![]() When viewed in the context of contemporary ideas about the pagan past, a kitschy melodrama sets in play new possibilities for the relationship between soul and body in a time of the loosening hold of Christian beliefs. To understand what is at stake here, this article explores how an image of a burning body might have made meaning in this time and place. Taking The Funeral of a Viking seriously illuminates several such issues, including the state of Victorian painting and Dicksee’s place within it in the 1890s the rise of interest in the pagan past debates within the Christian church about disposal of the dead and the nature of the afterlife and, most relevant to the theme of this issue, the transformative potential of fire in Victorian Britain. It gives visual form to the alternative beliefs emerging to trouble complacent orthodoxies, in terms of both art practice and value systems more generally. While often dismissed as, at best, aesthetically limp and ideologically pallid, or, at worst, as insidiously reactionary, late-Victorian painting rewards close analysis because it reveals conflicts and contestations of a society in the throes of change. The composition thus enacts the transformative effects of flame itself, in which material structures metamorphose into formless new substances or break down into constitutive elements.įrank Dicksee, The Funeral of a Viking, 1893 (detail). This gesture takes us from the present human world, comprised of detailed, bounded forms, to the unknown future of the natural realm, marked amorphousness, and dissolving in places into abstract patches of pure paint, a veil of orange and grey pigment ( Fig. 3), holds a burning torch at his side, while raising his other arm in a sweeping gesture that rhymes with - or activates - the right–left movement of the canvas. The source of the kindled glare, a man in glittering breastplate and helmet ( Fig. In the maelstrom of fire, water, and air is the supine figure of a Viking chief, clad in full armour, clutching sword and shield, his body starkly and obdurately outlined against the flaming pyre ( Fig. Coordinating its efforts with obvious strength and skill, a team of bare-chested warriors wades into the surf against crashing breakers, straining rippling muscles to launch the funeral barge. ![]() Roiling waves lap the feet of the assembled throng on the right. (2017) “Victorian Imag(in)ing of the Pagan Pyre: Frank Dicksee's Funeral of a Viking”,ġ9: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century.(25).Ĭomposed across a dramatic diagonal from lower right to upper left, Victorian Royal Academician Frank Dicksee’s imposing six-by-ten-foot Funeral of a Viking of 1893 features physically powerful men immersed in, even becoming a part of, the elements ( Fig. As the Christian world insisted on the resurrection of the body in a way that clung fiercely to tangibility and bounded form even in the face of belief in the immortality of the saved soul, the modern moment might be seen, in contrast, as characterized by an embrace of an aesthetic of dissolving form or formlessness. I suggest that the Victorian fascination with pagan fire-death allowed for alternate visions of form–matter relationships that in turn might produce new aesthetic possibilities. In fictional accounts such as Paul Du Chaillu’s novel Ivar the Viking (1893), the pyre as a narrative tool similarly forced attention to the body as dematerializing thing and to the language articulating this dissipation. Moreover, the Viking dissolves into pigment itself, mere aesthetic effect taking the place of a recognizable figure. Fire produces metamorphosis in the objects it encounters, and Dicksee’s portrayal underscores the notion of a clearly delineated human body transforming into amorphous flame. I set Frank Dicksee’s oil painting, Funeral of a Viking (1893), against the background of the emergent cremation movement and accounts of the neo-Druid William Price, a proponent for the legalization of cremation in the 1880s, in order to glimpse the work performed by the visualization of the ritualized burning of human beings in the pagan past. Victorians drew on imagery of Druid and Viking funeral pyres as a way of exploring alternative narratives of death and burial, generating a collective attention to what happened to a body after death. |19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth CenturyĪrticle Victorian Imag(in)ing of the Pagan Pyre: Frank Dicksee's Funeral of a VikingĪuthor: Nancy Rose Marshall (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Abstract ![]() ![]() Marshall | Victorian Imag(in)ing of the Pagan Pyre: Frank Dicksee's Funeral of a Viking
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