Journal Entry for the Week of February 21 to February 25

If there is one thing that can be said with certainty about art, it is that death is certainly not the limit of it. In fact, when one studies the Roman catacombs, death only accentuates the mystique and allure of the artwork that adorns these dank and dreary caverns. If one ever gets the chance to venture down these historic sites, an artistic utopia awaits those curious about life in Roman antiquity and beyond. The paintings of The Good Shepherd as a metaphor for Christ, or the Virgin Birth as depicted in the image above, all speak of a society that underwent a religious revolution that permeated their consciousness well beyond the grave. Catacombs were not just cemeteries for ordinary people but the resting places of Saints and other revered men and women. For this reason amongst others, it was vital that the paintings on these tombs accurately reflected not only the social climate of ancient Rome, but also significant details about the people that were buried herein. Just like the skeletons in Pompeii alluded to the status and health of a person, the amount of detail and intricacy that went into a tomb's decor reflected wealth and a fancy for posthumous grandeur. Certainly, if a tomb were made of carved marble one could safely assume that it was home to someone who was quite well-off. The artwork adorning these tombs would also tell the viewer a host of information such as a person's relationship to others, their profession, the number of children they had etc. Indeed, in many ways the catacombs and the art therein acted as a synthesis between life and death.

A particular aspect of the catacombs that really stuck with me was how wealth would determine the beauty and allure of your tomb. This is something I have experienced in my own homeland, Pakistan. If you visit a local cemetery there it is not difficult to tell who was wealthy and who was just a person living on common means. Though not fantastically wealthy, my family in Pakistan enjoyed a certain amount of prosperity around the time when my grandfather passed away. His grave certainly reflects our status; compared to many of the plain and scattered grave plots around him, his grave is entombed within a roof with four white pillars and a set of steps leading up to it. It makes me marvel at the strange ways in which class differences follow us even into the afterlife. The wealthier Romans got the tombs made out of marble; my grandfather recieved a white chamber with pillars instead of a simple hole in the ground. Art and architecture in ancient times and in many ways even today, is utilized as yet another medium to establish a hierarchy between classes and generations. It certainly has interesting implications for some of the more romantic perceptions of art, especially for those who see art as the great liberator of the mind or a means through which to transcend the earthly world. Although art undoubtedly functions in these ways, in many ways I find it forces us to continue conforming to our earthly roles. Simply by studying the materials and details that are used in the construction of a grave or catacomb, we can label the tomb as belonging to a slave or a ruler, a commoner or a saint. The art in the catacombs strangely symbolizes how we can never truly escape who we are, even in death.