There's been a bit of a fashion overdose on this blog in the last few weeks. So for today I'd like to focus on something that deeply contrasts with fashion, death.
Well, I actually debated the fashion and death relationship in a previous post on fashionable horror films, but today I want to concentrate on something that relates more to death, art and culture and that has always fascinated me, the porcelain plaques that decorated particular graveyards such as the one in Limoges.
Graveyards as we know them were established in Europe at the end of the 1700s when the tradition of burying the dead outside cities basically started. The large necropolises that were created around the beginning of the 1800s were just the beginning of a trend that became a norm even in smaller towns such as Limoges around 1830.
Between this date and the 1920s the European graveyards became examples of great architecture and art. After a few years, though, graveyards were covered in boring black granite or grey marble tombstones, yet Limoges's graveyard was an exception. Its tombs were indeed covered in quite beautiful ceramic plaques, featuring black and white or coloured paintings and inscriptions with the name of the person who had died and sentences such as "Here Rests" or "Pray for Him/Her".
The very first plaques featured the sort of iconography you would find on funeral invitation cards, with tombs, urns and willow trees, but it wasn't rare to find also portraits of entire families gathered around the bed of a dying father or mother – this trend became more popular between 1860 and 1880 – and images of supernatural creatures.
Until 1880, the porcelain inscriptions with their little colourful scenes were particularly beautiful and they had an important cultural value: they were indeed representations of how the collective imagination perceived death.
It's interesting to see how on a few tombstones the dead people were portrayed waking up again to eternal life, getting out of the tombstones or being led by an angel to heaven. The attire of the people portrayed on the tombstones is particularly detailed, the ample dresses worn by the tearful widows could be used as a study in what was fashionable at the time, while the occasional skeleton symbolising Death clad in a rather kitsch black mantle covered in white stars evoked the rather fashionable macabre style of the end of the century Baroque.
When photography arrived the porcelain tombstones were not produced anymore, but their iconography continues to fascinate me and I often wonder whenever I find books that talk about the Limoges porcelain tombstones how long it will pass before some cutting edge designer will bring back those poetically sad scenes into fashion and maybe print them onto dresses.
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