'From Despair to Love: Picturing Suicide in Medieval Art'

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Monday 30 January 2012, 7.30 p.m. Ben Zweig (Boston University),

Suicide, that mysterious and unknowable death, provided ample fodder for the mediaeval imagination. Then as now, suicide both attracted and repelled. It stirred the imagination and the emotions, delighting, disgusting, and enraging artists and viewers. Appearing in many illustrated bibles, prayer books, and church sculptures, images such as Judas Iscariot hanging and disemboweling himself out of despair or King Saul impaling himself condemned suicide as a sin. But mediaeval depictions of self-annihilation made deeper claims about the nature of belief, emotions, and madness. They determined the causes of suicide and argued about the irrationality behind it. They asked those who looked at them to be repulsed by what they saw and to take pleasure in their revulsion. Indeed, pictures of suicide straddled a point between intellectual explanation and visceral representation, where theological exposition was intensified through the limp limbs and contorted bodies of self-murderers.

Suicide was depicted not only in religious contexts. Pictures of suicide appeared in many secular artworks, from illuminated romances to small ivory boxes and mirrors. In these luxury artworks intended for a courtly audience, depictions of suicide differed from those sanctioned by the powerful forces of the Church. Visualizing the suicides of ancient figures such as Lucretia and Dido instead of biblical figures, courtly society no longer imagined suicide as a sin. Suicide became heroic and exciting. It became romance. To kill oneself was the work of virtuous wives and wronged lovers rather than of despairing traitors.



The Monarch
(public house)

40–42 Chalk Farm Road


Greater London

NW1 8BG


Free to attend.

Ben Zweig is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. He has an BFA in painting and art History from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and a MA in art history from Tufts University. He was a Fulbright Fellow at Uppsala University, Sweden and a Presidential Fellow at Boston University. Ben is currently writing his doctoral thesis on the representation of suicide in Romanesque and Gothic Art.