Below is a recent paper on effigies and some ideas on their relationship to a larger understanding of art:
The Everlasting: Art, Death, and Permanence
The effigy is a kind of image that persists through human history. It takes on a variety of forms depending on the culture being examined. These forms may be tombs, shrines, small coins, or miniature sculptures to name a few. Despite the variety, the basic function of effigies remains the same: to memorialize and immortalize the existence of an individual – an existence limited by the corporeal body, but extended by the effigy.
The notion of the effigy is something heavily embedded in the psychology of art, regardless of whether or not it is the primary intent of any particular work. Rainer Metzger touches on this in a review of Hans Belting’s book Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (which roughly translates to Picture Anthropology: Drafts for a Science of Pictures):
The tomb effigy, the memorial portrait, and the death mask approach a condition of perfect substitutability for the irrevocably absent object, the once-living body. The dead person exchanges his body for an image; that image holds a place for him among the living (p. 29 and chap. 6). Belting describes this exchange, enacted in ancient cults of the dead, as the archetype of the image-body-medium triangle (p. 29). The photograph, the performance, and the statue, in turn, point directly toward that ideal exchangeability. Essentially, every image wants to be a home for a lost soul.
It is important to be clear that the image as a “home for a lost soul” is not something all artists consciously subscribe to or even want as part of their practice. Many artists have specific intentions for their work that have nothing to do with death or existence.
However, having an image remain present in the memory of the viewer is something that many artists will align with a successful artwork. Here, parallels can be drawn with the creators of ancient effigies. For example, the sentiment of a work that stays in the viewer’s memory has been part of the visual language of tomb effigies since the Romans were carving their reclining images of the dead,
In the early sixteenth century, unprecedented interest was shown in the art of commemoration, with its beginnings in ancient Greece. The humanists liked to quote Cicero, who dealt with the subject at length. In the epistle Ad Herenniuini, Cicero asserts ‘things immediate to our eye we commonly forget. We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in the memory. And we shall do so if we establish likenesses as striking as possible; if we set up images that are… doing something (agentes imagines); if we dress some of them with crowns or purple cloaks, for example, so that the likeness may be more distinct to us’.
(Ascher 318)
Much art sets out to be memorable in the way Cicero describes. Lately, however, purple cloaks and striking likenesses are replaced with a much broader spectrum of theories behind what entices a viewer. Such theories are developed with the same goal in mind: for the artist to impart an idea, skill or some other experience upon the viewer. These things passed to the viewer are often things that an artist is interested in, close to, or otherwise has a very personal relationship with. They are things that tend to be central to an artist’s identity.
In this way, art can be linked to the making of tombs across many cultures. Take the tomb of Richard Boyle, an Earl of the Irish city of Cork in the sixteenth century. Boyle spent much of his own money designing his tomb, which “was a means of demonstrating that he had arrived, and had created a fortune and a dynasty” (Tait, 1). While notions of fortunes and dynasties are not typically evident in the art of today, it is not so far fetched to assume that many artists create works that are somehow representative of their identity. Indeed, much art is referred to as “making a statement”, much in the way Boyle’s tomb made a statement about things he was concerned with. From this perspective, art can act as a kind of effigy for the artist, and possibly an effigy for other things.
Metal is a material that lends itself to prolonged existence, and has heavily integrated itself into the history of sepulchral art. From the tombs of ancient Egypt, to recent Vietnam War memorials, metal has a quality that suggests an everlasting impenetrability, something that is not affected by the persistence of time and the decay of memory. Its texture, weight, and surface luminance often add a magical element, something that seems to have escaped the laws of time that the living are irrevocably chained to.
Many African cultures have traditionally associated a religious or otherworldly significance to metal as a material. The workers of metal have a certain cultural position as a result of such understandings. Walter Cline in his 1937 book Mining and Metallurgy in Negro Africa describes how the Wachagga people relate to the metal smiths in their culture:
The Wachagga in the northern part of the Kilimanjaro district, who say that God hates the makers of deadly weapons, forbid smiths to go on the war-path with them, for their presence is likely to bring death.
Cline also explains the spiritual force the Wachagga embed in the metal worker’s hammer, and that other factions of the Wachagga elevate their smiths as a kind of supreme warrior, for similar reasons that the northern Kilimanjaro Wachagga fear their smiths’ presence in battle. Perhaps it is the transformation the material undergoes when being formed into an object, perhaps it is its mined origin, or perhaps it is its strength as a substance that provides the basis for such dramatic cultural understandings of the material. Nonetheless, metal as a material is closely associated with mortality across many cultures.
Nearly all art media are used to immortalize those who have passed. Stone, wood, clay, paint, and photography have all played significant roles in remembering. Art is heavily imbued with notions of eternal preservation, and the typical contemporary museum or gallery has members of its staff dedicated to preserving and archiving works in its collection.
However, metal is one of the few materials that seems to be trusted on its own to retain its form over time. Many other materials need frequent cleaning, touching up, and repairing. Stone, for instance, is significantly less durable than metal. It chips, and its porous texture can often leave it susceptible to cracking in cold climates. Metal is often used in outdoor sculpture, as well as for precious objects, because of its seeming impervious nature. This independence is something that serves to imbue metal with a kind of life force of its own, the way a tree or a wild animal has a life that belongs to it, and not a caretaker.
When thinking about art as an effigy of the artist, metal holds a certain amount of conceptual weight as a material. Its historical presence lends to its sense of timelessness, as well as its seeming ability to retain the aura of the thing it represents, be it object, person, or idea. It can be used to add permanence to artifacts and ideas that are fleeting for artists and viewers alike. It can do so in the same way an effigy can make permanent a limited existence: as a placeholder for the thing that might otherwise be absent, and an activator of memory.
Works Cited
Ascher, Yoni. “Form and Content in Some Roman Reclining Effigies From The Early Sixteenth Century”. Gazette des Beaux-Arts v. 139. April 2002: 315-30.
Cline, Walter. Mining and Metallurgy in Negro Africa. Menasha, Wisconsin: George Banta Publishing, 1937.
Lerer, Susan. African Metalwork and Ivory. Newport Beach, California: Susan Lerer, 1993.
Metzger, Rainer. “Bild-Anthropologie (Book Review)”. Kunstforum International no. 155. June/July 2001: 499-500
Sund, Judy. “Beyond The Grave: The Twentieth-Century Afterlife of West Mexican Burial Effigies”. The Art Bulletin v. 82 no. 4. December 2000: 734-67.
Tait, Clodagh. “Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, and His Tombs”. Irish Arts Review (Dublin, Ireland) v. 20 no. 1. Spring 2003: 120-1.
