The Aesthetics of The Funereal in Greek Tragedy and Medieval Dances: An Antecedent of The Sinister

Abstract

The relationship between aesthetics and death has been as frequent as it has been complex. On the one hand, it is inevitable to account for all the representations of death linked to a previous theological scheme, of which art itself would be a reflection. Here we would have everything related to the care of death, concretised in the sepulchral sculptures that remind human beings of an ultraterrestrial destiny. In this sense, we have from the pyramids of Egypt to the stately pantheons of Pere Lecheise. On the other hand, nineteenth-century sturm and drung came to conceive of death as an incentive to life and an entity with a life of its own that is addressed precisely to the living, so that art came to show us a living figure, sometimes of great beauty, sometimes with a markedly macabre aesthetic that would come, in any case, to provoke reflection in the subject. From the macabre we would move on to the sinister understood as a Kantian judgement of taste. A judgement of taste on the sinister, a category understood as a bridge between the sublime and the macabre, from which a whole set of possibilities can be inferred: necromancy, necroeroticism. It is the possibility of eschatology to generate aesthetic pleasure for the contemplator. Death as an object of aesthetic contemplation.