Dates: Saturdays, September 3, 10, 17, 24 and October 1
Time: 11 am-12:30 pm ET
Admission: $165 regular admission / $145 for Patreon members

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time

For human beings, sight is fundamental: cognition of reality often proceeds by visual and figurative symbols. Death, in extinguishing all the senses, presents a paradoxical problem, namely the impossibility for humans to imagine it: how can an absence be translated into images?

To overcome this "checkmate of vision," over the centuries death has been represented through complex, ever-changing iconographic systems and motifs.

In this five weeks class, University lecturer and writer Ivan Cenzi will take the students for a richly-illustrated journey spanning three thousand years, tracing the historical variations and semantic richness of allegories of death: from the depictions of the ancient world (Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Etruscans) to the medieval danse macabre, from the "Triumphs of Death" to Flemish vanitas paintings, from dissected corpses in early modern anatomical illustrations to the morbid infatuations of 19th-century Romanticism, from Surrealist experiments to those contemporary artists who include real corpses in their works.

We will discover that the Macabre, far from being just something repugnant, is a noble register that runs throughout the history of art, science and the sacred. Studying the collective imagination related to the Macabre is useful not only to understand how the perception of death and dying has evolved over time, but also to find useful tools for constructing a new and appropriate symbology of mourning and impermanence today.

Topics covered will include:

• Greco-Roman depictions of Thanatos

• The consanguineus lethi sopor: eternal repose

• Where does the concept of memento mori come from?

• Displaying a dead body: rules of "decorous" representation

• Macabre iconography in the Late Middle Ages

• "I Am Death and I Wear the Crown": the medieval personification of the Black Lady

• Celtic influences, Norse myths and psychopomps

• Death becomes precious: Renaissance and Baroque incarnations of vanitas

• The dilemma of dissected death: anatomical illustrations and museum preparations

• Flemish still lifes and their symbolism

• The 19th century between decadentism and positivism; spirit imagery; Victorian mourning

• The 20th century, the concealment of death and the pervasiveness of the simulacrum

• A brief history of death in film

• The corpse as canvas: the mise-en-scène of the obscene in contemporary art

• Death in the age of social networks and the search for new symbols

IVAN CENZI is an explorer of the uncanny and collector of curiosities. He is the author of The Eternal Vigil on the Palermo Catacombs, De Profundis on the Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples, Mors Pretiosa on Italy’s main religious ossuaries, His Anatomical Majesty on the Museum of Pathological Anatomy in Padua, and The Petrifier on the “Paolo Gorini” Anatomical Collection in Lodi. He also wrote Paris Mirabilia and London Mirabilia. A lecturer of Iconology of Death at the University of Padua, since 2009 Ivan Cenzi is the curator of Bizzarro Bazar, a blog centered on the concept of dark wonder and the study of the Macabre; he writes and hosts a web series of the same name.