Poems in Stone

The Embodied Object: Recensions of the Dead on Roman Sarcophagi

“…We may argue that, as a visual and material instantiation of the rhetorical structures of ancient Roman mourning, 27 sarcophagi use portraiture to supply panegyric through images -amplifying and elaborating the memory of the deceased through narrative (especially mythological) contexts and adducing such devices as personification, as well as a stress on deeds and accomplishments, which were fundamental to the ancient rhetorical handbooks' prescriptions for monody, consolations and funerary eulogies. 28 But just as verbal rhetoric is a double-edged sword, with the risk of emptiness in that its subject may fail to live up to the virtues extolled, so the rhetoric of embodiment in all forms of portraiture on sarcophagi offers absence as much as presence, and potentially the sign of the emptiness of all consolation (visual and literary) in the face of the rupture of death. While Christian-themed sarcophagi appear to have abandoned lids with with three-dimensional sculptures of the deceased reclining as at a banquet or in sleep (known as kline-lids, which are a definite genre in both eastern and Roman sarcophagi as well as their Etruscan predecessors, including funerary urns), both portraits within tondi and idealized portraits on frieze sarcophagi are frequent, implying some continuity in the visual rhetoric of presence and absence, despite the fundamental transformations of attitudes towards death and salvation with the institutional establishment of the new religion.…”