this process where these images of suicide represent
what Derrida called the anterior default of a presence.
y
In historical
terms, this represents a slow depreciation of ideas from voluntary
death to self-killing, self-murder and to the pejorative suicide.
Accordingly, the reception of these images indicates a stigmatiza-
tion process at work which signals a discontinuity with the antique
and yet overlaps with it. It also indicates a slow but fairly resolute
growth in canonical law and then civil law in opposition to suicidal
death. New meanings of suicide arose alongside old ones, and a strat-
ication took place. Above all, the image of Judas was utilized in the
construction of suicide as a bad death. Judas was rst seen as a crimi-
nal with his betrayal represented by the inclusion of his victim, Jesus,
and his motivation by the portrayal of the purse. Then he was shown
alone and his original crime of treachery was isolated, to be replaced
by the additional crime of self-killing. Even so the motive of betrayal
was taken to have a bearing on the method.
Published in ++, Reverend Tukess Discourse on Death provided a
valuable slant on attitudes to self-murder in this respect. Tukes iden-
tied two sorts of voluntary deaths, one lawful and honest, such as
the death of martyrs, the other unlawful and dishonest, where men
have neyther lawful calling nor honest ends.
8
In Tukess opinion, if
the cause was honourable then so was the death.
Yet in the period before Tukess useful guidelines were established
there was an attempt by artists to portray the word in image. Artists
sought visual equivalents for the literary biblical text. The survey of
these images above has demonstrated that the images form a language
over and above the written. Trying to tie them to the biblical referent is
perhaps a historical problem in itself. The extended chronological
span of Early Christianity and its meeting with antiquity and Jewish
culture indicates the complex nature of the historical problem in hand.
The loss of chronological faithfulness serves to highlight central issues
of the problems of such a history. Across time, suicides imagery forms
a metalanguage which begins with its separation from words. Linear-
ity is lost and though the logos of suicide clearly concerned itself with
speech (parole) and the oral text, the images that aim to represent the
written word nally break from speech to offer a differing sign system.
The quietness is difcult to cope with.
8j
St Pauls epistles to the Corinthians are testament to the problem.
Peter Paul Rubens, The Death of Seneca, +o8, oil on panel. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
images proliferate throughout the period. The continued depiction of
the suicides of heroic and beautiful women by European artists
throughout the period +joo to +o precedes the period of stigmati-
zation from the mid-seventeenth to the eighteenth century designated
by MacDonald and Murphy as the era of secularization (illus. , j).
To some extent the expansion of these images was due to the reso-
lution of medieval debates around iconophobia, and especially that of
the problem of the representation of women, with its focus on the
vice of luxuria rather than a concern for representing heroic women.
+
In the process of suicides redesignation, luxury was to play another
role and became intertwined with suicides motives. In +yy, at the
end of the early modern period, John Herries blamed luxury and
depravity for the number of suicides in the metropolis. The
offspring of hell, the self-assassin as Herries described them, was
above all cowardly, and suicide deemed to be the dire attendant of
guilt, remorse and despair [which] begins to infect [and is]
contrary to nature.
+y
There is a marked change occurring from the
decade of the +yyos where it is noticeable that sensibility entwined
with luxuria is identied as a cause of despair resulting in suicide.
It is no surprise at all that Herries cowardly offspring of hell are
linked to the eighteenth-century phenomenon of sensibility. In the
+yos Charles Moore, the rst suicidologist, attacked men of sensi-
bility with moralistic zeal. A prime target for this attack was Goethes
ower-gathering hero Werther. Moore had little doubt about his
luxurious effeminacy as a cause of his suicide, which is generally
bestowed on the sybarite.
+8
The process which led to this notion of
self-slaughter as a by-product of contaminated femininity begins to
nd a focus through the large number of images of suicidal women
and the votaries of Epicurean and sensualist philosophy. Hypersensi-
tivity of this kind was clearly an eighteenth-century phenomenon,
+
yet in suicidal discourse it spills over into the nineteenth century. In
the process the devil, too, lost signicance as a spiritual force and
began to symbolize a secular force.
:o
Male artists fascination with the deaths of beautiful women is
apparent and the increasing conceptualization of suicide as weakness
was part of a process of medicalization that tied itself to an idea of
suicide that is represented as feminine. Images of Lucretia offer a
suitable example of this, though not all representations of Lucretia
stressed her sensuality. Drers Lucretia has been cited above as
unusual in the genre. More typical was the tragic beauty portrayed by
Bruyn the Elder, or Francias Lucretia (illus. j). Drers Italianate
image depicts a somewhat sullen heroine who appears quite awkward,
Robert Strange,
Cleopatra, c. +8o,
engraving after Reni
(illus. :).
Cleopatras nipple. Like the Oroborous that reconciles heaven and
earth, it signies life and death as a continuity and is an appropriate
teleological symbol for suicide. Its symbolic value as a force of
destruction and its phallic nature indicate the equivocal nature of the
sign suicide. What was the purpose of her death? Was it for gain? For
loss? To avoid being taken back to Rome? The result of vanity and
greed? A quest for power? The erotic component of the image of the
moment of death is clear. Similar questions can be asked of the repre-
sentations of Lucretia, whose voluntary death was probably the most
frequently visualized.
::
Important to any understanding of representations of Lucretias
heroic death is that the method, penetration by a knife, symbolizes
the cause of Lucretias suicide. In +j Hans Schufeleins woodcut
for Johann von Schwartenberg, the Lutheran jurist, places the hero-
ine in front of an open window in her bedchamber in order to give
emphasis to her reputation, her virtue and to the cause of her death.
As a symbol of vengeance, death and sacrice, the knife relates to the
motive and the cause for the killing. Rather than being a Freudian
symbol, the knife, commonly shown as having a blade of exaggerated
length, refers to the gladiatorial sword and to the spiritual being of the
swordsman. The consequence of Lucretias death also requires some
consideration, for its deliberate nature gives rise to the theory that she
may have been inuenced by other motives. The result was a war
against the Tarquins, the outcome of which was the birth of the
republic. For Lutherans the power of passive resistance was
connoted, and as such Lucretias story found its way into plays,
prayers and pictures which opposed the tyranny of the emperor.
Thus her death simultaneously signals the power accredited to
womens suicide and the anxiety engendered by its suggestion of the
cessation of the family and the importance of maternity. At the same
time, the perception of the suicide of a woman as destructive of
nature supports accepted notions of the female role, and denies heroic
status to this death. By the end of the early modern period, it was
considered more important to achieve fame in life than in death, and
Lucretias appeal dwindled.
In terms of suicidal discourse, these images of Lucretia and
Cleopatra are also contemporary references. Though they hark back
to old stories, they make statements that are present-centred around
the social establishment and formulation of meanings of suicide.
From the seventeenth century we nd a visual system not so depen-
dent on language as either earlier biblical references or the antique.
The archaic component is missing and new meanings arise which in
y
turn are also contested. A closer examination of these images will
show how they relate to their seminal literary sources and to contem-
porary historical notions of suicide in religious and secular intellec-
tual circles.
The myth of Lucretia offers an exemplar of the historically chang-
ing notions of suicide and immortality. Her story originates in the
fth century uc, and is remembered through the writings of Ovid (
uc+n +y) and Livy (j uc+n +y). During the Renaissance Lucretias
image was extremely popular on Italian cassoni, functioning as a
warning against indelity.
:
Dramatically portrayed by Titian (illus.
+) and most poignantly by Artemisia Gentileschi, herself the victim
of a rape, the cause of Lucretias public suicide was her rape by
Sextus Tarquinius, son of the despotic Roman Lucius Tarquinius
Superbus. In Ovids story, Lucretia does not want her husband
Tarquinius Collatinus to have a stained wife on his hands and, driven
by what might be deemed magical thinking (as expounded by Wahl
in Suicide as a Magical Act), commits suicide in front of her
husband and father after telling them of her rape. The end result is in
a sense part of a delusion, chimerical and irrational, though the act is
regarded as rational and heroic.
By killing herself Lucretia gains powers and advantages not
possessed by the living woman.
:
This is explained in recent suicidol-
ogy by the notion of post-ego where it is argued that in only a small
number of instances is the desire for death the sole motive for
suicide.
:j
By killing off the I of her experiences and pain, Lucretia
perpetuates the I of her individuality. Irrational or not, this delu-
sional fantasy signies a desire to control not just the future, death
and life, but also to preserve a reputation that was chaste. The illogi-
cality of this may be the very key we need to understand her motive.
Central to suicidal thinking is the desire to perpetuate the I. The
ctional image conjoins with the facts of her death to achieve this.
Lucretia does not die so much as stops living. Canonized for dying
rather than living as a deled woman, Lucretias image acts as a
metaphor for chastity, and as such a symbol was widely employed in
high art and in popular visual culture during the period of the Renais-
sance and Reformation. Thus her heroic death was made secondary to
her chastity. The continuing popularity of Lucretia images was
assured by reason of their compatibility with Christian values. James
Yates, in Chariot of Chastitie, an essay in praise of Lucretia, observed:
How Lucrece sate in heaven above her seate was thee bestowed
Lucrece she would not have a body for her spouse unchaste.
:
Guaranteed a place in heaven or not, Lucretias dominant concern
8
was with her own reputation after death: her impact, the survival of
her memory and inuence. The connotation is of her death as
memento vivere rather than memento mori, the birth of the republic, the
child of her rape. The popularity of Lucretias image in the fteenth
and sixteenth centuries is evidenced in references to street signs such
as that described hanging over Thomas Berthelets London printing
shop in +jo.
:y
A small square maiolica oor-tile showing Lucretias
suicide can be found in Vyne House near Basingstoke; a Tudor prop-
erty that contains a chapel with Renaissance glass. Probably made in
Antwerp in the early sixteenth century by an Italian migr potter,
and no doubt copied from a print or painting, it is evidence of the
wide and enduring popularity of Lucretias heroic death (illus. y).
Encouraged by the phenomenon of Epicurus in England, the
deaths of Cato and Lucretia were much discussed as a philosophical
trend from the mid-seventeenth century and, in agreement with
Epicurean literature, portrayals of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis
(j uc) were popular from the mid-sixteenth century. In a small
engraving by Pietro Testa, who himself committed suicide, Cato is
represented surrounded by supportive comrades (illus. 8). Above
him are two busts, which might represent Seneca and Aristotle as
described by Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations (+.y+j).
:8
As the
Cranachs Lucretia
clearly contains a sly eroticism emphasized in the half-closed eyes
framed by the veil and given further emphasis by the serpentine
nature of the veil, which curls around her body. Her adornment, a
+o
bejewelled choker, is reected in the pattern of the knife handle and a
long chain falls loosely around her neck just above the breasts. The
symbol of the chain is ambiguous, and though it may be thought to
suggest the bonds of matrimony, it does not seem to serve such a
purpose here. More than likely the chain stands for Lucretias involu-
tion and entanglement. The veil falls over the left nipple. The right
shoulder is lightened, to bring forward the arm that holds the knife. It
is, of course, feasible to contend that this glossy image was destined
for the bedchamber rather than the gallery, and only purports to be
Lucretia; however, what is nally portrayed and projected is a concept
of woman. Salacious rather than sanctimonious, Cranachs Lucretia
has nothing to do with the Lutheran politics of virtue. The role of art
in prescribing the feminine position as object of the gaze overrides
the subject and the aesthetically pleasing image of Lucretia depicts a
symbolic act wherein suicide, death and woman as sexual object are
conjoined. Inscribed on womans body are the reections of patriar-
chal culture; therefore the difculty of reading womens suicides is
compounded from the outset by the arbitrariness of the depicted
social body. This arbitrariness is increased over time.
Other images offer much the same format, though they are not so
erotically charged. A Hungarian Christian image by the Master of the
Holy Blood shows the blade penetrating the esh. Blood ows down
Lucretias stomach to disappear behind her otherwise revealing gown.
Her left hand is held forward, displaying rings on all ngers but one.
The image is described by Van Hooff as an image of a Christian hero-
ine of chastity (illus. ). A physiognomic reading of the image could
indicate the construction of a similar guile to Cranachs Lucretia, iden-
tiable in the narrowed eyes which, in this example, are slightly turned.
The compatibility of these images with Augustinian preaching where
Lucretias duplicity is implied means that they can be read as expres-
sions of either guilt or innocence. When Augustine slyly remarked that
Lucretia may have consented to the act of rape as a result of her own
desire, then her death became her own punishment of herself. These
theorizations meant that her voluntary death could be read as a conse-
quence of her adultery.
Yet Shakespeare immortalized Lucretia in his poem, The Rape of
Lucrece, of +j. Ophelia, another Shakespearean suicide, is in a
sense Lucretias counterpart, or rather her mirror image, being of
sound body, but unsound mind. Ophelias story appears to anticipate
modern psychiatry and the concept of suicide as sickness or the disso-
lution of self. Ophelias imaging is not found at all in the descriptive
arts until the late eighteenth century and becomes popular in the
+oj
nineteenth century when the medicalized view becomes prevalent.
One might theorize here that Shakespeare pre-empted the nine-
teenth-century medical view of suicide caused by a disintegration of
the self. Above all, it is Lucretia who nds her way into painting,
popular folklore, poetry and Christian mythology as both a heroine
and an adulteress. The power of Lucretias trace is evident across
Europe in the numerous and successive interpretations of her death
by both male and female artists, though this is not apparent in
England till the latter part of the century. Painted by Guido Canlassi,
Artemisia Gentileschi, Rubens (illus. o), Elisabetha Sirani and
Sebastiano Ricci (illus. j+), Lucretias trace is subject to varying inter-
pretations. Francias and Canlassis are exemplary of the general type.
In contrast to the Hungarian image of Lucretia described above, most
+o
jo Rembrandt, Lucretia, +, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
versions of Lucretia depict her with noble features. Rembrandts
image of + is unusual in that Lucretia is fully clothed rather than
dishabille. Above all, her rationality is portrayed (illus. jo). Her face is
turned towards the knife; her left hand is held up in front of her to
communicate her resignation.
Venetian Sebastiano Riccis Lucretia breaks away from traditional
portrayals to offer an altogether different version. The much-trav-
elled Ricci, whose work was known across Europe, depicts Lucretia in
turmoil, a tempestuous, revengeful woman in total disarray. On the
oor, serving to symbolize the rape, is a broken egg. The seed of
generation and the mystery of life thus lies shattered on the ground.
The egg, however, also symbolizes immortality, and in its broken state
may serve as a denial of it. This unsympathetic image brings to mind
Giottos earlier personications of Wrath, in the Arena Chapel, yet in
the insensitive handling of Lucretias death Riccis Lucretia says more
about the cause, and the result, which others refer to symbolically by
the knife. In this image the motive for death is represented as furore.
However justiable such rage might be in this case of rape, the image
does not conform to the story.
Nowhere is the cool deduction associated with the story more clearly
depicted than in Siranis painting: Lucretia is shown on her bed,
+oy
j+ Sebastiano Ricci,
Lucretia, c. +y:o, oil on
canvas. Dayton Art
Institute.
pondering her situation, her right hand resting calmly on the knife.
This sensitive image of a woman, painted by a woman, suggests a
thoughtful, sad and resigned person on the point of taking her own
life. Several images include the bed, although in this image the
bedchamber intimates a certain privacy that recalls the rape and looks
forward to a quiet death.
Catos self-killing undergoes similar discussion to that of Lucretia
and painting in the period, as does Senecas, but neither is the subject
of visual translations of the type described above. The constancy in
visualizations of Cato and Seneca indicate that for men their heroic
stature is maintained. Typical of Senecas images are those of Perrier
and Rubens, which show him standing in the bath (illus. j:). The
undated engraving by Franois Perrier and the painting by Rubens
display distinct similarities in their portrayal of posture and garb.
Perriers Seneca is a younger man, while Rubenss is an old man
+o8
j: Franois Perrier, Seneca,
c. +o, etching after Beham.
Wellcome Library, London.
surrounded by admirers. Bleeding is not depicted in the Rubens. The
Perrier image shows Seneca standing in what appears to be an urn
with a rams head around the side. Both the bath and the urn can be
read as signifying purication, regeneration, or change and re-
creation. Furthermore, Senecas containment within the urn slowly
lling with his blood is a highly pertinent symbol that makes links
with the world of the feminine.
The spilling of blood in this way has similarities with the bleeding
of a pig in a slaughterhouse. Mary Douglass anthropological work,
however, indicates anxiety around the spilling of blood or bodily
uids, particularly in menstruation where blood traverses bodily
boundaries and may serve to indicate a threat to masculinity, or even
an external threat to territory.
j
Rembrandts Lucretia is called to
mind here. In Kristevas theorization of Douglass work, blood can
represent a gender threat and signify social or sexual danger within a
society. If this can be applied at all to the deliberate spilling of blood,
Senecas act depicts a disruption to the social and to the symbolic
body; but the anxiety created is about the male body and its unity. The
taking of notes of Senecas last words emphasizes his importance as a
philosopher and the urn with his spilt blood attempts to contain and
preserve in some way the symbolic masculine unity which suicide
threatens.
These images tell us that the diversity of opinion in Europe was
even greater than imagined and that the picture was never clear-cut.
In general, the social history of suicide has either tended to ignore
visual images as historical sources, or afforded them a supercial
connection with writing. In effect, social history seems to be part of
an iconophobic intellectual tradition that has denied the visual
images importance as evidence. It is my argument here that culture
operates in all spheres to furnish society with symbolic representa-
tions of economic and religious circumstances as they limit or delimit
specic social groups.
Lunacy was by the seventeenth century increasingly referred to in
coroners reports as a manifestation of sympathy with the suicide and
the suicides family, and more verdicts of non compos mentis were
given. No images directly linking suicide to lunacy have been found
dating from before the nineteenth century though despair and lunacy
may have been conated. In general, the visual imagery of suicide
does not directly indicate a condemnation of self-killing; there were
other reasons for these portrayals.
Notably, very few of the images are of English origin. On the
whole, the later images, Riccis apart, are sympathetic and reconstruct
+o
a heroic suicide, though the imagery of Judas indicates continuing
Christian condemnation. In a Lutheran Satire on the Papal Arms, a
woodcut by Master B P from c. +j8, Judas appears hanging from one
of the broken keys of the city of Regensburg (illus. j). This damning
image depicts the pope hanging on the opposite shaft of the keys.
The competing discourses in these images indicate a lack of agree-
ment, so much so that it is historically impossible to see a signied
agreement at all. One text above all challenged the dominant view of
suicide, John Donnes Biathanatos: A Declaration of that Paradoxe or
Thesis, that Selfe-homicide is not so naturally Sinne, that it may never be
otherwise, rst published in + but written earlier. In the context of
the debates on suicide, it probably had little positive effect. His title is a
strange one; it is derived from the Greek biaiothanatos (one who dies
violently) and thus avoids reference to murder and killing. Some
suicides were, for Donne, permitted by fair implication; and in these
cases the victims should be offered salvation. Skirting around Augus-
tinian philosophy, Donne noted that voluntary death was not directly
prohibited in the scriptures or old law. Donnes work gives the sense of
a realization of death as the limit of power, and a recognition of the
struggle in all of us between life and death. Aimed at giving sover-
eignty to the individual, it was a much maligned text.
Ignoring the sophistication of such argument, internecine bicker-
ing of differing denominations posited that the other was more prone
++o
j Master B P, Satire on the Papal Arms, c. +j8, woodcut.
Kunstsammlungen Veste Coburg.
to suicide than themselves. Discourses on self-murder ran the whole
gamut from serious debate to sophistry and sanctimonious sermoniz-
ing. Geographic and climatic factors are commonly cited as cause,
and later nd their way into satires of English suicides. In his Letters
on the English and French Nations the Abb Prevost, a writer of
macabre stories and a man of many contradictions, pointed an accus-
ing nger at a set of men whom he had no hesitation in identifying as
a potentially suicidal group. They were those who never laugh at all,
and those are Presbyterians: they make laughing the eighth mortal
sin.
In France, war, famine and nancial crisis from +8o meant that
actual suicides had increased.
+o
8 A reproduction of the Chatterton Handkerchief of +y8j.
The D I S T RES SED PO E'r. 0;1\. A TR U E
Th.. l),lilllillg which tl.! Wn"nri:"c
Wll- fDkll nrllw: du,lrnse,1 rJ7'e.rerl&ateOll. ; Ahlwt.t aC"OIllrulllld.,., rllt.. potWII.ylJ
wonc. urllit' 5;) c.. f'llIdyr.....hnnah- nlalico:
(haUMiOh. 1.'l d rriclld drc:whml Ih.thr of e le BUI VIe;' I1 k thy h .. .. u.v.
f,IUII';"n i ll ...'hidl .... is rrpufc:nlcG In .....\t." ""nUl nn1 bJfuln.4d"J."L
da is pIRlr.. AUxllt'tin "lid C,1f'rS .llOId CHATTERTON. WtMdtnJUtlwt'iWottlw .
ad'.. u."ftl his 1iIi-. and Aud
""de,. IQOk 1ha n was fUllerlto ago:: BIt" and d"rrlnl.lTUftt.l.n gn,iU\
11... ["0",1' ap,lrlUlent porlr.,
cd
,nOlh(' WithpowTlYAtKi .....,...'_ rllu thril:s-.J
prilll . tllf: folded ben, the broken &:nllr h:.I"d
utensil below it. th.. boulr."hrutlhins It Wl'IU" MOnlly thy reg,ard " .b
c.andk. a.nd th.. di,.. ... Ilnmt nftl.. Thcfrlmdly C'Ob-b.rrrVlllt fura
blnl..rrllUl,. ilwenliol.rI'.3IlUJ They nlrrlllut.ap.....tofwlVlIIIUllN'lwd b...., "
w""" f'C'l lltit"l,and;l upon an The bcd.whm:o" 1l.'Unh...." 'tIC
a.mt. lllt liQO uC .. rcMlly 11 &>uht A'llloft unltn."ln CIlr:1I1 anWJllh. .rp' " .Q
krs. <'Uf,f'licuous c:hJIr.cterillic --9 Or fpenl, In ck.,. dduWw ,j"""I'" lh..
But poor Ch.uerton _ bOC'1\ unP
rr
.. To vU.... ne:d motn'n6.bul'oc\ariC-' lill,;
bad n..r: his paiions wtrr too impctuo.us" Too lhe fHti:.l\ h."J "' als. '
il nd ina diOr:utcd 1II0lncnt he dr.vrtmt Butlw.:fnrncb ,thelJI-dlllitlgdrn1 roht.."...
h,mul(o[an ..h illS grnlw" nUJ:l:J,,r'u,lt. InJkl C'tMnpla.-C')'. 'b..nct. .,)
iUHI1ht'lo:o;IC' .. itlg ..an" of ,1.. publick. Andund4'lU". allllarih il,fcl"CfM...T. I'IlCp.,Ids,
_111d. uhdo..h'c:dl.1 ........ rcnclrrd roc:n" iujud! ltW'nl .tnC'rryrlll.
r... ,I.bl...lId happy Unknown .nd rntl And,lhol1e:brr.th,ntndcmo
v
pPl.uet....-ql.its.
erablc ",hill' "lit'C'. he un.... e:"II, (orth 9 tl11lllllrIN ll1uill Ilus Ilwe: li.rvpy
rl.l,i(l,; ty Il ...d 1I1fl'fllicm Mc... "rwit and And ..J
l,..flling Cllll'loy II ICllIStJ,'u I" l1wh blrti thy(t1r."YI nolh .nd ig"...."WTh"'d
hl.' ..I"nl . ... lld locJlI,rrfI 1hcir"i>l ,",IJ;lI- Thupinf.ltiy,,IncI wllh pkntyfC'd, ..0
il or'l ll(' wrihus:, Jfard IIldf'NI Ihll,:c rn thy mem'ryl Irt::ly the: fablr. plume
hit [,1.., hotll lit adnm rlul tim..' in ""hid. or thy fu....lt....d M/W'fMoo
u
,'
hf InC'II. ....tlftllnpl'lIcd If) 10 M.,n Ihuu.Ml C'.nh'lSh.:.grroioM' (' I'n ,o
I'ti,k IInJ IHtVt'rtyt H_ Mlin)'" Cl1ld., tU,. will..,utl' fI.If .
i . wos''c!iVCI jl c:h.ann t(l hit wnt'll and. Or. ,F COlII(-' Wltn..ra hM\!)Jllr (.a\ .. or h",,=
while' Ihl' botht thought ecitc$ . dmira- S1llhJld,,J\JI ..... ..rIAII.,I'rl;."".
,iOU,lhc rl"CUUn.1ioJl or his miruic' Lr. hunger J>t"lsh1,y dnJlflhcb-,:>
,a w.,lfCms ;I1('lIdct flmplthy Ilnd furraw. lllC'd""IY l'roUl I..., J}lIfI,"II" har,,"
\VI,o wuuld ,u" will> du.' he hod been h.lI..h m;"hd.y ,,!
fa forluha lr . ... 10 rriitw:' a fdlow IMl fn-tcn It to " 11 If IIOw, -....:J
fc, lIff'dc:h- ."lift pindllng &.r"irtr \01.3*11' Il.to-' tUlhf. bcu"""
Mild it. llI"d fuicoidil"l ADd.btuk..t ....
Against a background of opinion that luxury and depravity was
bringing about a crisis of suicide in England, and the backlash against
sentiment and sensibility, the death of Chatterton shifted the debate
on suicide in another direction and mobilized a case for which the
moralists could argue. That the feelings of Werther, who died for love,
should be likened to Chattertons clearly offended Charles Moore,
who thought the marvelous boy was to be admired, not for his death,
but for his innate and early-ripened abilities.
y
Moore, a vicar, had
much to say about love and madness and, drawing on Virgil, nally
concluded that suicide was but a cowardly and effeminate revenge.
8
Vicesimus Knox described Chatterton in the following eulogy:
He had all the tremendous sensibility of genius ... Even his death, unfortu-
nate and wicked as it was, displayed a haughtiness of soul, which urged him
to spurn a world, where even his exalted genius could not vindicate him from
contempt, indigence and contumely ... Unfortunate Boy!
Mary
never appeared to intervene in these cases, though it has to be said that
miracula appears to be part of Catholic discourse. Shameful and sick,
these servants had succumbed to the Devil and as usual he was there to
help drag them further down. However, it is in the period of the nine-
teenth century that we begin to see illustrations of these deaths. At the
same time a growing relationship of suicide with mental alienation can
be seen in images such as Etienne Esquirols Maladies mentales of +8
or manifest in the growth of manuals in Britain warning of the poten-
tial danger of suicide for depressive patients.
In Simmels critical analysis, the city was read as a site for the
struggle for gain, and therefore, for some, loss must ensue.
Signi-
cant loss is a continuing aspect of suicides representation where loss
is represented as a motive for suicide. For women, the victims and
sinners in suicidal representation, the loss is of a loved one, or the loss
+
of purity; for men, it is pecuniary loss in the gamble of life, especially
in the period of bourgeois capitalism. In a situation where gain is
accorded maximum credence, loss is inevitable and risk-taking
becomes associated with suicidal behaviour. As an effect of this, in
representation, the conscious social aspect of suicidal motive inter-
mingled with deeper unconscious desires as psychodynamic motives
were also ascribed to suicide. Loss or deprivation is represented as a
factor in both conscious and unconscious motivation. In the early part
of the century Simmel thought: With each crossing of the street,
with the tempo and multiplicity of economic and social life, the city
sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to
the sensory foundations of psychic life.
j
The city as a locus for suicide has a long history, but Simmels
analysis goes beyond earlier representations to see the uniformity and
indifference of life in the modern city as having an effect on the
psyche. In Simmels thinking, modernity had created a split between
the world of emotions and the rational-technical world, so much so
that the city dweller became a cog in a vast machine. As a result of this
unbearable pressure, the subject would then reassert the sensuous
side of life which placed its emphasis on the social body, in dress, style
and leisure. In Webers critique, this is a supercial sensuality, in
response to which death becomes less of a threat than ageing, whereas
art constantly looks for and re-evaluates the experiences of life, and
aestheticizes it. In a sense, Boccioni, the Futurist and follower of
Henri Bergson, who idealized technological change, was right when
he insisted that in modern art the spectator would be put in the
picture.
Only
then can the debate be shifted from the ambiguous notion of rights.
For me, these images give rise to these debates, help to form them,
and in some cases, actively take part in them.
:::
::
References
Introduction
+ P. Veyne, Comment on ecrit lhistoire: Suivi de Foucault revolutionne lhistoire (Paris,
+y8), p. :. In Veynes tribute to Foucault he indicates that each age might
recongure or resignify elds of discourse and make them unique. Veynes idea
facilitates a further shift from a totalizing history that is determined by the
economic to one that considers successive relationships to objects and to
objectications that, in this case, might resignify suicidal death.
: M. Foucault, Right of Death and Power over Life, in Foucault, History of
Sexuality, vol. r (London, +y8), pp. +8.
C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (London, +yj), p. 8.
E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England .,cc.,Sc
(New Haven and London, +:).
j M. MacDonald and T. R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern
England (Oxford, +o), pp. jy.
L. Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain
(Oxford, +8), pp. +8. Neads analysis of prostitution in visual
representation and the visual links made with suicide demonstrates the potential
of applying Foucaults ideas of power in Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan
(New York, +yy). See also Seduction, Prostitution, Suicide: On the Brink by
Alfred Elmore, Art History, v/ (September +8:).
. Representing Voluntary Death in Classical Antiquity
+ B. Russell, The History of Western Philosophy (London, ++), p. +8. That
suicide was deemed unlawful in Orphic tradition gives emphasis to Socrates
death as forced murder by poison: We are strangers in this world and the body is
the tomb of the soul, and yet we must not seek to escape by self-murder we
have no right to make an escape, J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London,
+o), p. +o8. Also see W. E. H. Lecky, History of European Morals, vol. r
(London, +8). These works imply that classical antiquity may not have been as
open as previously thought in its treatment of suicide, though to prove otherwise
would be difcult as epigraphic sources are limited: P.Veyne, Suicide, sc,
esclavage, capital et droit romain, Latomus, o (+8+), pp. :+y8; A. J. L. van
Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-Killing in Classical Antiquity (London
and New York, +o); M. F. Grifn, Philosophy, Cato and Roman Suicide, I &
II, Greece and Rome, xxxrrr/r (April +8), pp. yy. J. M. Cooper, Greek
Philosophers on Euthanasia and Suicide, in B. A. Brody, ed., Suicide and
Euthanasia: Historical and Contemporary Themes (Dordrecht, Boston and
London, +8).
: J. Elsner, ed., Art and Text in Roman Culture (Cambridge, +).
Van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide, pp. j. See also L. Burn, The British
Museum Book of Greek and Roman Art (London, ++).
D. Novak, Suicide and Morality: The Theories of Plato, Aquinas and Kant and
Their Relevance for Suicidology (New York, +yj).
j R. Garland, Death Without Dishonour: Suicide in the Ancient World, History
Today, xxxrrr (+8), p. j. Slaves, soldiers and those charged with capital
offences were forbidden to take their lives. See also A. H. W. Adkins, Moral
Values and Political Behaviour in Ancient Greece (London, +y:).
Plato (:y-y uc), The Trial and Death of Socrates, trans. J. Warrington
(London, +), p. . See also R. G. Frey, Did Socrates Commit Suicide?,
Philosophy, j (+y8).
y D.Gourevitch, Suicide Among the Sick in Classical Antiquity, Bulletin: History
of Medicine, (+), pp. jo++8.
8 Plato, Socrates, John Warringtons introduction, p. xiv.
D. Daube, The Linguistics of Suicide, Philosophy and Public Affairs, r (+y:),
p. o.
+o J. M. Cooper, Greek Philosophers on Euthanasia and Suicide.
++ Van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide. See also Cooper, Greek Philosophers
on Euthanasia and Suicide.
+: Van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide.
+ A. Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, vol. r, The Violent Against Themselves
(Oxford and New York, +8), p. 8.
+ D. W. Amundsen, Suicide and Early Christian Values, in Brody, Suicide and
Euthanasia, pp. 8o8+.
+j M. MacDonald and T. R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern
England (Oxford, +o), pp. +j+ and pp. :y. For a critical review: D. Friest,
Social History : (May +:), pp. joj.
+ Van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide, pp. +yj.
+y R. Wilie, Views on Suicide and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy and Some Related
Contemporary Points of View, Prudentia, j (May +y), pp. +j:; Van Hooff,
From Autothanasia to Suicide, pp. +yj. See also R. Garland, The Greek Way of
Death (London, +8j); E. Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and
Poetry (Berkeley, +y).
+8 Van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide, pp. +yj, is citing Philostratos,
Eikones, +, .
+ Ibid., p. +yj, citing Eikones, +, +:+.
:o Plato, Apology in Socrates, p. x.
:+ T. K. Hubbard, Nature and Art in the Shield of Achilles, Arion, /+ (Winter
+:).
:: S. Freud, Collected Works (London, +::), p. ++. See especially the essays
Medusas Head and Civilisation and its Discontents, where Freud states that
the desire for destruction when it is directed inwards mostly eludes our
perception unless it tinged with eroticism.
: Van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide, p. +y. O. Touchefen, ed., Lexicon
Iconographicum Classicae (Zurich, +8+) contains a list of 8 objets dart featuring
Ajaxs death.
: C. James, Whether tis nobler. Some Thoughts on the fate of Sophocles Ajax
and Euripides Heracles, Pegasus, +: (+).
:j R. Flaciere and J. Devambez, Heracles, Images et recits (Paris, +), p. :. See
also J. D. Beazley, Red Attic Figure-Vases, vol. : (Oxford, +); A. R. Rose,
Seneca and Suicide. The End of the Hercules Furens, Classical Outlook, o
(+8), pp. +o++.
: Plato, Apology.
::
:y Ibid.
:8 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (London and New York, +:y) +,
y. In the writings of Cicero and Seneca Cato and Socrates migrate from
darkness to light. It is clear that fear gave them the right to die. See also Van
Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide, p. :y; F. Cutter, Art and the Wish to Die
(Chicago, +8), p. . Cutter mentions that a Hellenistic sculptured relief of
c. :oo uc depicts Socrates drinking the hemlock. No location is given for this work.
: J. D. Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom Among Christians and Jews in
Antiquity (San Francisco, +:), pp. +y:+; Van Hooff, From Autothanasia to
Suicide, p. +o, drawing on the work of J. Baechler, Les Suicides (Paris, +yj). Van
Hooff points out that the self-killer was part of a cosmos, p. +8. To affect that
cosmos was to affect nature itself. Self would be to some extent determined by
that cosmos, or by community. Although self-killing implies one sees oneself as
an object the historical specicity of self must be born in mind.
o E. Durkheim, Suicide, trans. J. A. Spaulding and G. Simpson (London, +j:).
Durkheim divides suicide into four categories; egoistic (much overestimated in
his account at the expense of) altruistic, anomic and fatalistic. See also S. Taylor,
Durkheim and the Study of Suicide (London, +8:).
+ F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique, The Lure of Classical Sculpture
(New Haven and London, +8+), pp. ::j and :8:.
: Ibid.
G. Bazin, A History of World Sculpture (New York and Greenwich, c+, +8),
p. jo+.
C. Mitchell Havelock, Hellenistic Art (London, +y+), pp. +j and +j. See
also J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art (London, +y) pp. ++j. In a
discussion of naturalism versus realism Pollitt states that the rst professional
treatise on sculpture was that of Polyclitus in the fth century uc, framing ideas
of beauty and the commensurability of the body.
j E. Q. Visconti, Opere var italiana francesci (Milan, +8:y+), pp. :j; M.
Bieber, The Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age (New York, ++), p. +:; Bazin,
History of World Sculpture, p. jo+. Also Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique,
p. :8:. Perhaps indicating the ambiguity of suicide itself the writers above
conrm that the statue has been taken to be representations of Sextus Marius
killing his daughter to protect her from the lust of Tiberius, and that he himself
had been accused of incest with the girl. At different times it has been
mistranslated as Pyramus and Thisbe (Pyramus is killed rst in Ovids story). See
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford and New York, +8), p. y8.
J. Charbonneaux, Hellenistic Art (London, +y); Y. Gris, Le Suicide dans le
Rome antique (Montreal and Paris, +8).
y Bazin, History of World Sculpture, p. jo+.
8 R. Brilliant, Portraiture (London, ++). Brilliants notion of the authority of
likeness and authenticity of the autoicon is more readily seen in funerary
sculpture where it is employed to enhance the once lived quality of the original,
pp. +:j+.
N. Llewellyn, The Art of Death (London, ++), p. j. Llewellyns argument that
the body portrayed does not constitute an iconic sign is pertinent in this case,
though the power of the sculpture to portray the natural body and effectively
cloak the social body and suppress representation makes for a problem of
analysis. My analysis attempts to reveal the strategies that give off this effect. In
this sense, the reality (realism) is a signifying practice.
o J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore, +y), pp. +j and
::. See also Charbonneaux, Hellenistic Art, p. ::.
::j
+ A. Vernhet, Une four de la Graufensengue, Gallia, (+8+), p. for the story
of foot soldier Tiberius Claudius who decapitated Decebulus and gained
immediate and immense popularity.
: J. Winckelmann, Monumenti antchi inediti, : vols (Rome, +yy). The work has
been referred to as The African Fisherman. See, for example, the cover to Seneca,
Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth, +y:). The
images history is evidence of the desire to name. It could be a slave and therefore
might represent all slaves. See Rose, Seneca and Suicide, pp. +o++.
Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, pp. :8:.
Bieber, The Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age, p. +:.
j J. Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts and Letters during an Excursion in Italy in
the years .Sc: and .Sc (London, +8+). Forsyth comments: These busts are all
anonymous, authenticated by no model, and as questionable as the genius of
Seneca himself , p. :.
J. Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political
Thought (Oxford, +8).
y Ibid.
8 Ovid, Metamorphoses, pp. y. See also C. Segal, Ovids Metamorphic Bodies:
Art Gender and Violence in the Metamorphoses, Arion, j/ (Winter, +).
F. Cutter, Art and the Wish to Die, p. :o+. Cutters example is evidence of the
changing meanings given to suicide where the image is re-spoken. In this case the
pagan is turned into the Christian. The conversion has more obvious meanings in
the context of Christianity as a proselytizing religion.
jo M. Grant, Myths of the Greeks and Romans (London, +), p. 8:. The original
text uses the expression mischance, p. y8. The translator also notes that visual
adaptations occurred through to the nineteenth century, p. xxxvii. See M. Grant
and J. Hazel, Whos Who in Classical Mythology (London, +). My concern is
with myth as a second order semiotic system in the sense Barthes spoke of in
Mythologies (London, +y).
j+ An image of Canace can be found in Garland, The Greek Way of Death, p. .
j: Y. Gris, De la frequence du suicide chez les Romains, Latomus, (+8o),
pp. +. See also I. Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia. A Myth and its
Transformations (Oxford, +8:). Donaldson refers to images contradicting Gris,
but gives no clue to their whereabouts. Van Hooff s reference to Plinys Naturalis
Historia, , :8, indicates there were no statues devoted to Lucretia among the
Roman heroes and heroines (From Autothanasia to Suicide, p. :8y). It was in the
Renaissance, when the notion of honour became an accepted norm, that Lucretia
could serve as a positive example of female virtue. See also M. Warner, Alone of
all her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York, +8); P. Schmitt-
Pantel and A. Goldhammer, A History of Women in the West, vol. r (+:). The
latter notes the dearth of information on women in ofcial sources and the
profusion of texts and images created by men that are concerned with women
and gender.
j J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (London, +:y). The dual importance of this
citation is that it illustrates that the traces of these suicides linger on as the play of
the cosmic and the natural combine. It was hanging, not suicide per se, that was a
bad death in antiquity. Hanging, however, has a fairly imperspicuous and
complicated symbolic history. The victim of hanging is caught between heaven
and earth left in suspension. Jung saw hanging as a tense expectation or
unfullled desire, see K. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, in Collected Works,
vol. v (London, +j). It also has to be seen as a tting end to a heinous life: Van
Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide, pp. +j. Van Hooff s fascinating work in
::
this eld indicates that hanging had sinister connotations in antiquity. He refers
to the noose of ghastly death (nodum informis leti). The body of such a death was
thrown away like that of an enemy or those guilty of treason.
j Frazer, Golden Bough.
jj Van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide, p. +y. No location is given, but he
notes that the statue breaks from Euripides story to have Jokaste hang herself.
j Cutter, Art and the Wish to Die, p. +8j.
jy R. Chartier, ed., Cultural History (London, +88), pp. :y8.
: Self-killing from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance
+ D. W. Amundsen, Suicide and Early Christian Values, in B. A. Brody, ed.,
Suicide and Euthanasia: Historical and Contemporary Themes (Dordrecht, Boston
and London, +8), pp. yy+j.
: B. A. Brody, Jewish Casuistry on Suicide and Euthanasia, in Brody, ed., Suicide
and Euthanasia, pp. yj. A key factor in suicides categorization was that the
suicide caused their own death, the martyr allowed it, p. jo.
A. J. Droge and J. D. Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among
Christians and Jews in Antiquity (San Francisco, +:). The method of stoning
implies a martyrdom by a non-Christian of a Christian. The robed gure who is
being stoned has a costume reminiscent of that worn by Christ in images: the
executors wear a garb similar to a Roman toga. See also: F. E. Reynolds and E. H.
Waugh, Religious Encounters with Death. Insights from the History and
Anthropology of Religions (Pennsylvania, +yy); J. T. Clemons, What does the Bible
say about Suicide? (Minneapolis, +o).
Droge and Tabor, A Noble Death, p. +8y8. In the nal analysis the distinction
between suicide and martyrdom devolves upon personal commitment.
j Ibid., p. +j. See also P. Brown, The Cult of Saints. Its Rise and Function in Latin
Christianity (Chicago, +8+); M. Gatch, Death: Meaning and Mentality in
Christian Thought and Contemporary Culture (New York, +).
M. Camille, Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator (New
Haven and London, +), p. ++j.
y M. Camille, The Gothic Idol. Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art
(Cambridge, +8). See also review by R. Scribner in Social History, xvrr (May
+:) pp. y.
8 M. Camille, The Book of Signs: Writing and Visual Difference in Gothic
Manuscript Illumination, Word and Image, r/:, (AprilJune +8j).
Droge and Tabor, A Noble Death, refer to a Platonic loophole that allowed
Socrates death to be used as a justication and as a means of moderating against
the act of a voluntary death. See also Augustine, City of God, trans. J. Healey and
R. V. G. Tasker (London, +jo), book x, ch. xxiii. p. :. The ambiguity of the
act was clearly recognised by Plato, see Phaedo, p. , in The Trial and Death of
Socrates (London, +), pp. 8y+yj, where Socrates states we must not set
ourselves free or run away.
+o M. Zerwick and M. Grosvenor, A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New
Testament, vol. +, GospelActs (Rome, +y) and Revd A. Marshall, The
Interlinear GreekEnglish New Testament (London, +j8), pp. +: and .
++ F. Cutter, Art and the Wish to Die (Chicago, +8), p. +j.
+: Samsonic suicide can, however, be seen as revenge, see M. P. Jeffreys, Samsonic
Suicide or Suicide of Revenge Among the Africans, African Studies, vr/ (+j:),
pp. ++8::. Also M. H. Spero, Samson and Masada: Altruistic Suicides
Reconsidered, Psychological Review, j (+y8), pp. + .
::y
+ Camille, The Gothic Idol, notes that the propaganda value of the visual focus
meant that debates on otherness were turned against the Saracens and the Jews.
+ D. Daube, The Linguistics of Suicide, Philosophy and Public Affairs, r (+y:)
p. y8.
+j Ibid.
+ Cutter, Art and the Wish to Die, pp. +y.
+y Augustine, The City of God, book r, ch. xvii; see pp. :+ where Augustine breaks
from Matthews version of the story. While on the subject of self-killing he
muddies the water on Lucretias rape, shall we say she was an adulteress, or was
she chaste?, p. :. Yet at the same time Augustine refers to suicide as voluntary
death and eeing from sin, pp. :+ and +. Philosophically his text has much in
common with Platos attempts to dene virtue in Theaeatetus, trans. R. A. H.
Watereld (London and New York, +8y).
+8 Augustine, The City of God.
+ Droge and Tabor, A Noble Death, p. j. See also D. Parkin, ed., The Anthropology
of Evil (London, +8j). Parkin notes that the Hebrew word for evil is ra which
also means worthlessness, uselessness or, a bad or sad urge like suicide, p. :y.
The problem of martyrdom/suicide appears inseparable. Both are symbolic
deaths. The argument here is that Christian theologians attempted to resolve the
issue but the slippage between the two makes denition difcult.
:o In the King James Bible, Judass desolation is gured in Psalms as a prophecy
(::j). King Davids prophecy concerning the eld of blood ties David with
Judas, and makes stronger the link between Ahitophels death and that of Judas.
:+ I discovered this in the Warburg Library. No location was given for the
manuscript.
:: These personications are crucial to the development of abstract ideas of
good/evil, vice/virtue, and act as aids to the process of analytical thought and
allegorization. Impatience, despair and suicide are thus linked.
: A. J. L. van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-Killing in Classical
Antiquity (London and New York, +o), p. +y8.
: C. A. Prudentius, Psychomachia [+oj], English trans. in Works, trans H. J.
Thomson (London, +j:). Pictures illustrating Prudentius text can be found in
D. de Chapeaurouge, Suicide in the Middle Ages in Zeitschrift fr
Kunstwissenschaft, + (+o).
:j I. Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia. A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford,
+8:), p. +. See also E. Muller, Humanist Views on Art and Morality: Theory
and Image, in P. Bange et al., eds, Saints and she-devils: images of women in the
.,th and .6th centuries (London, +8y) p. ++, where he afrms that notions of
Lucretias chastity appealed to the Church and its teachings. The tile in Vyne
House chapel near Basingstoke is evidence of this. In Cleopatras case, the
question of the anti-type to the Virgin Mary is raised. In J. Alexander and P.
Binski, eds, Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England .:cc.,cc (London,
+8y), p. , Abimelech is described as a kind of Antichrist.
: Augustine, City of God, book r, ch. xviii, pp. ::.
:y Ibid.
:8 Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia.
: Van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide, p. :y8. Pliny, Naturalis Historia, , 8.
See also J. Gould, Law, Custom and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of
Women in Classical Athens, Journal of Hellenic Studies, +oo (+8o); M. R.
Lefkowitz and M. B. Fant, Images of Women in Antiquity (Bromley, +8).
o Van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide, p. +yy. See also J. Blitz, Tragedies van
Euripides op Macedonische reliefbekers, Hermeneus, rxrr/+: (+o).
::8
+ Cutter, Art and the Wish to Die, p. +y8.
: B. Taylor, The Medieval Cleopatra: The Classical and Medieval Tradition of
Chaucers Legend of Cleopatra, Journal of Renaissance and Medieval Studies, y
(+yy). See also Van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide, p. :+, who notes that
the idea that Lucretia contained a male soul in a female body can be found in
Valerius Maximus Memorable Facts and Sayings in Valerius Maximus (London,
+8+), .+.+.
F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique, The Lure of Classical Sculpture
(New Haven and London, +8+), pp. +8y.
Taylor, The Medieval Cleopatra. See also L. Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra:
Histories, Dreams and Distortions (London, ++). Hughes-Hallet sees Cleopatra
as a site where power and desire intersect, pp. +y8. Also M. Hamer, Signs of
Cleopatra (London and New York, +). There are varying interpretations of
what Cleopatra meant. They range from passive object to virago.
j Remiets image displays the lth of death in the way Mary Douglas describes in
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London
and New York, +8), p. +y.
M. MacDonald and T. R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern
England (Oxford, +o), pp. +jyy. The authors divide the era of severity into
three: The Crime of Self-Murder, The Instigation of the Devil, and Opposition
and Ambivalence. The period extends from the sixteenth century through to the
early seventeenth century. If this is applicable in this case, then Drers image of
Lucretia falls into the rst. The popularity of Lucretia was, however, also
enhanced by an interest in the classics. One image (c. +j:8) by Lorenzo Lotto in
the National Gallery depicts a fully clothed lady holding a drawing of Lucretias
suicide. Beside the woman is a table and a written text which states that through
the example of Lucretia not a single immoral woman shall remain in existence.
y J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore, +y).
8 Revd Mr W. Tukes, Discourse on Death (London, ++), p. :+.
A. J. Droge, Mori Lucrum: Paul and Ancient Theories of Suicide, Novum
Testamentum, o (+88), pp. :8.
Conict and Change in Early Modern Europe
+ A. Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, vol. r The Violent Against Themselves
(Oxford and New York, +8), p. +y. Murrays research has located the word
suicida as early as ++8 in a passage by Walter of St Victor, Contra quator
labyrinthos Franciae, p. 8.
: Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, pp. 8.
Ibid.
M. MacDonald and T. Murphy, Sleepless Souls. Suicide in Early Modern England
(Oxford, +o), pp. :y. Protestantism offered a shield against suicidal despair
instigated by Satan. See also D. Freist, review of MacDonald and Murphy, Social
History, xvrr/: (May +:), pp. jo j. In his Daemonologia Sacra (Edinburgh,
+yy) the Nonconformist clergyman R. Gilpin espoused such a view. See also D.
Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death. A Study in Religion, Culture and Social
Change (Oxford, +yy).
j K. E. S. Zapalac, In His Image and His Likeness: Political, Iconographic and
Religious Change in Regensberg, .,cc.6cc (Ithaca and London, +o), pp. +:+j.
MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls.
y Ibid.
8 Revd Mr W. Tukes, Discourse on Death (London, ++), p. :+.
::
MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. 88.
+o T. F. Mayo, Epicurus in England, .6,c.,:, (Columbia, +); F. D. Miller,
Epicurus on the Art of Dying, Southern Journal of Philosophy, + (+y),
pp. +yy.
++ J. Addison, Cato: A Tragedy (London, +y+), Act v, scene i; Mayo, Epicurus in
England, p. 8; W. Charleton, Epicuruss Morals (London, +j); L. Richeome,
Ladieu de lme dvote laissant les corps (Lyon, +jo).
+: F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique, The Lure of Classical Sculpture
(New Haven and London, +8+), p. oj; E. McGrath, Rubens Subjects from
History, vol. r (London, +y). In England the portrayal of heroic antiquity
continued into the nineteenth century. The popularity of the theme of Senecas
death is evidenced by its presence on Italian porcelain copies of antique subjects.
Referring more to a new heroism and the values of modern bourgeois life than
those of antiquity, Senecas image appears as late as the early nineteenth century
in intaglio on ne Wedgwood china. Perriers engraving has +FP inscribed at the
bottom left and may be a copy of Rubenss Seneca, though it is not clear if the
number refers to the date ++. Antony and Cleopatra were also popular on
Italian porcelain and English earthenware. An illumination from a fteenth-
century French manuscript in the British Library shows Antony and Cleopatra
both about to kill themselves, Cleopatra with a snake at each breast. L. Hughes-
Hallett refers to an unsigned painting by a follower of Leonardo which shows a
Cleopatra neither passive nor a virago: Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and
Distortions (London, ++), p. , pl. jo. Angelica Kaufmans painting Cleopatra
shows her kneeling at Antonys tomb fully clothed (Courtauld Institute of Art).
An earlier sixteenth-century Flemish engraving in the Warburg shows Cleopatra
beside a tree, thereby associating her with Eve, the Fall and temptation.
+ I. Watts, A Defense Against the Temptation to Self-Murther wherein the Criminal
Nature and Guilt of it is Displayed, the various Pretences for it are Examined and
Answerd (London, +y:). A Congregationalist and hymnist, Watts argues that
Satan walks about through the Great City seeking who he may devour, p. iv.
On the same page he refers to the ambiguous verdict of found dead in the Bills
of Mortality, and in the weekly news. See also the much earlier anonymous
Religious Tracts to the True-Hearted British Reader (London,+::), p. j. In
both texts the malice of Satan is blamed for suicide as it made a man both the
active and the passive subject of his own action.
+ R. Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours: Or, Hypochondriacal and
Hysterical Affections with Three Discourses on the Nature and Cure of the Cholic,
Melancholy and Palsies (London, +y:j). See also G. Cheyne The English Malady:
or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds; as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits,
Hypo-chondriacal, and Hysterical Disorders, :nd edn (London, +y), p. :o8 and
introduction pp. iiii. Cheyne, a Scot, thought all nervous disorders arose from
glandular distemper. His treatise is an exemplar of contemporary medical
attempts to classify self-murder.
+j W. Rowley, A Treatise of Female, Nervous, Hysterical,Hypochondriacal, Bilious,
Convulsive Disease with Thoughts on Madness and Suicide (London, +y88). This
interesting treatise makes ties between illness/women/suicide. See T. Castle,
The Spectralisation of the Other, in F. Nussbaum and L. Brown, eds, The
Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (London, +8y); S.
Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York, +yy). Increasingly suicide and madness
were drawn together, as Rowleys lengthy title implies, and women were the
prime focus of these medical investigations. See E. Showalter, The Female
Malady. Women, Madness and English Culture. .Sc.,Sc (New York, +8j). Also
:o
Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness and the Responsibilities of Feminist
Criticism, in P. Parker and G. Hartman, eds, Shakespeare and the Question of
Theory (London, +8j).
+ R. Scribner, review of M. Camille, The Gothic Idol. Ideology and Image-Making in
Medieval Art (Cambridge, +8) in Social History, xvrr (May +:), pp. y.
+y J. Herries, An Address to the Public, on the Frequent and Enormous Crime of Suicide
Delivered at the Old Jewry on the :nd January, .,,, (London, +yy). In Herriess
argument luxury and depravity are signalled as cause. Herries describes the
suicide as the most depraved of human characters, p. j.
+8 C. Moore, A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide (London, +yo), p. y.
Luxurys effects, according to Moore, deprave morals and corrupt the heart.
+ J. Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York, +8). See also, A .J.
L. van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-Killing in Classical Antiquity
(London and New York, +o), pp. :o. Clearly suicide has to be feminized in
order for a feminine analogue to be seen as problematic in these terms.
Alternatively, the feminine analogue may have been an integral part of the
feminization process. Van Hooff s wistful section on the subject of Ancient
Werthers concludes that antiquity was not acquainted with the type. See also
Higonnet, Speaking Silences, in S. R. Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in
Western Culture (Cambridge, +, and London, +8), p. y+.
:o O. Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford, +8y).
:+ Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions, p. :o. In K.
Reynolds and N. Humble, Victorian Heroines: Representations of Femininity in
Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art (London, +), Cleopatra is labelled a
femme fatale, p. ++j. In Charlotte Brontes Villette (+8j) Lucy Snowe examines
an eroticized image of Cleopatra. It has been identied as A Dancing Girl by De
Biefre, which Charlotte saw at the Salon de Bruxelles.
:: Cutter, Art and the Wish to Die, lists over +o images. The current research has
revealed many more. Guido Renis Lucretia in the Royal Collection is an example
of the anti-type of the virgin.
: D. Owen Hughes, Representing the Family: Portraits and Purpose in Early
Modern Italy, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, r/r (Summer +8).
: E. S. Shneidman, Suicide, Sleep and Death: Some Possible Interrelations
among Cessation, Interruption and Continuing Phenomena, Journal of
Consulting Psychology, xxvrrr (April +), pp. +o:.
:j C. W. Wahl, Suicide as a Magical Act, in E. S. Shneidman and N. Farberow, eds,
Clues to Suicide (New York, +jy), p. :.
: J. Yates, Chariote of Chastitie (London, +j8:).
:y When the Elizabethan printer Purfoot (who inserted miniatures of Lucretia in
his works) announced his wares were to be purchased in St Pauls Yard he was
referring to Thomas Berthelets publishers at that address. See M. D. Faber,
Shakespeares Suicides: Some Historic, Dramatic and Psychological
Reections, in E. S. Shneidman, ed., Essays on Self-Destruction (New York,
+y), p. .
:8 E. Cropper, Pietro Testa .6.:.6,c, Prints and Drawings (London, +88),
pp. :jj. The refusal of Augustine to compare Samsons death (martyrdom) to
Catos is a noticeable oversight. Clearly Cato could have been vindicated in the
same way as Samson. See Augustine, City of God, trans. J. Healey and R. V. G.
Tasker (London +jo), book r, ch. xxiii, p. :. Croppers work also includes
images of the studies and rst state engravings of The Suicide of Dido, c. +jojj,
p. :8.
: Ibid., pp. :8yo.
:+
o Ibid.
+ Thanks to Hugh Stevenson, Assistant Keeper, Fine Art Department of Glasgow
Museums and Art Galleries, who provided me with this reference and that of
Francesca del Cairos Death of Cleopatra.
: Z. Pierce, A Sermon on Self-Murder (London, +y), p. y.
Mayo, Epicurus in England, p. j:, for reference to Jean Francois Sarasin, Oeuvres
(Paris, +y:).
L. Richeome, Ladieu de lme dvote.
j Mayo, Epicurus in England, p. j.
Addison, Cato, Act v, scene i.
y MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. :o. L. Stone, The Family, Sex
and Marriage in England, .,cc.Scc (New York, +yy). N. Llewellyn, The Art of
Death (London, ++), pp. +:y. S. W. Goodwin, Kitsch and Culture: The Dance
of Death in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Graphic Art (New York, +88). See
C. Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London,
+8); E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England,
.,cc.,Sc (New Haven and London, +:).
8 T. Browne, Religio Medici (London, +:).
Watts, A Defense against the Temptation to Self-Murther, preface p. iii.
o J. Sym, Lifes Preservatives against Self-Killing or a Useful Treatise concerning life
and Self-Murder (London, +y), p. :y. Sym, a minister of Leigh in Essex,
noted the randomness of suicides victims in terms of age and all types: Clergie,
Laity, Learned, unlearned . male, female, p. +.
+ Gilpin, Daemonologia Sacra, p. +++. Gilpin thought that Satan drove in the
design of Self-Murther, yet spoke in awe of Lucretia, and Catos death. For a
similar appraisal see Yates, Chariot of Chastitie. See also J. Hillman, Suicide and
the Soul (London, +); K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London,
+y), pp. +, +, jj, jy, :+. Also J. McManners, Death and the
Enlightenment. Changing Attitudes to Death in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford,
+8j) and M. Zell, Suicide in Pre-Industrial England, Social History, xr (+8).
For a discussion of the changing pattern of evil see P. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of
Evil (Boston, +); D. Pocock, Unruly Evil, and D. Taylor, Theological
Thoughts about Evil, in D. Parkin, ed., The Anthropology Of Evil (London,
+8j).
: Zapalac, In His Image and His Likeness.
K. Menninger, Man Against Himself (New York, +8). Menningers thesis is that
the wish to harm (sadism) turns in on itself and becomes the desire to be killed
(masochism). Cranach painted three Lucretias and differing authors give
differing dates. A. Stepanov, Lucas Cranach the Elder (London, +y), refers to
three, two painted in +j: in the Akademie der Bildenden Kiinste
Gemildegalerie, Vienna (tempera on red beech), and a third in +jj in the Art
Museum, Nizhni-Novgorod (oil on wood). The three show Lucretia in a similar
pose and bejewelled, but in varying states of undress. In the +jj image the veil
drops to reveal the beginning of the crotch. Cranach also did a woodcut of The
Self-Sacrice of Marcus Curtius in +joy. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York is a pen and brown ink over black chalk drawing of Lucretia by
Raphael (c. +j+o). Raphaels drawing was copied by Raimondi Marcantonio
(+yj+j) and Marcantonios engraving from the drawing (c. +j+o) bears the
title Dido. This interchangeability of names shows the popularity of these female
suicides but also the gradual dissipation of the original stories and of the
individuality of the heroines.
M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
::
(London and New York, +8), p. +y.
j J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. L. Roudiez (New York,
+8:), p. y+.
C. Moore, Backgrounds of English Literature, .,cc.,6c (Minneapolis, +j), pp.
+8+. Moore draws on the Abbs writing in the journal Pour et Contre from
+yo.
y Ibid., p. +8. The English upper classes were the focus of puritan criticism here,
and their suicide seen as a result of idleness.
8 J. Foxe, History of the Actes and Monuments of the Church (London, ++), p. :.
The cases of the apostate Judge Hale of Kent who committed suicide after his
arrest, p. , and that of Clarke, an open enemy of the gospel, p. , or of
Bomelius, a student at Louvain who drew on the company of Tyleman, master of
the popes college indicate further the willingness to tie suicidal tendencies to
papists or to believe Roman Catholicism led to despair and self-killing, p. 8.
J. Donne, Biathanatos (London, +). A survey of the Bible will indicate that
Donne was correct. Donnes poem The Legacy is also worth reading in respect of
his argument on voluntary death, with its theme of mans immutability. See also
L. G. Crocker, Discussion of Suicide in the Eighteenth Century, Journal of the
History of Ideas, no. + (+j:), pp. yy:; McManners, Death and the
Enlightenment; T. I. Beauchamp, Suicide in the Age of Reason in B. A. Brody,
ed., Suicide and Euthanasia: Historical and Contemporary Themes (Dordrecht,
Boston and London, +8); Zell, Suicide in Pre-Industrial England; M.
MacDonald, The Secularisation of Suicide in England, Past and Present, +++
(+8).
Foxe, Actes and Monuments.
jo J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (London, +o), p. :jj.
j+ Cutter, Art and the Wish to Die, pp. :o:.
j: V. Knox, Essays Moral and Literary (London, +yy8o).
j Holbeins image can be read in the context of the age of severity as a result of
wider changes, crusades against popular culture and suicide beginning to be read
as a polarity of Christian hope.
, An English Dance of Death?
+ E. Young, The Complaint: Or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality
[+y] (London, +8o).
: T. Warton, Ode on Suicide (London, +yy+). Along with Gray and Percy it was
Warton who recognised the Rowley poems as fabrications.
M. MacDonald and T. Murphy, Death lAnglaise, in Sleepless Souls. Suicide in
Early Modern England (Oxford, +o), deals with the topic in some detail, pp.
oy+. The argument is that Bills of Mortality and newspapers convinced
natives and foreigners alike of Englands malady.
G. Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture (Baltimore,
+).
j Young, Night Thoughts.
Z. Pierce, A Sermon on Self-Murder (London, +y), p. y. Pierce was Bishop of
Bangor, then Rochester.
y J. Henley, Cato Condemnd or the Case and History of Self-Murder, Argued and
Displayed at Large, occasioned by a Gentleman of Grays Inn Stabbing Himself in
the year .,c, and other instances (London, +yo), pp. 8+o.
8 Ibid., p. +o.
Lord Byron, Don Juan, ed. L. A. Marchand (Boston, +j8), p. +8.
:
+o D. Hume, Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul (London, +yyy), p. :+.
++ D. Diderot, Oeuvres Complete, eds J. Asszat and M. Tourneaux (Paris, +8yjy),
vol. , p. :.
+: Gentlemans Magazine, rvr ( April +y8), pp. +o++.
+ Ibid., rrv ( April +y8), pp. 8yy8.
+ Hume, Essays on Suicide, p. :+.
+j C. Fleming, Dissertation Upon the Unnatural crime of Self-Murder (London,
+yy).
+ B. W. Oddy, The Suicide, An Ode, in Gentlemans Magazine, rxrr (JulyDecember
+y:).
+y N. Llewellyn, The Art of Death (London, ++), pp. +:y. See also J. Hayes,
Thomas Rowlandson: Watercolours and Drawings (London, +y:); T. Rowlandson,
The English Dance of Death (London, +8+j), p. +. Also R. Paulson, Rowlandson:
A New Interpretation (New York, +y:).
+8 C. A. Moore, Backgrounds of English Literature (Minneapolis, +j). For the
growth of romantic suicide see A. Marchwinski, The Romantic Suicide and the
Artists, trans. I. Green, in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, crx, (February +8y),
pp. y. Marchwinski gives the voluntary deaths of the French Revolution as
exemplum virtutis, p. . It is these ethical values that Neoclassicism espouses in
the face of open condemnation of the act of suicide.
+ G. H. Lewes, The Life of Goethe (New York, +j), p. ::.
:o R. Williams, The Country and the City (London, +8j), p. +.
:+ I. Watts, A Defense against the Temptation to Self-Murther wherein the Criminal
nature and the Guilt of it is Displayed, the various Pretences for it are Examined and
Answerd (London, +y:).
:: G. L. le Sage, Remarques sur ltat dAngleterre (Paris, +y+j) cited in C. A. Moore,
Backgrounds of English Literature, p. +8:.
: Mercurius Politicus, June +y:o. The anonymous writer insisted that the English
were more prone to suicide than the rest of the world.
: On English Suicide by a Foreigner, Gentlemans Magazine, v (: May +yy),
p. :o.
:j On English Suicide by a Foreigner, Fogs Journal (+ May +yy). That this
continued into the nineteenth century is evidenced in Forbes Winslows work
The Anatomy of Suicide (London, +8o). See also The Classic Land of Suicide,
The Psychological Journal (+8+).
: Henley, Cato Condemnd, p. :8.
:y W. Gough, To the Christian Reader (London, +y). Goughs sermon of +8 April
is cited in the preface to J. Sym, Lifes Preservatives against Self-Killing, or a useful
treatise concerning Life and Self-Murder (London, +y).
:8 G. Cheyne, The English Malady or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds; as
Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypo-chondriacal and Hysterical Distempers,
:nd edn (London, +y).
: On Suicide, Gentlemans Magazine, rr (August +y:), p. +.
o I. Lucas, ed., Peter Kalms Visit to England on the Way to America in .,,S (London
+8:), p. jy. Kalm thought the east wind might be a cause. Climatic factors as a
cause of suicide reected a longstanding belief in the capacity of the weather to
unbalance the humours, leading to melancholy. In England, the high rate of
winter suicides would seem to support it.
+ Gentlemans Magazine, vrr (: May +yy), p. :o. A survey of the Gentlemans
Magazine in the period from +y+ to +y8 revealed a growing variety of opinion
of suicide. Suicide was satirized, suicide was voted for and against, but above all,
there was an ongoing and dynamic discussion of suicide as crime and a product of
:
madness, lunacy, or a tortured mind.
: Ibid.
The Connoisseur (Thursday, January +yjj), p. :: a dull day was looked upon
as a natural order of execution, and Englishmen must necessarily shoot, hang or
drown themselves in November.
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Law, trans. T.
Nugent and J. V. Prichard, in Great Books of the Western World (Chicago, +j:),
p. +oy.
j Ibid., p. +o8.
Hume, Essays on Suicide, p. 8j.
y C. A. Moore, Backgrounds of English Literature, p. +8:.
8 N. Llewellyn, The Art of Death (London, ++), pp. :y.
J. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, th edn (London, +8yy), p. :.
o Ibid., pp. .
+ Ibid.
: Gentlemans Magazine, xxxv (August +yj), p. +y.
Minois, History of Suicide.
The Connoisseur (Thursday, January +yyj), p. :y.
j C. Fleming, Dissertation Upon the Unnatural crime of Self-Murder (London,
+yy).
J. Herries, An Address to the Public on the Frequent and Enormous Crime of Suicide
Delivered at the Old Jewry on the :nd January, .,,, (London, +yy).
y Hume, Essays on Suicide, p. +. Here, Hume draws on Rousseaus Eloisa.
8 V. Knox, Essays Moral and Literary, vol. rr (London, +yy8), p. .
C. Moore, A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide, to which are added two treatises
on duelling and gaming (London, +yo), pp. o+.
jo C. Tilly, Social Change in Modern Europe: The Big Picture, in L. Berlanstein,
ed., The Industrial Revolution and Work in Nineteenth Century Europe (London,
+:). Tillys argument is that communication was European and not local or
national. Tillys concept that non-coercive wage labour (capitalism) and the
political unit of the state were the social context for change is useful here as the
rst offers freedom and a concept of usefulness, the second offers regulation
and control over life until death. In this respect, see also M. Foucault, Right of
Death and Power over Life in History of Sexuality (London, +8+).
j+ Anon., Du Suicide (Paris, +yy), pp. :.
j: Ibid., p. .
j M. D. Blackett, Suicide: A Poem(London, +y8). Blackett clearly illustrates the
problem of the pre-statistical era in her acceptance of the frequency of suicide.
See M. Zell, Suicide in Pre-Industrial England, Social History, xr (+8).
j Moore, A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide, p. o.
jj Knox, Essays Moral and Literary, vol. rr, p. ::.
j Herries, An Address to the Public, on the Frequent and Enormous Crime of Suicide,
pp. . Herries refers to melancholy as a demon.
jy Knox, Essays Moral and Literary, vol. rr, p. :+8.
j8 Ibid., p. ::o.
j B. Mandeville, A Treatise of Hypochondriack and Hysterical Passions (London,
+y++). Also R. Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours: Or,
Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Affections with Three Discourses on the Nature and
Cure of the Cholic, Melancholy and Palsies (London, +y:j).
o The English Dance of Death (from the design of Thomas Rowlandson) (London,
+o), pp. +:+.
+ Moore, A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide, p. +.
:j
: Blackett, Suicide: A Poem.
Ibid.
There is a vast ledger of Chattertonia in the British Library. The last, rather
sad, entry is from a Daily Mirror report on the vandalizing of his statue in Bristol
during +j.
j The image is referred to by MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. +:. See
also C. K. Cieszowski, The Legend Makers: Chatterton, Wallis and Meredith,
History Today, xxxrr (November +8:) pp. j.
MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. +.
y Moore, A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide, p. +:.
8 Ibid., pp. :+y+8. Moore describes suicide as a cowardly and effeminate revenge
[motivated] by dissipated love.
Knox, Essays Moral and Literary, vol. rr, p. :j:.
yo H. Montgomery Hyde, The Strange Death of Lord Castlereagh (London, +j8),
pp. :o:. See also B. T. Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories
(Princeton, J, +88), pp. .
y+ Gates, Victorian Suicide.
y: E. H. Carr, What is History? (London, +8y), p. 8.
y Hyde, The Strange Death of Lord Castlereagh.
y Byron, Don Juan, p. +8.
, Preserving Life and Punishing Death
+ A. Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, vol. r, The Violent Against Themselves
(Oxford and New York, +8), pp. :8:.
: Ibid., pp. +y and :8.
SPCK, Suicide: Its Guilt and Punishment. Earnestly Addressed to all classes
particularly those of Humble Life, in Religious Tracts, circulated by the SPCK in
eleven volumes in +8. This excerpt is taken from vol. rrr, published in +8:,
pp. y. In part it draws on an article in The Courier (: August +8+y). G. Minois,
History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture (Baltimore, +),
indicates that a similar attitude existed in France.
O. Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford, +8y) p. :+.
j E. P. Thompson and E. Yeo, eds, The Unknown Mayhew (London, +y),
pp. :oo:+.
Ibid. See also Anderson, Suicide, p. o.
y Anderson, Suicide, pp. :o:.
8 The Times (:o April +8). The furore over Furley lasted months. At the end of
the year The Northern Star (:8 December +8) was still making mileage from
the case.
M. Slater, Dickenss Tracts for the Times, in M. Slater, ed., Dickens .,,c
(London,+yo), pp. +:.
+o L. Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin and
Philosophy and other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (New York, +y+), p. +8.
Foucaults ideas of suicide, expressed in History of Sexuality, are extremely close
to his tutors.
++ K. Ittmann, Work, Gender, and Family in Victorian England (Basingstoke, +j).
Also L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England .,cc.Scc (New York,
+yy).
+: Anderson, Suicide, see chapter Mid-Victorian London pp. +:::.
+ The Print in Germany: .,Sc.,, exh. cat. (London, +8). In the background
of Klingers ironic nal image is pictured the Akademie deutsche Kunst. Klingers
:
work inuenced a series of later German Expressionist works by Hans
Baluschek, Heinrich Zilles Simplicissimus (+o) and Kathe Kollwitzs
Simplicissimus (+o), although Klingers portrayal was of a cry for help, which in
later expressionist works turned to a scream.
+ Art Journal (June +8+), and Athenaeum(+: May +8o).
+j J. Ruskin, letter in The Times (:j May +8j).
+ T. J. Clark, Image of the People, Gustave Courbet and the .S,S Revolution (London,
+y). For the latter part of the century, E. W. Herbert, The Artist and Social
Reform: France and Belgium, .SS,.S,S (New York, +y+).
+y Anderson, Suicide, pp. +:::.
+8 J. Clubbe, ed., Selected Poems of Thomas Hood (Cambridge, +, +yo).
+ M. Watson, The Suicide Prostitute (Cambridge, +8oj).
:o J. Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore, +8). If Lacans
notion of rst and second deaths is applicable here then the second death takes
place in the symbolic order.
:+ E. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic
(Manchester, +:), p. :+.
:: B. T. Gates, Suicidal Women: Fact or Fiction? in Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes
and Sad Histories (Princeton, J, +88), pp. +:jjo.
: B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England,
.S.,.S,: (London, +y+), pp. :+:.The word alcoholism was rst used in +8o,
and by +8yy alcoholism was described as a disease.
: Gates, Suicidal Women, pp. +:y. The method was violent and contradicted
passive notions of feminine suicide. The choice of descent was also important.
The idea of monstrous women, women as furies, is discussed in chapter + of N.
Auerbach, Women and the Demon (Cambridge, +8:).
:j S. A. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Sickness unto Death [+8], trans. W.
Lowrie (Princeton, J, +j).
: Suicide from Waterloo Bridge (The Suicide of Alice Blanche Oswald),
Illustrated Police News (:+ September +8y:). Also, Suicide of Two Girls (:
October +88).
:y A.-J.-F. Brire de Boismont, De linuence de la civilisation sur le suicide,
Annales dhygine (+8jj).
:8 Singular Attempt at Suicide, Illustrated Police News (: June +8y).
: For a more extensive analysis of wig-wearing see M. Pointon, The Case of the
Dirty Beau, Symmetry, Disorder and the Politics of Masculinity, in K. Adler
and M. Pointon, eds, The Body Imaged (Cambridge, +).
o G. H. Savage, Suicide as a Symptom of Mental Disorder, Guys Hospital
Reports, rd Series, xxxv (+8).
+ Bentleys Miscellany, vr (+8).Thanks to Dr Julie Rugg for this amusing
reference.
: Ibid.
C. Fleming, Dissertation upon the Unnatural Crime of Self-Murder Occasioned by
the Many late Instances of Suicide in this City (London, +yy).
Abb Bergier, Examinen du materialisme, ou refutation du Systeme de la nature
(Paris, +yy+).
j Fleming, Dissertation, p. +8.
Ibid.
y M. Doane, Theorising the Female Spectator, Screen, xxrrr, /
(SeptemberOctober +8:) p. +8.
8 C. Lombroso, The Female Offender (New York, +8j), pp. +joj:.
Anon., The Red Barn (London, +8:o).
:y
o J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. L. Roudiez (New York,
+8:), p. y+.
+ Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, pp. :oj:. Also B. Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity:
Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Sicle Culture (Oxford, +8); M. Higonnet,
Speaking Silences: Womens Suicide, in S. R. Suleiman, The Female Body in
Western Culture (Cambridge, +, and London, +8), pp. y:.
: R. Melrose Brown, The Road to Ruin, PhD dissertation, University of Sussex,
:ooo.
6 The Century of Destruction
+ A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London and New York, +yj), p. ++.
: A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York, +yo), p. ::j.
G. Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, in Classic Essays on the Culture of
the City (New York, +). See also M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism(London, +y), p. +8:.
Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life.
j Ibid.
U. Boccioni, Futurist painting: Technical Manifesto, reproduced in C.
Harrison and P. Wood, Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. .,cc.,,c
(Oxford and Cambridge, +, +), p. +j+. First published in Poesia in leaet
form in ++o.
y F. T. Marinetti, The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, rst published in
Le Figaro (:o February +o).
8 A. Breton, Is Suicide a Solution?, La Rvolution Surraliste, +: (July
+:jDecember +:).
M. A. Caws, Ladies Shot and Painted: Female Embodiment in Surrealist Art, in
S. R. Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, +, and
London, +8).
+o J.-P. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism[+8], trans. P. Mairet (London, +y),
pp. +:+.
++ F. Cutter, Art and the Wish to Die (Chicago, +8), p. :. Cutter is quoting a
letter from E. Shneidman, a key gure in the eld of suicidology, whose work
includes Essays on Self-Destruction (New York, +y).
+: Ibid.
+ J. Baudrillard, The Hyper-realism of Simulation, in Jean Baudrillard. Selected
Writings (Stanford, +88).
+ Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism.
+j I. Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London, +), p. +o.
+ F. Jameson, The Deconstruction of Expression, New Left Review (July/August
+8), pp. j:.
+y J. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since .Scc
(London and New York, +8+), pp. :j+:.
+8 J. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. C. Levin, in J. Fekete, ed.,
The Structural Allegory (London, +).
+ Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, pp. jj.
:o G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London and Athlone, +88),
pp. :o+.
:+ Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. +.
:: A. Artaud, van Gogh: the Man Suicided by Society [+y], in H. Weaver, ed.,
Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings (Los Angeles, +88).
: This is in an email in my possession from the Pollock Krasner Trust. Thanks to
:8
the Trust for this valuable information.
: L. R. Lippard, Pop Art (New York, +), pp. y+o+.
:j Ibid.
: R. Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York, +8+), p. 8. See also J. Updike,
Fast Art, New Republic, :oo (:y March +8), pp. :8; B. R. Collins, The
Metaphysical Nosejob: The Remaking of Warhola, Arts Magazine, : (February
+88), pp. yjj; A. Warhol and P. Hackett, Popism: The Warhol 6cs (New York,
+8o), p. ::.
:y P. Bergin, Andy Warhol: The Artist as Machine, Art Journal, xxvr/ (Summer
+y), pp. j.
:8 R. Hughes, The Rise of Andy Warhol, New York Review of Books, xvrrr
(February +8:), pp. +o.
: L. Alloway, Art, The Nation, ccrr/:+ (: May +y+), pp. 8.
o P. Nahon, Americas Most Famous Artist, Cimaise, j (SeptOct +8y),
pp. 8:.
Postscript
+ Heavens Gate, Our Position Against Suicide,
www.heavensgate.com/misc/letter.html.
: Heavens Gate, Press Release, :: March +y.
D. Plotz, The Cult, the Comet and the Web: From Rancho Santa Fe to Heavens
Gate, www.slate.com/TangledWeb/yo:8/TangledWeb.asp.
esse the K, Re: Jack Kevorkian,
www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/disabilityresearch/+-o:/oo8+.html.
j D. M. Pappas, Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide in G. Howarth and P. C. Jupp,
eds, Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Death, Dying and Disposal (London
+), pp. +y+j.
E. Freeman Sharpe, Similar and Divergent Unconscious Determinants
Underlying the Sublimations of Pure Art and Pure Science in Collected Papers
on Psycho-Analysis (London, +jo), pp. +yj. See also Sharpes excellent paper
The Impatience of Hamlet, pp. :o+.
y V. Knox, Essays Moral and Literary, vol. + (London, +yy8), p. :+8.
8 S. Lawson. Thanks to Sonia for the notes on her painting.
S. McLean, Law at the End of Life, in M. Mitchell and A. M. Gilroy, The
Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal, th International Conference
Proceedings, Glasgow Caledonian University (Glasgow, +8) pp. +oy8.
:
Select Bibliography
Alvarez, A., The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York, +yo)
Anderson, O., Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford +8y)
Aris, P., Western Attitudes to Death (Baltimore, +y)
Bassein, B. A., Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature
(Westport, c+, +8)
Baudrillard, J., Symbolic Exchange and Death (London, +)
Braudel, F., History and Social Science. The longue dure, in On History, trans.
S. Matthews (Chicago, +8o)
Brody, B. A., ed., Suicide and Euthanasia: Historical and Contemporary Themes
(Dordrecht, Boston and London, +8)
Bronfen, E., Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester,
+:)
Camille, M., Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator (New
Haven and London, +)
Cieszkowski, C. K., The Legend Makers: Chatterton, Wallis and Meredith, History
Today, xxxrr (November +8:), pp. y
Clemons, J. T., What does the Bible say about Suicide? (Minneapolis, +o)
Crocker, L. G., Discussion on Suicide in the Eighteenth Century, Journal of the
History of Ideas, no. + (+j:), pp. yy:
Crudens, A., A Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testament (London, +)
Cutter, F., Art and the Wish to Die (Chicago, +8)
Daube, D., The Linguistics of Suicide, Philosophy and Public Affairs, r (+y:),
pp. 8yy
Dijkstra, B., Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of the Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Sicle Culture
(Oxford, +8)
Donaldson, I., The Rapes of Lucretia. A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford, +8:)
Droge, A. J., and J. D. Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians
and Jews in Antiquity (San Francisco, +:)
Duffy, E., The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England .,cc.,Sc
(New Haven and London, +:), pp. ++y
Durkheim, E., Suicide, trans. J. A. Spaulding and G. Simpson (London, +j:)
Farberow, N. L., and Shneidman, E. S., The Cry for Help (London, ++)
Frey, R. G., Did Socrates Commit Suicide?, Philosophy, j (+y8), pp. +o8
Garland, R., Death without Dishonour: Suicide in the Ancient World, History
Today, xxxrrr (+8), p. y
, The Greek Way of Death (London, +8j)
Gates, B. T., Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton, J, +88)
Grifn, M. F., Philosophy, Cato and Roman Suicide, I & II, in Greece and Rome,
xxxrrr/+ (April +8) and : (October +8)
Gris, Y., De la frequence du suicide chez les Romains, Latomus, (+8o),
pp. +
:+
Hamer, M., Signs of Cleopatra (London and New York, +)
Higonnet, M., Speaking Silences in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. S. R.
Suleiman (Cambridge, +, and London, +8), pp. 8y
Howarth, G., and Jupp, P. C., eds, Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Death,
Dying and Disposal (London, +)
Hughes-Hallett, L., Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions (London, ++)
Llewellyn, N., The Art of Death (London, ++)
MacDonald, M., The Secularisation of Suicide in England, Past and Present, +++
(+8), pp. jo+oo
, The Inner Side of Wisdom: Suicide in Early Modern England, Psychological
Medicine, y (+yy), pp. jj8:
, and T. R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls. Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford,
+o)
Marchwinksi, A., The Romantic Suicide and the Artists, trans. I. Green, Gazette
des Beaux-Arts (February +8y), pp. :y
McManners, J., Death and the Enlightenment. Changing Attitudes to Death in
Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, +8j)
Minois, G., History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture (Baltimore, +)
Murray, A., Suicide in the Middle Ages, vol. r The Violent Against Themselves
(Oxford and New York, +8)
Pearson, A. C., The Ajax of Sophocles (London, +oy)
Richardson, R., Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London, +88)
Rost, H., Bibliographie des Selbstmords (Augsburg, +:y)
Shneidman, E. S., Essays on Self-Destruction (New York, +y)
Taylor, B., The Medieval Cleopatra: The Classical and Medieval Tradition of
Chaucers Legend of Cleopatra, Journal of Renaissance and Medieval Studies, y
(+yy), pp. :
Tietze-Conrat, E., Patterns of Suicide in Literature and Art, unpublished
typescript, Warburg Institute Library, +jy8
Touchefen, O., Ajax, in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae +, ed. J.
Boardman (Zurich, +8+),
Van Hooff, A. J. L., From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-Killing in Classical Antiquity
(London and New York, +o)
Wahl, C. S., Suicide as a Magical Act in Clues to Suicide, eds E. Shneidman and N.
L. Farberow (New York, +jy)
Wittkower, R., and Wittkower, M., Born Under Saturn (New York, +)
Zapalac, K. E. S., In His Image and His Likeness: Political Iconography and Religious
Change in Regensberg, .,cc.6cc (Ithaca and London, +o)
Zell, M., Suicide in Pre-Industrial England, Social History, xr (+8), pp. o+y
::
Acknowledgements
In general, I would like to acknowledge my debt to the many curators, librarians and
museum staff who answered my enquiries and helped me along the way. I owe thanks
particularly to the British Museum, British Library, Wellcome Institute and Warburg
Institute. Thanks to Roy Porter who took time out to discuss the work with me some
years ago when I knocked on his door on spec, and to Olive Anderson for replying to
my letter with sound advice. If I was to list all of the institutions and people who
helped me in my task, it would require another book. I thank them all.
In particular, I owe a huge debt to Nigel Llewellyn, who was my DPhil tutor at the
University of Sussex and whose patience kept me going in what was a long up-hill
struggle. Nigels book The Art of Death (++) was a major inuence. Thanks also to
Maurice Howard at Sussex, who was always prepared to assist and guide me.
Here at Leeds Metropolitan University, I involved a host of staff in the project.
Denise York read my typescripts and made many astute observations. Veronica Lovell
chased up images with relentless vigour. Sylvia Reid read earlier versions of the script,
and those all-important commas were put in. Hans van Lemmen was especially help-
ful in obtaining images of tiles and giving his expert advice on them. Our reprographic
service deserves a special mention. Finally, I owe a debt to the University and to
Professor Howard Green for the sabbatical which gave me valuable time to write.
I wish to extend my thanks to Reaktion Books, to Harry Gilonis for his expertise
as picture editor, and to Andrea Belloli for her guidance with editing.
:
Photographic Acknowledgements
The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the following sources of
illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it (other than institutions
named in full in the captions):
Photo ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London :ooo: 8; photo: The Andy
Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York/ARS, New York and DACS,
London :ooo: +, ++; photo: ARS, New York and DACS, London :ooo: ++:, ++;
photo: Bayerische Staatsgemldesammlungen, Munich: :, ; Biblioteca Apostolica
Vaticana, Rome: +y, +8 (Cod. Lat. ::j), : (Vat. Gr. yyF:jRo), :j (Vat. Gr.
yyF::Vo), j (Vat. Lat. yF8Ro); photo: Bibliothque Nationale de France,
Paris: + (Ms fr. +:, fol. :jjv); photo courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Reproduced with permission. :ooo Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All Rights
Reserved: (Francis Bartlett Donation); Bridgeman Art Library: :, , +, :8, :, +,
, (Paul Mellon Collection), (William Hood Dunwoody Fund), 8, 8y, o;
photo: British Library Reproductions: , 8; British Museum, London: :o, ,
j+oo, title page; photo: DACS, London :ooo: +++; Gallia (:, +8+): +:;
Giraudon: :y (Ms. /+:8 fol. +y v); Giraudon-Bridgeman Art Library: , +;
photo: Istituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, Mexico City: 88; Lauros-
Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library: :+; photo: Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London :ooo: +oy; photo: National Library of Ireland, Dublin: ; photo:
Succession Picasso/DACS, London :ooo: +o; photo: Tate Picture Library/ Tate,
London :oo+: y+, 8 (purchased with the assistance of a special grant from the
National Gallery and donations from the National Art Collections Fund, Lord
Duveen and others, and presented through the National Art Collections Fund);
photo courtesy of Hans van Lemmen: j; photo Vatican Museum, Rome/M. Sarri:
o; photos: V&A Picture Library/ The Board of Trustees of the Victoria & Albert
Museum: y:, 8j, +o; photo courtesy of the Trustees of the Watts Gallery, Compton,
Surrey: 8; Peter Willi: 8.
:j
Abimelech j8, ,,, o,
Absalom o, ++
Addison, Joseph +, +o+
Ahitophel jy, o, :, , ++, ..S
Ajax +8, :c, :j, :6, :,, :8+, :,, j,
8, 8o, +
alcoholism +jy; see also drink
Alloway, Lawrence :+:
Althusser, Louis +j+
Alvarez, A. +, +
American Photo Syndicate +8, :+8
Amusements des Anglais Londres +:j,
.:,
Amykos Painter, the +, :
Anderson, Olive +, +j, +j
Andics, Marguerite von 8
Anena :
antiquity 8, +++, +8, :+, :, y, o,
:, 8, j+:, j, j8, y8, 8, 88, o,
:, +::, +, +y, :o8
Antony j:, 8:, ,
Aris, Philippe :o
Arria :
Ars Moriendi +, jo, 8, 8
art history , +o, ++, +, +y, +8, , ::+
art of suicide +j, +8, :+8, :::
Art Union of London, The +8
Artaud, Antonin :oy, :o8
Attalos , ,, j
Augustine of Hippo :, , y, 8+,
+, +oj
autocheira j
autophoneutes :, :o8
Avelli, Francesco Xanta +oo
Barlach, Ernst :o, :c,, :o
Bartolozzi, Francesco +
Baudrillard, Jean :oo, :o, :+:, :+8
Bazin, Germaine
Beham, Hans Sebald .cS
Bentleys Miscellany +
Bergier, Abb +yy
Bergson, Henri +j
Berman, Eugene :oy
Berthelet, Thomas
Bible, the +:, , jo, j, , y, ++j,
++; see also New Testament; Old
Testament
Bieber, M. 8
bioethics ++, :+y
Blackett, Mary Dawes +, +8, +8
Blackmore, Richard :
Blair, Robert +:
Blake, William +:y, +:, +, .6,
Boccaccio +o
Boccioni, Umberto +j
Boulanger de Boisfremont +
Bourdon, Sebastien ++
Braudel, Fernand +
Breton, Andr +j, +y
Brire de Boisemont, Alexandre ++
Brilliant, Richard
Britain +:
British Medical Journal +88
Bronfen, Elisabeth +j, +j
Browne, Hablot Knight (Phiz) +,
.6,
Browne, Thomas +o+
Brutus :, ++8
Bruyn, Bartholomaeus, the Elder
Burial Act +8
Burton, Robert 8, +j
Byron, Lord +
Cadmos .
Camus, Albert +8, +, +j, :o+:, :oy
Canace +, :, :
Canlassi, Guido +o
:y
Index
capitalism +:, +o+, +:, +8, +j
Carlyle, Thomas +
Carr, E. H. +:
Carracci, Annibale +
Casagemas, Carlos :o:, :c, :oj, :o
Cassius :
cassoni 8, ++
Castlereagh, Viscount, Marquis of
Londonderry +, +:, +:8, ++:,
.,, +j, +8, +8, +8
Cato +, :, +o:, .cc, +o8, ++8, +:
Cecioni, Adriano +8, .,:
Czanne, Paul +
chaos +8
Charleton, Walter +
Chatterton, Thomas +, +j, +:, +:,
+:8, +, +8:, .,, +j, +, +8,
:o; Handkerchief +, .,c
Cheyne, George 8, +o
Christianity +:, +, , , j+, j, ,
y, 8, ++, +; see also Early Chris-
tianity
Church, the y, :, j:, 8
Cicero
city, the +j:, +j, :oo
Clark, Kenneth ::o
Clark, T. J. +j
class ++, +:8, +o, +:, +, +8, :+:
Cleopatra , j:, ,, 6,, 8:, S:, :,
, y, ,6, +o, ++:, +, +y8
Cobb, Richard ++
Colombe, Jean 6,
Combes, William +
Comenius, Johann Amos y8, ,S
Connoisseur, The ++
coroners +, +o, ++, +:, +, +jo,
+yy, +8; see also inquests
Council of Auxerre y
Council of Braga y
Council of Orleans y
Council of Toledo y
Courier, The +8
Cranach, Lucas, ,c, +o
crime and criminalization +o, ::, 88, ,
+o:, +:, +, +y, +jo, +8, +8,
:+y; see also crying crimes
Croft, Herbert ++
crossroads burial 88, +, +8, +yy
Crudens Concordance to the Old and
New Testament j
Cruikshank, George +, +:, .,, +,
+jy, .,,, +j, +, .6,
crying crimes +, 8y, 8, +o:, +:y
Cutter, Fred , y, ++, +yy, +8, :o8,
:++
Dadaists :o:
Dadd, Richard +y, .6S
Dances of Death ++j, +:, +:y8, +j
danse macabre +, jo
Daube, David ::,
Daumier, Honor +:8, +
David, Jacques-Louis ++, .:c, +:8, +8
de Laszlo, Violet Staub :o8
de Vigny, Alfred ++, +
Decebulus , y8, S, ,, , j
decriminalization +, +:, +y, +, :+j
Deeves, F. +, .6,
Delaroche, Paul +j, .,.
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari :o:
Delftware tiles ++j+, ..6, ++8, ..S,
..,
Denham, Percival +8o
depression and depressive illness +o:,
+o, +8, +jy, +8, +88, +y, +,
:o+, :oy
Derrida, Jacques y, 8j
Desecration of the Corpse, The +yy, .,S
despair :, jj, y, yy8, 8, +o:, +o,
+o, +++, +:y, +:8, +j, +, +,
+j, +8
Devil, the j+:, y, yy, , , +o:, +8,
+; see also Satan
Dickens, Charles +j+; The Chimes +j+;
Nicholas Nickleby +, .6,
Diderot, Denis +:y
Dido :, jy, ,,, ,6, j+, 6S, ,:, 8:,
:, , +oo, ++:, +++j, ..,, +:8,
+, +y, +8:
Doane, M. +y8
Donaldson, Ian 8+
Donne, John 8, ++o
Dor, Gustave +j, .,c, +8
Douglas, Mary +o
drink +:, +:, +; see also alcoholism
Droge, A. J., and J. D. Tabor j+
Du Suicide +
Duffy, E. +
Drer, Albrecht , 8, S,, ,
Durkheim, mile o, , y8, +
Durkheimianism ++, +y, +, :+:,
:+8
Early Christianity +:+, +8, :, ,
:8
j+, j, 8+, 8j, :+; see also
Christianity
Egg, Augustus +jj, .,6
Elektra
Elmore, Alfred +
England +, :, 8, 88, +o, +++, ++j,
+:, +:j, +:yo, +, +, +j,
+j, +y, +y8, +; condition of
+j
Enlightenment, the 8, +:, +:y, ++
Epicureanism +, +:, , +o+, +++,
+:, +, +y
Epicurus +,
Epigonus
Esquirol, Etienne +8
eternal damnation y, ::, yy
Euadne :j, +
Euripides +, :, , ,,
euthanasia +88, +8, :+y
exagoge o, j, j, ++, :o
Exekias :,, :8
Expressionism :o+:, :o
family, the +o+, +j+:
Fini, Leonor :o, .,,
Fitzgerald, Lord Gerald +j
Fitzgerald, T. P. .,
Flameng, Leopold +8, .S,
Flaxman, John +8, :o
Fleming, Caleb 8y, +:, +y, +y, +yy
Fogs Journal +o
folklore j, yy, , +o, +y8
Forrest, Mr +:y
Forsyth, Joseph
Foucault, Michel +o, +, :o+
Foxe, John, History of the Actes and
Monuments of the Church (Foxes
Book of Martyrs) +++, ++:
France +, jo, 88, 8, ++, ++8, +:j,
+:y, ++, +8, +j, ++, +8
Francia; see Raibolini, Francesco
Frazer, J. G.
French Revolution ++, +:y, +8
Freud, Sigmund :8, +o+, ++:, +88, +o,
+j, :o:
Frith, William Powell +8, .S,; The
Road to Ruin +8, .S,6, :o+
Furley, Mary +joj+, +j:
Fuseli, John Henry ,:, ++, +, +8+,
.S:, +88, :o
Garzi, Luigi +oo
Gates, Barbara T. +, +j
Gautier de Coincy +
Geldzahler, Henry :+o
gender , ++, +, :j, 8+, +o, +j, +,
+y, +, +8, +j, +8:, +8, +8,
:o, :+:
Gentileschi, Artemisia 8, +o
Gentlemans Magazine +:y, +o, ++,
+:
Grard de Nerval +8
Germany +, 8, 88, 8, +o, +:y, +j+,
+j:, +y, :o+, :o:
Gesta Romanorum :, 8+
Gilbert and Sullivan +
Gilpin, William yy, +o:
Giotto 66, yy8, +oy
Gislebertus ,,
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von , +:;
Dichtung und Warheit +:; The
Sorrows of Young Werther +:, +:8,
+, +o
Gough, William +o
Grant, Michael :
Grasset, Eugne-Samuel +8, .,, :+o
Great Crash of +8y +j+
Greenland ++
Grifths, Abel +
Gris, Y. :, y
Halbwachs, M.
Hale, Dorothy .,, :o, :o
Hales, Bishop +:
Haman y8o
Hamilton, Gavin +, +, .6,
Hamlet y, , ::+
hanging :, :j, +, j, 8, j+, jjy,
o, , y8, 8o, o, ++o, +++, +:8,
+:, +8, +, +yy, +y8, +8
Haskell, F., and N. Penny j
Hayter, William :o, :oy
Heavens Gate +8, :.,, :+j+, :+8
Hell Fire Club +:
Hell ::, o, :+:
Henley, J. (Orator) +:, +o
Henry of Hohenstaufen +y
Herakles o+, ., j, j, +8, :o
Hero and Leander +
Herries, John , +:, +j
Higonnet, Margaret +j
Hogarth, William +::, +j, +, +y,
+jy, +; Marriage A la Mode ++,
.:c, +:8, +:; Gin Lane +:8, .:,
:
Holbach, Paul Henri, Baron d +:y
Holbein, Hans ++
honeymoon suicides +
Hood, Thomas +joj+, +j, +j
Hughes, Robert :++
Hume, David +8, +:y, ++, +:
Hunt, William Holman +j
Illustrated Police News, The +jy, .,S,
+j, .6c, ++, .6:, .6, +8, .S,
Industrial Revolution +:
inquests +j, ++; see also coroners
insanity 88, :, +, ++:, +8, +8,
+88; see also lunacy and lunatics;
madness; mental illness; non compos
mentis; unsound mind
Internet +8, :+j, :+8
Ireland +y
Irnshaw, David .,,, :o8
Italy +, 8, +o
Iver, Hans :o
Jameson, Frederick +
Joffrin, Guilly :++, :+:
Jokaste :j
Joos van Cleve 8
Josephus j
Judas :j, jojj, ,,, ,,, j8, o, , 6,,
yy, ,, ,6, 8o, 8j, 88, o, ++o++,
+::, +:, .,:, +yy, +8o, :+:o
jumpers +jy
Kahlo, Frida .,, :oj
Kalm, Peter +o, ++
Kauffman, Angelica +
Kevorkian, Dr Jack :+j, :++y
Kierkegaard, Sran +j
Klinger, Max, Eine Mutter +j+:, .,:,
+j, +8
Knox, Vicesimus +8, 8y, ++, +:, +,
+j, +y, ++, ::+
Kollwitz, Kthe :o, :c,
Kristeva, Julia +o, +8+, +8
Lacan, Jacques +j, +j
Lancet, The +88
langue 8j
Laodameia :
Lateran Council j
Lawson, Sonia .,6, :::
le Goff, Jacques 8
le Sage, Georges Louis +o
Liberale da Verona ++, ..,
Lippard, Lucy :+o
Livy 8
Llewellyn, N. ++
Lombroso, Cesare +y8
London +:o, +:, +8, +j
Londonderry, Lord (Marquis of); see
Castlereagh, Viscount
Low Countries +; see also Netherlands,
the
Lucius Cosius ,
Lucretia :, 6,, ,c, ,., 8+, S., S, S,,
88, :, , , ,,, y, ,,, +o:8,
.c, .c,, ++, +, +y8, .6S, +y8,
+8:, +8, :+o++, :+, :::
Ludovisi Gaul , ,, jy, , y8, j,
:o:
Luiken, Jan ++, ..,
Luini, Bernardino y, ,,
lunacy and lunatics +, +o, +:, +o,
+:, +j, +, +; see also insanity;
madness; mental illness; non compos
mentis; unsound mind
MacDonald, M., and T. R. Murphy :,
8, 8, :, , +j, +o
Maciejowski Bible j8
madness y, ++, +, , +, +j+, +8:,
+8, +, :+:; see also insanity;
lunacy and lunatics; mental illness;
non compos mentis; unsound mind
maiolica , ,,, +oo
Man Ray +y, .,,
Mandeville, Bernard +j
Manet, Edouard +, +8
Mantalini, Mr +, .6,
Marcus Curtius
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso +j
Marshall, Dorothy j+
martyrs and martyrdom joj+, o, 8j,
8, 88, o, ++, +8, +j; satanic yj
Masada j, +8, :+
Masereel, Frans +, :cc, :o+
Masson, Andr :oy
Master B P ..c
Master of the Holy Blood ,., +oj
masturbation +88
Mayhew, Henry +jo
medicine and medical science +, +, +j,
8y, 88, +, :, , +o:, +o, +o, +o,
+:+, +, +y, +j, +, +8o, +88,
+
:jo
melancholia (melancholy) 8y, +, :,
+o:, +++, +:j, +:8, ++, +j, +y,
++, +8:
memento mori , ++:, ::o
Menninger, Karl +o
Menoikeus :
mental illness +8, :oy; instability +8,
+8o; see also insanity; lunacy and
lunatics; madness; non compos
mentis; unsound mind
mentalits y8
Mercurius Politicus +o
Middle Ages j:, , 8+, 88
middle classes ++j, ++, ++8, +:+, +,
+
Millais, John Everett +j, +8o8+, .S.,
:o+, :o
Minois, Georges ++, +8
Mir, Joan :o8
Mishima, Yukio :o
misogyny +o+
Mohocks +:
Monroe, Marilyn :o+:, :+8
Montesquieu ++
Moore, Charles +8, 8y, , +o+, +:,
+, +y, ++
Moyes, Margaret +jy
Munch, Edvard +j+, +
Murdoch, Iris +
Murray, Alexander 88, +y
Myrmillo y
myth +8:, :++
Nahl, Johann +
Nahon, Pierre :+:
Narcissus +:, ++:
nation , ++, +, :j, j, y8, +++, +,
+8, +:, +j, ++, +8
Nead, Lynda +
Nero :
Netherlands, the 8; see also Low Coun-
tries
New Testament +, , jo, j, , y,
88
Nietzsche, Friedrich +, :o+
nomos (culture)
non compos mentis o, +o, ++, +, +jo;
see also insanity; lunacy and lunatics;
madness; mental illness; unsound
mind
Norway +j+
Oddy, B. W. +:y
Oesterreich, Mathias +
Ohnerfurcht, Johann 6:
oikos (private domain) , y
Old Testament +, , j, jy, +, ,
y, +o, ++
Ophelia y, +oj, +j, .,,, .,,, +8o8:,
.S., .S:, +88, :o+, :o, :o8,
:+o+:, ::+, :::
Orozco, Jos :o8
Oswald, Alice Blanche .,S, +j, ++
otherness and the other :+, y, ,
++o, +, +jo, +, :++
Ovid, +:, y8, 8, ++:+
Ovide Moralis ++
Paetus j
Pantheia :j
parole 8
Pearce, Zachary +o+
Pearson, A. C. :
Peasants War +o
Pellegrini, Giovanni Antonio +
Peregrinus o, +
Perpetua 8
Perrier, Franois +o8, .cS
Phaedra (Fedra) +, :j, ,, ,,
philosophes +:, +:y
philosophy 8, , ++, +8, :+, ::o
Philostratos :, :j, +
photography ++, +8, +y, :o, :+o,
:+
physis (nature)
Picasso, Pablo :o:, :c, :o, :o8, :+o
Pierce, Zachary 8y, +:
Pindar :
Pissarro, Camille +j, +8, .,.
Plankney and Havington +++
Plato 8, +8, ::, :, +oo
Platzer, Johan +
Pliny 8+
Pluis Jan, ++j
Poland 88
polis (public domain)
Pollock, Jackson :o8, :c,
Polyclitus :8
Pompeii o, ,., :
Pontius Pilate :
poor, the , ++
popular culture , +, +j, +, +8,
+jj, +8; visual 8
pornography of violence +, +j, :o
:j+
Portia , :, ++:, +8:
post-ego 8
postmodernity +, :+:, :+
press, the +:, ++, +, +j, :o; see
also yellow press, the
Prvost, Abb +++, ++
print culture +:, j, yy, ++
prints ++8, +:8, +, +
Procris and Cephalus y8, ,,
prostitution +j, +, +jo, +j, +8,
+88
Protestantism :, 8, , +o+, +::,
++:, +y, +
Prudentius 8o
Pucelle, Jean +
purgatory +, ::, ++
Pyramus and Thisbe o:, ,., j, y,
:, , +oo, ++:+, .., +
Queen Mary Psalter j8
Raibolini, Francesco (Francia) , ,,,
+o
Ramberg j
rape 8+, 8, 8, +o:, +oj, +oy8
Razis 8
Redon, Odilon :oy
Reformation, the +:, 8
Regents Canal +jo
Rembrandt +o:, .c, +o, .c6, +oy, +o,
Remiet, Pierre j:, ,, j, 8+, S., 8:
Reni, Guido 6,, , ,6
Renieri, Niccol ,,, ++:
Reynolds, Joshua +:8, +, +
Ricci, Sebastiano +o, +oy, .c,, +o,
+++j
Richeome, Louis +, +o+
Rilke, Rainer Maria +
Rivalz, Antoine +
Rops, Flicien +8
Rost, Hans ++
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques +:
Rowlandson, Thomas +:8, +, .,, +
Rowley, William 8y,
Rubens, Peter Paul 6S, :, ,, +o,
+o8, +++j, +
Ruskin, John +j
Russia ++
St Paul j:, , 8, :o
Samson , jy8, o, :, ++, +
Sandrart, Joachim von :
Sarasin, Jean-Franois +o+
Sartre, Jean-Paul +8, +, :o:
Satan 8, +o+, +o:, +o, +o; see also
Devil, the
Saul , jy8, o, , ++j+, ..6,
..,, ..S, ++
Schufelein, Hans y
Schober, Arnold ,
Scotland ++j, +y
Seneca 8, ,c, , :, ,, , ,
+o8, .cS, ++8+, +:8, +8
sensibility +, , +j, ++, +j, +j,
+8o
servants +:, +y8
sexuality ++, +o+, +8, +88, :o
Shakespeare, William +o, +8o; Hamlet
y, +88; A Midsummer Nights Dream
:; The Rape of Lucrece +oj; Romeo
and Juliet :
Sharpe, Ella Freeman ::o
Shawshank Redemption, The :o
Sherman, Sahri :++
Shneidman, E. S., and N. L. Farberow
+8
Simmel, Georg +j:, +j
sin +, :, j, y, +y, +j, +jj
Sirani, Elisabetha +o, +oy
Smith, Henry +:
Society for Promoting Christian Knowl-
edge (SPCK) +y, +8, +
Socrates 8, :+, ::, o, :, ++8+,
.:c, +8
Solar Temple +8
Solomon, Abraham +j
Sophocles :,
Sophonisba , :, , ,,, , ++:, +
soul :, , yy, 8+
Spain +, y
Stanhope, Spencer +j
state, the :, :, +, +j+, :::; suicidal
:o:
statistics +::, +:, +
Stikeley, William 8
Stodhard, Charles Alfred j8, ,,
Stoics :, +, +o+, +:
Strange, Sir Robert , ,6
Sturm und Drang +:y
Suicide, The: A Tale found on Facts
+y8, .,,
Suicide Act +
suicide prevention +o
suicide rates +:j, +o, +8
:j:
suicidology +8, +y
Suleiman, S. R. +j
Sweden ++
Swinburne, Algernon Charles +8
Switzerland +, ++
Sym, John 8, +o+
Taylor, Barbara 8:
Testa, Giovanni Cesare +oo
Testa, Pietro +oo, .cc
Tietze-Conrat, Erika ++
Times, The +jo
Tinguely, Jean :o:
Tissot, James .,:, +o
Titian 6,, 8
Tnnies, Ferdinand +
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de +8
Tourniere, Robert +, +
Trajans Column , y, S
Tree of Life 8o
True-Hearted British Reader :
Tukes, Reverend Mr 8j, o+, :
Turner J. M. W., +
Two Brothers, The: Anpu and Bata :
unsound mind +y, +; see also insan-
ity; lunacy and lunatics; madness;
mental illness; non compos mentis
utilitarianism +:
Valerius Maximus 8+, S.
Vallaton, Flix +8, .,c
vampires +y
Van Gogh, Vincent :o8
Van Hooff, A. J. L. :, y, j, +oj
Veyne, Paul +o
Vincent of Beauvais ,, 8:
Virgil y, ++, ++; Aeneid y, +oo
Visconti, E. Q. , , 8
Vollard, Ambroise .,
Wahl, C. S. 8
Wales +y
Wallis, Henry +8, .,
Warhol, Andy +, .,, +, :o+:, :.,
:+, :+, :+8
Warton, Thomas +:
Waterloo Bridge +j
Watson, Mary +jj, +8
Watts, George Frederick +jo, .6,
Watts, Isaac :, +o+, +o
Weber, Max +j
Wellington, Duke of +
Werther , +:, +:, +o+, +
Whistler, James Abbott McNeill +8,
:o+
Wilde, Oscar +8, :o+
Williams, Raymond +:
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim , 8
witchcraft +o+
Withers, William +:j
woman y, +j, :8, :, yy, +oj, +:j, +j,
+j, +, +8o8+, +8, :oj, ::+
women :j, , :, j8, j8, ,
yy8o, 8:, :, , 8, +o+,
+oj, +o8, +++j, +:+, +:, +:,
+j, +8, +, +j+y, +j, ++,
+, +yy, +8o, +8:, +, :++,
::+:; falling +jy, +j
Women of Cimbria j, ,,
work +, +j+
working class +
World War I +, +j, +j+, +8, +8, +8,
:o+, :o
World War II :o8, :+o
world wide web :+, :+
Yates, James 8
yellow press, the +j, +jj, +, +8
Young, Edward +:, +:, +:y
Zapalac, Kristin +o
Zimmerman, Franz 8
Zimri jy, o, 6., 6:
:j