Corpse Theatre in the Sacred Spaces of Italy: Guest Post by Elizabeth Harper, All The Saints You Should Know Blog

Elizabeth Harper of the fabulous All the Saints You Should Know blog has some astounding details to add to the material covered in our recent post on Sacred Italian Waxworks or The Last Judgement with Real Corpses in 18th and 19th Century Italy. She kindly agreed to write the following guest post which expands on the idea in surprising ways.

All image credits listed below. Please click on images to see larger, more detailed version!

Corpse Theatre, by Elizabeth Harper

There’s a building that’s hard to overlook on via Giulia in Rome. It’s the one with laughing skulls over the door. 

On a marble plaque at eye level, a winged skeleton holds a spent hourglass over a fresh cadaver. The plaque reads “Alms to the poor dead, which they get in the countryside.”

  “They” is La Confraternita dell'Orazione e Morte, or the Confraternity of Prayer and Death. They were a group of Catholic laymen who buried Rome’s indigent dead and this building was their oratory.

Burying the dead is a particularly important Catholic ritual because burial is linked to the concept of purgatory. Purgatory is a place where heaven-bound souls undergo a final purification before entering heaven, but in Catholic imagery it can easily be mistaken for hell. Fire surrounds writhing nude bodies. This fire is supposed to cleanse the souls just like the grave eventually cleanses bones of rotting flesh. Appropriate, since sin and flesh are often inextricable, like in St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians where he calls everything from drunkenness to sorcery a “sin of the flesh”. After purgatory, when sin and flesh are gone for good, the clean, white bones are considered at peace and safely in heaven, which is why skeletons like the one on the façade are often shown with wings. But conversely, no burial means no peace. Though it’s not entirely orthodox, folk traditions imply that the dead can find themselves stuck in a netherworld between this world and the afterlife if they’re not given a Catholic burial.

Migrant workers in the farms outside of Rome were particularly susceptible to this fate. Malaria could kill them in the midst of their work and without family or friends to tend to them, weather and animals could ravage their corpse. The brothers in the Confraternity of Prayer and Death made the trip out to the countryside by foot and gathered these bodies year-round. It could take them four days to carry the dead back to Rome on their stretcher. They did this from 1552 to 1896. Their handwritten ledgers indicate that they picked up at least 8,600 bodies during those 344 years. If they passed a parish churchyard they would bury the workers there, but if not, they would carry them back to their oratory on via Giulia.

Today, the nuns who use the oratory open it for just a few hours every week while they pray for souls in purgatory. If you happen to find the church open, a donation to the sisters yields access to the crypt where you can see the lifetimes of work done by the brothers before them. Down there, you’re likely to be alone. The erratic hours mean that unlike Rome’s famous Capuchin crypt, there’s no line of nervously giggling tourists. It’s just you, the bone chandeliers, the engraved skulls, an altar full of legs and arms, and somewhat ominously, a scythe.

The overall effect is a bit ramshackle because we’re only seeing salvaged pieces of the original crypt. When the Tiber embankments were added in the late 19th century, the majority of the crypt and the order’s cemetery were destroyed. Including, unfortunately, the crypt’s theatre.

The scythe is actually nothing more than a theatrical prop, but somehow that’s even more unnerving than the real thing.

Here are a few images of how it once looked:
  In 1763 the confraternity built a stage in their crypt. They started using the corpses they collected in tableaux staged for the public called sacred representations. If you’ve ever seen one of those Christmas manger scenes where a real Baby Jesus is depicted more or less in a petting zoo, you’ve seen a sacred representation. The only difference was the confraternity was using dead people, not farm animals. 

They staged a sacred representation every year for the week following All Souls Day. It started simply with “The Burial of Jacob”. A few flat paintings were used as scenery and a corpse played Jacob’s corpse. Specific death scenes were always popular, The death of Judith, Jezebel, and St. Paul were all staged along with a few more universal tableaux, like “the allegory that we all must die”.

Every year the productions became more elaborate. By 1790 they had life-sized wax figures playing the roles of the living, dressed in costumes designed for the occasion.  In 1802 when they staged “The Mountain of Purgatory” they built a mountain surrounded by candelabra. The figure of Justice was perched up high holding scales and a sword. Beneath him you could see souls in the flames of purgatory. One lucky soul was shown being lifted by a cherub and taken up to heaven. When staged with actual dead people, it’s hard to make a scene like this any more literal. The sacred representations were seen as a useful teaching tool that transcended language and literacy barriers.

Other churches in Rome like Santa Maria in Trastevere and the now deconsecrated cemetery chapel of the Lateran put on similar, though less elaborate tableaux. But another place that rivaled the Baroque stagecraft of Santa Maria dell'Orazione e Morte was the hospital just across the Tiber—Santo Spirito.

If you visit Santo Spirito today, you won’t find a trace of the sacred representations, but there are eyewitness accounts and engravings of the shows that were performed in their graveyard starting in 1813. The confraternity there cared for the dead from the hospital and like the brothers at Santa Maria dell'Orazione e Morte, they had access to a large number of unknown or unclaimed bodies. In the days before the medicalization of death, dying at home was considered preferable and a hospital death was often a last resort for people who were poor and alone.

After sunset, theses brothers would come collect the dead from the hospital and carry them out to the cemetery. There, they would open one of the hospital’s 24 mass graves and lower in the naked body with chains. The bodies would stay there, unless they were cast in a sacred representation. A particularly noteworthy performance in 1831 depicted the final judgment. The mass graves were opened and the freshest corpses were costumed and propped up beneath a wax angel blowing the last trumpet. Fortunately, Antoine Jean-Baptiste Thomas left us with an engraving of this particular dramatization.

Starting in the early 19th century, Rome’s confraternities started to get some pushback from the pope on their use of bone and corpses. The final nail in the proverbial coffin of corpse theatre was hammered in when Rome joined unified Italy in 1870. A strict ban on burying people in convents, crypts or hospitals was enforced for the sake of public health. One of the last sacred representations was done at Santa Maria dell'Orazione e Morte in 1880. The brothers there preformed the “Vision of Ezekiel” in secret knowing their cemetery and their performances were about to become a thing of the past. In the end, their customs were as ephemeral as human flesh. 

More on this topic can be found at the recent post Sacred Italian Waxworks or The Last Judgement with Real Corpses, 18th and 19th Century Italy by clicking here.

Image List

1.  Insignia, or stemma, of the Confraternita dell'Orazione e Morte
2. "Chapelle de l'Eglise de la Mort" Engraved by Francois Alexandre Villain after Jean-Baptiste Thomas, Wellcome Images
3-8. Photographs by Elizabeth Harper
9-13. Images of Orazione e Morte on via Giulia ; Photographs from the Archives from the Roman Society of Natural History
14. "Dramatisation of Purgatory" at Santo Spirito; Engraved by Francois Alexandre Villain after Jean-Baptiste Thomas

SOURCES: Amadei, Emma. "Il Culto Dei Morti Nella Roma Dell'Ottocento." Archivio Storico Capitolino. 1 Jan. 1957. Web. 14 Oct. 2014.
L'Arciconfraternita Di S. Maria Dell'Orazione E Morte in Roma E Le Sue Rappresentazioni Sacre. Vol. 33. Rome: Roma, 1910. Print.

Sacred Italian Waxworks or The Last Judgement with Real Corpses, 18th and 19th Century Italy

Doing research for my upcoming book on the Anatomical Venus, I came across the following choice tidbit in the excellent Waxing Eloquent: Italian Portraits in Wax (on which more here).

Italy, it explains, never developed a tradition of wax museums as we think of them; instead, it enjoyed a flowering of often macabre sacred waxworks located in confraternities devoted to caring for the dead. It continues:

Despite Italy’s lack of wax museums,the country can claim a pre-eminent role ... of transferring the profane popular amusements of such displays to pious representations that, for more than a century, attracted the devout and curious alike. They were set up by the various confraternities devoted to burying the poor and bodies that had been abandoned in the countryside… The oldest was the archconfraternity of Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte… to enhance the solemnity of the octave of the dead in November, the association prepared musical oratorios, artistic biers and sacred representations. The latter were staged in the cemetery under the church, which, in 1762, the provveditore Agostino Ancidoni had decorated entirely with skulls and bones “artistically' arranged to create a lugubrious mise-en-scène. It was also at this time that the representations began to be staged…”

 ... an even more macabre representation was prepared in 1813 when, in the atrium of cemetery of Santo Spirito in Sassia, the scene of the Last Judgment was staged in a singular manner. Set at the feet of a wax angel sounding the trumpet to rouse the dead and call them to the Last Judgment, at the end of the pits were the real corpses of those who had died the previous night at the adjacent hospital. 

You can read more in Waxing Eloquent: Italian Portraits in Wax, edited by Andrea Daninos; find out more--or buy a copy!--here.

Image: Santa Maria dell'Orazione e Morte, Rome; Dorli Photography on Flickr

For more on this topic, see Corpse Theatre in the Sacred Spaces of Italy: Guest post by Elizabeth Harper, All The Saints You Should Know Blog by clicking here.

Saint Victoria and Saint Wittoria in Rome, or The Difficulties of Researching Catholic Artifacts

A few of the most wonderful things I saw on my recent trip to Italy with Evan Michelson were the two saints seen above, both to be found in Rome, the last stop on our tour. The first is Saint Vittoria, or Victoria, on view in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, directly across from that Bernini's masterwork The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (top 3); The second is a wonderful reliquary preparation of "S. Wittoria, Martire" fantastically posed and costumed, and showcased in a gold and glass coffin in the Basilica of Saint Mary Sopra Minerva (bottom 2 images).

I am not sure if these two representations might possibly depict the same saint (Wittoria being an alternate/old fashioned spelling for Vittoria?), or two separate ones. I have been able to find nothing official on the Internet about a Saint Wittoria, though Vittoria seems to be a depiction of the Roman Saint Victoria, "virgin and martyr of the catacombs." I also am not sure if there are human bones embedded in the wax of St. Victoria, though Marina Warner asserts this is the case in her wonderful book Phantasmagoria, and the close-up photo above of her hand seems to support this assertion.

Regardless of the problems with research, I hope you agree with me that these are astoundingly amazing and fascinating artifacts. These Saints--and many more, both sacred and profane--will be featured in my upcoming exhibition at Viktor Wynde's Fine Arts in London this September. They will also feature in a book I am working on with friend, Morbid Anatomy Library Scholar in Residence and co-star of The Science Channel's "Oddities" Evan Michelson. Stay tuned for more on that!

The Hand of Glory, from Sir James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion," 1922

There is a fruitful branch of homoeopathic magic which works by means of the dead; for just as the dead can neither see nor hear nor speak, so you may on homoeopathic principles render people blind, deaf and dumb by the use of dead men’s bones or anything else that is tainted by the infection of death...

In Europe [such] properties were ascribed to the Hand of Glory, which was the dried and pickled hand of a man who had been hanged. If a candle made of the fat of a malefactor who had also died on the gallows was lighted and placed in the Hand of Glory as in a candlestick, it rendered motionless all persons to whom it was presented; they could not stir a finger any more than if they were dead. Sometimes the dead man’s hand is itself the candle, or rather bunch of candles, all its withered fingers being set on fire; but should any member of the household be awake, one of the fingers will not kindle. Such nefarious lights can only be extinguished with milk. Often it is prescribed that the thief’s candle should be made of the finger of a new-born or, still better, unborn child; sometimes it is thought needful that the thief should have one such candle for every person in the house, for if he has one candle too little somebody in the house will wake and catch him. Once these tapers begin to burn, there is nothing but milk that will put them out. In the seventeenth century robbers used to murder pregnant women in order thus to extract candles from their wombs...
--The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer, 1922

You can read many more such factoids in the fantastic The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion by Sir James George Frazer, published in 1922; you can read it online by clicking here, or purchase a hard copy (as I have done) by clicking here.

Image sourced here.

Galileo's Finger, Science Museums, and the New York Times

Now a particularly enduring Catholic practice is on prominent display in, of all places, Florence’s history of science museum, recently renovated and renamed to honor Galileo: Modern-day supporters of the famous heretic are exhibiting newly recovered bits of his body — three fingers and a gnarly molar sliced from his corpse nearly a century after he died — as if they were the relics of an actual saint.

“He’s a secular saint, and relics are an important symbol of his fight for freedom of thought,” said Paolo Galluzzi, the director of the Galileo Museum, which put the tooth, thumb and index finger on view last month, uniting them with another of the scientist’s digits already in its collection.

“He’s a hero and martyr to science,” he added.

The above image--of Galileo Galileo's preserved finger in its reliquary as now on display in Florence’s history of science museum--and text are drawn from an article that ran in today New York Times. You can read the article--which traces the history of Galileo as well as his preserved fingers and other assorted remains--in its entirety by clicking here.

Image Caption: "Visitors looked at one of Galileo’s fingers, on display at the Galileo Museum in Florence." Photo by Kathryn Cook for The New York Times                            

"An Iconography of the Flesh: The Bizarre Afterlife of Eva Perón" Lecture; Observatory Tomorrow Night!

Full details following. Hope to see you there!

An Iconography of the Flesh: The Bizarre Afterlife of Eva Perón
Professor Margaret Margaret Schwartz
Date: Friday, August 21
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Wine (some of it chilled, I promise!)

When Argentine First Lady Eva Perón died in 1952, the intent was to embalm her body for display in a monument to the Argentine worker: a fitting tribute for the martyred patron saint of the working classes. This ambitious project—it was to be three times the height of the Statue of Liberty—was never realized, and when Perón was overthrown in 1955, the embalmed corpse became the new regime’s most stubborn problem and potent secret. In its thirty years in search of a permanent resting place, the embalmed body left a trail of death, insanity, and corpse-napping in its wake as Evita sympathizers sought to find the body of their saint and Evita’s enemies tried to keep the body’s whereabouts a secret. Professor Margaret Schwartz tells the story of the corpse’s afterlife and shows how Evita has stubbornly refused to die a proper death, thus rendering her corpse one of the world’s most unique and potent objects.

You can directions by clicking here and find out more about Observatory by clicking here.