Antique transformations and allegorical personifications of sorrow: a case of the New Cemetery in Belgrade

Abstract

The transformations of antique forms and contents can be continuously observed during the early modern and modern periods in Europe. Structures and formal solutions of the antique world, with particular emphasis on the Greco – Roman heritage, have become the groundwork of the art and culture of modern people. The incorporation of the antique heritage within the framework of the long nineteenth century and its persistence well into the twentieth century have become parts of the concept of the Europeanization of the Serbian art of that period. The modern culture of death has largelyrested on the use of the antique ideals. The image of the allegorical personification of Sorrow represents key visual evidence that confirms the practice of revival of motifs from the antique sepulchral culture. Sorrow is structurally described as an emotional reaction to loss. Within the culture of the nineteenth century, it was associated with the contemporary concept of pessimism and its key figure Arthur Schpenhauer. According to the new aesthetics and ethics of pessimism, the artistically and industrially shaped figures of Sorrow were created all across Europe. The personifications of Sorrow were most often created in accordance with the mass consuption of gravestones and standardized solutions of the monumental industry, thus representing visual expressions of the modern person and their understandings of sadness. Having been visualized in the model of antique personifications of Sorrow, presented in the form of mourning female figures dressed in antique vestments, these figures sublimate certain pessimism of the complex modern person. The sculptural image of Sorrow found on the graves of the Belgrade New Cemetery confirms the transfer of modern European sepulchral experience to the modern Serbian state. Shaped by the end of the nineteenth , the New Cemetery in Belgrade was a suitable place for expressing the pathos of modern pessimism embodied in the sublime personification of Sorrow.