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The voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the earth.
Visual representations of death rarely show corporeal agonies. Even in its most plentiful rendering in Western art history, those of Jesus' crucifixion, as seen in the small devotional picture by the fourteenth-century Sienese Pietro Lorenzetti, His unblemished torso spews a single stream of blood. Depiction of the sight of Jesus' corpse is common, of the strife of ceasing to live, not so. In the modern period, viewing photographs of bloated torsos splayed on the Gettysburg battleground or of an emaciated body early in the AIDS epidemic offers perverse scrutiny of cadaverous degradation. But formal postmortem portraits customarily idealize inert mortality as “resting in peace.” Or, as in John Sloan's early-twentieth-century portrait of Isaac L. Rice commissioned by his bereaved widow, death is denied by its title: Silence. That is, “Shush! He's sleeping.”
Soothing bereft mourners, the mood is honorific, the intention elegiac, a genre that literary critic Tammy Clewell aptly encapsulated as offering “consoling substitutes to heal the wounds of loss” (2004, p. 48).