Death
From Dust to Destiny
Richard BrilliantDeath: From Dust to Destiny features a rich collection of texts and images together with the authors' guiding commentary. The book offers a reflective meditation on the methods that artists, architects, and writers have developed to activate memory, and animate their subjects into a possibly-unending afterlife.
The terms ‘birth’ and ‘death’ have long denoted the apparent boundaries of our biological lives, situating in time the moments of coming to be and passing away. Yet the specific trajectory of a life can surpass its temporal boundaries. Long after the perishing of the body, and of its physical remains, the individual’s ethos can endure in the collective memories of survivors and subsequent generations. Such remnants have been created by rituals, reinforced through commemorations and obituaries, and projected through art and architecture. These powerful inducements to remember counter the finality of physical death, bridging the gap between absence
and presence.
Death: From Dust to Destiny, featuring a wide-ranging collection of texts and images together with the author’s guiding commentary, offers a reflective meditation on the methods that artists, architects and writers have developed to activate memory, and animate their subjects into a – possibly – unending afterlife. In this process death need no longer be a terminal departure but can become a new form of existence in the minds of others.
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whether discussing the architects of ancient tombs or the Romantic poets, Brilliant’s book shows an understanding of how the living and the dead connect. He shows us remarkable works of art from every era and discusses them not only with art-historical rigour but in terms of the emotions death has brought into lives and societies throughout history: he relates the art to every aspect of the before and after. His knowledge of poetry is also essential to the book’s success.
'Art Quarterly
Richard Brilliant was Professor Emeritus of Art History and Archaeology and Anna S. Garbedian Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His previous books include Portraiture (Reaktion, 1991) and My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks (2000).
