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.
