Quick Hit: One Hundred Views of Mock Corpses.

traveling with the ghost has collected a bunch of images of "mock corpses" on their site. I'm not entirely sure how to feel about them. First of all, I'm not sure if they're meant to represent "mock corpses" or real dead people. (And traveling with the ghost doesn't appear to be sure either.) Second of all, each example is a woman (although the breakdown of male to female artists is basically even) and a number of the images are violent. I'd be interested in learning about the artistic intent behind these images, because I wouldn't want to dismiss them out of hand. (Although Alexander Denomay's Break-Up--collected in part 1--seems to cry out for dismissal.) But it is striking that every single one of these images is of women. Every. Single. One. (Granted, this may have been a choice on the part of the blogger.)

Japanese handscrolls on the nine stages of purification of a human corpse, painted from the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries, often feature female bodies as the subject of the decomposition studies. It'd be interesting to look at all the extent examples to see if there were any versions produced that showed a male body. I wouldn't be surprised if they were all of women, or overwhelmingly of women. You can view images from an early nineteenth-century version (copy of a late eighteenth-century version) here and read an interesting article on the subject here.

Dead women have always been a popular motif in art it seems. Anyone know of comparative pre-modern Western examples? I'd appreciate a chance to compare the two.

One Hundred View of Mock Corpses:
Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.
Part 4.
Part 5.

Via.