Dakhma: The Towers of Silence

Dakhma is a cilindrical construction used by Zoroastrians a type of sky burial, for exposure of the dead to scavenging birds for the purposes of excarnation.

We read some interesting details by Fosco Lucarelli:

Towers of Silence: Zoroastrian Architectures for the Ritual of Death 

 Zoroastrianism traditionally conceives death as a temporary triumph of evil over good: rushing into the body, the corpse demon contaminates everything it comes in contact with. The flesh of a dead body being so unclean it can pollute everything, a set of rules had to be created in order to dispose of the corpse as safely as possible: as the natural elements of earth, air and water are sacred, the corpses were not to be thrown upon the water or interred. Cremation was also forbidden, as fire is the direct -purest- emanation of the divinity. Hence a complex ritual was developed, in which the corpses would be eventually exposed to birds of prey and thus devoured, in a final act of charity. After death every division of class and wealth disappeared, for all deceased would be treated equally.

A proper architectural typology was invented solely for the purpose of burial’s ritual: transported in the desert by nasellars (traditional zoroastrian pallbearers), the bodies of the deceased were then carted onto sandstone, forbidding hills, to be eventually disposed on cilindrical constructions called Towers of Silence. A Tower of Silence, or Dakhmeh, is a structure laying on the top of a hill, consisting of concentric slabs surrounding a central pit. The bodies were arranged onto four concentric rings: men, outermost, than women and children. Despite the fact the the birds of prey needed less than an hour to leave nothing but bones, the remains of the dead were left bleaching on the upper circles no less than a year before the nasellars could come and push the skeletons onto the underlying ossuary pit. Running through sand and coal filters, the disintegrated bones were eventually washed away in the sea. 

A guardian traditionnaly lived near the Tower of Silence, and was the sole person allowed to handle the ceremonial procedures, while relatives of the deceased stayed in a house below, and were forbidden to enter. 

Iranian Zoroastrian discontinued this ceremony, and the Dakhmeh were banned in the 70′s; conversely, Parsi modern-day Zoroastrians in Mumbai and Karachi still mantains the tradition of burial by exposure, through the use of their own Towers of Silence.

Jürgen Weber's sculptures in Nürnberg

Jürgen Weber (1928 - 2007) was a German sculptor. His works are committed to the style of realism. Two interesting macabre sculptures are in public in Nürnberg

Ship of Fools, based on the medieval motif and Plato's allegory

The Marriage Carousel (1977-1981) A large synthesis depicting scenes of the life circle of a marriage, from early strong love up to death

The Mummies of Venzone

For hundreds of years, a mystery surrounded the cathedral of Venzone, a small city in the province of Udine, Italy. Instead of decomposing normally, bodies buried in the tombs beneath the cathedral were perfectly preserved and still recognizable decades later, a fact which led the townspeople to periodically retrieve and commune with their dead loved ones. In modern times, scientists finally traced the source of this wonder to Hypha tombicina, a microscopic, parasitic fungus that rapidly dehydrates the bodies before decomposition can even begin. source

Cadaver tombs

A cadaver tomb or transi (or "memento mori tomb", Latin for "reminder of death") is a type of gisant (recumbent effigy tomb) featuring an effigy in the macabre form of a decomposing corpse. The topos was particularly characteristic of the later Middle Ages. A depiction of a rotting cadaver in art (as opposed to a skeleton) is called a transi. However, the term 'cadaver tomb' can really be applied to other varieties of monuments, e.g. with skeletons or with the deceased completely wrapped in a shroud. In the "double-decker" tombs, in Erwin Panofsky's phrase, a carved stone bier displays on the top level the recumbent effigy or gisant of a person as they were before death or soon after their death, where they may be life-sized and sometimes represented kneeling in prayer, and as a rotting cadaver on the bottom level, often shrouded and sometimes complete with worms and other flesh-eating wildlife. The iconography is regionally distinct: the depiction of vermin on these cadavers is more commonly found on the continent, and especially in the German regions. The dissemination of cadaver imagery in the late-medieval Danse Macabre may also have influenced the iconography of cadaver monuments.

Cadaver tombs were a departure, in monumental architecture, from the usual practice of showing an effigy of the person as they were in life. An early example is the famous effigy on the multi-layered wall-tomb of Cardinal Jean de La Grange (died 1402) in Avignon. The term can also be used for a monument that shows only the cadaver without the live person. The sculpture is intended as a didactic example of how transient earthly glory is, since it depicts what we all finally become. Kathleen Cohen's study of five French ecclesiastics who commissioned transi tombs determined that common to all of them was a successful worldliness that seemed almost to demand them shocking display of transient mortality. A classic example is the "Transi de René de Chalons" by Ligier Richier, in the church of Saint Etienne in Bar-le-Duc, France. These cadaver tombs, with their demanding sculptural program, were made only for high-ranking nobles, usually royalty or bishops or abbots, because one had to be rich to afford to have one made, and powerful enough to be allotted space for one in a church. Some tombs for royalty were double tombs, for both a king and queen. The French kings Louis XII, Francis I and Henry II were doubly portrayed, in effigy and as naked cadavers, in their double double-decker tombs in the Basilica of Saint-Denis outside Paris. Yet there are also other varieties, such as cadaver imagery on incised slabs and monumental brasses (including the so-called 'shroud brasses'), of which many can still be found in England.

Park of the Monsters in Bomarzo, Italy

Orcus mouth

It is the work of Pier Francesco Orsini, called Vicino (1523–1585), a condottiero and patron of the arts, greatly devoted to his wife Giulia Farnese, not to confuse with her maternal grandmother Giulia Farnese, the mistress of Pope Alexander VI. When the wife of Orsini died, he created the gardens. The design is attributed to Pirro Ligorio, and the sculptures to Simone Moschino. During the nineteenth century and deep into the twentieth the garden became overgrown and neglected, but in the 1970s a program of restoration was implemented by the Bettini family, and today the garden, which remains private property, is a major tourist attraction.

Dragon with Lions

The park of Bomarzo was intended not to please, but to astonish, and like many Mannerist works of art, its symbolism is arcane : examples are a large sculpture of one of Hannibal's war elephants, which mangles a Roman legionary, or the statue of Ceres lounging on the bare ground, with a vase of verdure perched on her head. The many monstrous statues appear to be unconnected to any rational plan and appear to have been strewn almost randomly about the area, sol per sfogare il Core ("just to set the heart free") as one inscription in the obelisks says.

Proteus Glaukos

The Park of the Monsters, also named Garden of Bomarzo, is a Manieristic monumental complex located in Bomarzo, in the province of Viterbo, in northern Lazio, Italy. The gardens were created during the 16th century. They are composed of a wooded park, located at the bottom of a valley where the castle of Orsini was erected, and populated by sculptures and small buildings divided among of the natural vegetation. The park's name stems from the many larger-than-life sculptures, some sculpted in the bedrock, which populate this predominantly barren landscape.

Neptune

Προσθήκη λεζάντας

Turtle

A giant who brutally shreds a character 

Hannibal's elephant

Sirene and two lions

A triton in a niche

Whale

Lion

Totenkapelle (Chapel of the Dead) in Austria

The Heiligenkreuz Abbey , a monastery of the Cistercian at Heiligenkreuz in the Vienna woods ( Lower Austria ). There is no interruption since its inception in 1133 and is now - after Rein -. the world's second-oldest, continuously active since the founding Cistercian monastery. Since 1713, a narrow space of three bays, covered with cross vaults, is in use as a burial chapel. The artistic design was the responsibility of Giovanni Giuliani(1663- 1744). Dancing skeletons glow (as candle holder=candelabras) the deceased confrere that is laid out in the middle of the chapel, the way to eternity.