Afterlife

Oskar Kokoschka
Pietà
(poster for Kokoschka's play, Murderer the Hope of Women)
1909
lithograph
Leopold Museum, Vienna

James Ensor
The Dead Rooster
1894
oil on canvas
Kunsthalle Mannheim

Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet
Young Woman mourning Death of a Pigeon
1808
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Arras

Gustave Courbet
The German Hunter
1859
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lons-le-Saunier

George Bellows
Punchinello in the House of Death
1923
lithograph
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Paul Delaroche
Louise Vernat on her Deathbed
(spouse of the artist)
1846
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes

Hippolyte Flandrin
Pietà
1842
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Käthe Kollwitz
Woman with Dead Child
1903
etching
Kunsthalle zu Kiel

Simon Vouet
The Deposition
1635
oil on canvas
Musée d'Art Moderne André Malraux, Le Havre

Giovanni Cesare Testa after Pietro Testa
Dead Christ mourned by Angels
ca. 1650-55
etching
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Roman Empire
Funerary Altar of Caetenia Polita
AD 100
marble
Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden

Roman Egypt
Funerary Mask of a Young Woman
AD 50
painted stucco
Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of a Woman
AD 70
encaustic on wood
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence

Roman Egypt
Mummy Portrait of Herakleides
AD 120-140
pigment and gold leaf on wood
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Lovis Corinth
Slaughtered Ox
1905
oil on canvas
Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg

Chaїm Soutine
Carcass of Beef
ca. 1925
oil on canvas
Musée de Grenoble

Queen:  Aiai, what a great sea of troubles has burst upon the Persians and the whole Eastern race! 

Messenger:  Well, be sure of this, the tale of disaster is not yet even half told: such a calamitous event has occurred, on top of what I have told you, that it outweighs that in the scale fully twice over. 

Queen:  What possible misfortune could be even more hateful than the one we have heard of?  Tell us what you say is this further disaster that has come upon the army that weighs even more heavily in the scale of evil.

Messenger:  All those Persians who were in their bodily prime, outstanding in courage, notable for high birth, and who always showed the highest degree of loyalty to the person of the King, have perished shamefully by a most ignoble fate.

Queen:  Ah, wretched me, my friends, this terrible catastrophe!  By what kind of death do you say they have perished? 

Messenger:  There is an island in front of Salamis, small and offering no good anchorage for ships, whose seashore is a haunt of Pan, lover of dances.  Xerxes sent these men there so that, when shipwrecked enemy men were trying to reach safety on the island, they could kill the Greek warriors when they were an easy prey while rescuing their own men from the straits of the sea; he was reading the future badly.  When god had given the triumph in the naval battle to the Greeks, that same day they clad themselves in stout bronze armour, leaped off their ships, and landed all around the island, so that the Persians had no idea which way to turn.  They were being heavily battered by hand-thrown stones, and hit and killed by arrows shot from the bowstring, until finally the Greeks charged them in a simultaneous rush and struck them down, hacking the wretched men's limbs until they had extinguished the life of every one of them.  Xerxes wailed aloud when he saw this depth of disaster; he was seated in plain sight of the whole army, on a high cliff close to the sea.  He tore his robes, uttered a piercing cry of grief, and immediately gave an order to the land army, sending them off in helter-skelter flight.  Such, I tell you, is the disaster you have to mourn, in addition to the previous one.  

– Aeschylus, from Persians (472 BC), translated by Alan H. Sommerstein (2008)