Video: Dead beauty: skeletons of saints adorned with gold and jewels
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Golden lace, luxurious attire, embroidered with pearls, shameless shine of precious stones - in Paul Kudunaris's photographs, all this splendor organically coexists with empty eye sockets of bared skulls, naked bones and dried flesh, destroying the boundaries between the beautiful and the ugly.
In 1578 in Rome, while carrying out earthworks, builders stumbled upon a network of underground catacombs, in which thousands of early Christian martyrs were buried. The deceased were canonized posthumously and were soon removed from their last orphanage. The remains were distributed among European Catholic churches to replace the holy relics destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. Arriving at their new addresses, the skeletons underwent a thorough restoration and received new clothes, which, probably, they could not even dream of during their lifetime: robes richly decorated with gold embroidery, wigs, crowns inlaid with precious stones, and magnificent armor. All this earthly luxury was supposed to serve as a reminder of the heavenly treasures that await the righteous after death.
Over the past few years, historian and photographer Paul Koudounaris, who specializes in photographing tombs, mummies, reliquaries and other eerie artifacts, has gained access to many closed religious institutions in order to be the first in human history to photograph the inhabitants of these gloomy tombs. Paul's photographs are filled with the atmosphere of medieval tales and legends about dead kings. They are deeply metaphorical and simply dizzyingly beautiful.
In an interview, Paul tells how it all began: “I first learned about these skeletons while working on the book“Empire of Death”. The book is about crypts, and I was photographing a skull-adorned crypt in East Germany when a local approached me and asked if I wanted to see a whole skeleton covered in jewels and holding a cup of its own blood. What a question! Asking a guy who travels the world photographing skulls like this is like asking a child if he wants to go to the land of sweets. I replied that I really want to, and he explained how to find a small, abandoned chapel, where such a skeleton is still preserved. At first I thought it was just a local curiosity, but as I continued to work on Empire of Death, I began to find such remains more and more often. In the end, I realized that they are part of a large phenomenon that completely dropped out of sight of art historians and did not receive any reflection in visual culture."
Earlier this month, Kudunaris' photographs were released in the format of a book entitled “Heavenly Bodies”.
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