HOLY MATTER
A winged figure guards one end of a cremation sarcophagus, carved in limestone by an Etruscan stonecutter three hundred years before the birth of Christ. It is an angel by any other name. Sealed inside, the ashes of a body remain as invisible mementi mori. For thousands of years people have created artworks to forge a connection with the dead, expanding the narrative of a life to beyond the physical world, a story of the imagined spiritual journey of each separate soul in the company of souls. Their artifacts connect the living to the dead by a transformation mystical and hidden1in an act of contemplation involving the senses, memory and imagination.
Carved on an Italian marble tomb made three hundred years after the death of Christ, birds are depicted on the first known representation of the Resurrection: represented as mediators of the divine, they soar heavenwards on a journey to an afterlife, linking the natural to the supernatural. With the assimilation of Christianity into western consciousness the metaphor of Heaven evolves into a ‘holy city’ with a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal,2 a city inseparable in the imagination from the beauty of Earth’s rarest elements, precious materials endowed with the means of communicating the power and mystique of the dead. In the Revelations of St John, the foundations of the City of God are adorned with jasper, sapphire, agate, emerald, onyx, carnelian, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth and amethyst. The street of the city is pure gold, transparent as glass3 – gold as precious metal purified by smelting, symbolising spiritual purification by fire, made indestructible and incorruptible as with the flesh of the saints whose bodies miraculously resist decomposition over time...