Memorials to love and loss through millenia

In Glasgow I learned about mortuary sculptures in shared tombs. One really old example is an Etruscan sarcophagus lid from about 300 BC depicting a husband and wife “on a bed with pillows, beneath crinkled sheets, in a loving embrace,”¹² — the memory of a happy marriage immortalized in volcanic tuff.³

A few days later, I visited the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, where I saw Patricia Cronin’s Memorial to a Marriage. Cronin “takes traditional art forms and adds contemporary content to address issues of sexuality, gender and class”⁴. The piece is a bronze cast of the mortuary sculpture of herself and her partner, Deborah Karr. The sculpture means to address, among other things, issues of gay marriage, love and loss.

Both of these are an example of artifacts as recorders and shapers of the human conversation on timeless issues. They are rock and metal footnotes on the stories we tell each other, and like their printed counterparts, they invite us into the nuance: It was lovely to be able to place a modern take on an ancient art form in its larger context, and to be thrown into complex contemporary issues through it.