Tear
The tear - as a shaped teardrop pendant, as a drop-shaped pearl or as a painted tear on a miniature portrait - is one of the most direct mourning symbols of all; it joins bodily reality (the drop actually wept) to symbolic condensation, and appears in jewellery from the Baroque memento mori to the modern teardrop ash pendant.
Written by Dr. Helene Vasall
The tear is one of the most direct mourning symbols of all. Unlike the anchor (an abstract metaphor of hope), the cross (a religious confession) or the butterfly (mythological and consoling), the tear refers to a concrete bodily reality: weeping. This union of bodiliness and symbol makes the tear a particularly dense iconographic element - it is simultaneously visible (as the drop actually wept) and symbolically condensed (as a sign of pain, compassion, contrition). In jewellery it is a continuous constant: from Baroque memento mori jewellery (see Baroque (c. 1600–1750)) via the Victorian teardrop pendant to the modern teardrop ash pendant.
Symbolic meaning
In a mourning context the tear carries several meanings:
- Grief and pain - its primary charge; a tear is the most immediate bodily gesture of grief
- Compassion - empathy derives from the Greek en-pathos; the tear of compassion is a central motif of Christian and Stoic ethics
- Contrition and penitence - in the Christian tradition (especially in Augustine and in monastic spirituality) the donum lacrimarum (gift of tears) counts as a holy gesture; in the Bible the sinner Mary Magdalene washes Christ's feet with her tears
- Purity - tears are clear, salt, unfeigned; they count as a ritual of cleansing
- Intensified faith - in the mysticism of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, tears are read as proof of the deepest experience of faith
In the Jewish tradition weeping is a central element of mourning (aveilut); the Western Wall in Jerusalem is a deliberate place of mourning with a collective reference to tears. In the Islamic tradition the shedding of tears belongs among the recognised mourning practices of the first days after the death of a relative.
History
Antiquity. Tear symbolism is central to the Greco-Roman mourning tradition. Lacrimaria - small tear bottles of glass or clay - are found in Roman graves in great numbers as grave goods. They were regarded as visible proof of the intensity of grief: the more tears, the stronger the mourning.
Middle Ages. The donum lacrimarum (gift of tears) is regarded in monastic spirituality as a holy gesture. Depictions of the tear in jewellery are rare, but occur in illumination.
Renaissance and Baroque (see Baroque (c. 1600–1750)). The tear appears in vanitas still lifes (see Skull (the Memento Mori Death's Head)) and in memento mori jewellery - as a small enamel tear on a black enamel pendant, or as a painted tear on a miniature. In Spanish Dolorosa iconography (the Mater Dolorosa, the sorrowing Virgin) the tear becomes the central identifying feature: images of the Virgin with painted tears on her cheek are a specifically Spanish and southern Italian tradition.
Georgian and sentimental (see The Georgian Era (1714–1837), Sentimental Jewellery). The high point of the tear in sentimental jewellery. Miniature paintings show mourning figures with clearly visible tears on the cheek. Tear catchers (small tear-catching bottles) are documented as small glass pendants between 1780 and 1820.
Victorian (see The Victorian Era (1837–1901)). The tear is made as a pendant form in many variations. Drop-shaped jet pendants (see Whitby Jet), teardrop pearls (see The Pearl in Mourning Jewellery), drop-shaped black enamel pendants (see Black Enamel (Schwarzemail)). The teardrop shape becomes one of the most frequent mourning pendant silhouettes. Long mourning drop earrings (long drops, see Mourning Earrings) are a standard item of the Victorian mourning toilette.
Modernism and the twentieth century. The teardrop shape survives in jewellery as a general pendant silhouette (outside mourning contexts too). Its specific charge as a mourning symbol recedes, but remains present in the funerary jewellery trade.
Today. In the modern memorial jewellery market the drop and teardrop shape has a strong presence - above all in ash pendants and memorial diamonds (see Ash Pendant, Memorial Diamond). The teardrop shape is especially well suited to a central hollow setting and is at the same time clearly legible as a gesture of mourning.
Formal variants
Classic teardrop pendant. A pendant in the shape of a tear, with a recognisable point above and a full curve below. It can be worn at the neck, often with a relic setting inside.
Teardrop pearl. A drop-shaped natural or cultured pearl as a pendant (see The Pearl in Mourning Jewellery). The drop shape of the pearl arises either naturally (very rare) or through deliberate culturing.
Drop earrings. Long-drop earrings (see Mourning Earrings) in teardrop form - a classic Victorian mourning jewellery form.
Drop-cut stone. Gemstones - garnet (see Garnet (Mourning Garnet)), amber (see Amber), onyx - are faceted in the pear cut (teardrop cut); the resulting stone is drop-shaped and carries the tear within it as a gesture of the cut.
Painted tear on a miniature portrait. On sentimental miniature paintings a small painted tear runs down the cheek of the mourning figure or of a depiction of the Virgin. A particular speciality of Spanish and southern Italian workshops.
Tear catcher (tear bottle). A small glass phial used in Victorian mourning fashion as a receptacle for tears. Today a collectors' item; occasionally available again in modern funerary practice.
Teardrop with relic setting. A drop-shaped gold mount with an ash capsule, hair inlay or fingerprint element inside. A modern memorial jewellery form.
Materials
Tears are rendered in jewellery in a range of materials:
- Pearl (see The Pearl in Mourning Jewellery) - conceptually the closest material tear; the white, faintly shimmering, drop-shaped pearl has since antiquity been the iconographic petrified tear
- Amber (see Amber) - in Greek mythology drops of amber are the tears of the Heliades; especially evocative in a honey-yellow drop cut
- Rock crystal - clear, transparent, with a memorial element (hair, ashes) cast behind it - a particularly dense symbolic variant
- Jet, vulcanite, onyx - the black teardrop pendants of the Victorian mourning toilette
- Diamond and memorial diamond (see Memorial Diamond) - the expensive modern variant, often in a pear (teardrop) cut
- Enamel tear on gold - small enamelled tears as an accent on mourning pendants
The tear in the modern memorial market
In today's market the teardrop shape serves several functions:
The classic teardrop memorial pendant. A discreet gold or silver drop with an engraved inscription or a small relic setting. Prices: 100–600 €.
Teardrop with cast-in ashes. An acrylic resin or glass drop with ashes cast into it, often visible as a pale layer within. Prices: 200–1,000 €.
Memorial diamond in a pear cut. A synthetic diamond made from ashes or hair (see Memorial Diamond), cut as a teardrop and set in a gold mount as a pendant. Prices: 3,000–25,000 €.
Teardrop pearl pendant. A large freshwater or Tahitian pearl in drop form, combined with a gold mount holding a relic setting at the back. Prices: 400–2,000 €.
Tear catcher. A modern revival of the Victorian tear bottle - a small glass phial on a neck chain. Symbolically strong, but rather rarely worn in practice.
The tear as a bridging symbol
One particular property makes the tear unique in a mourning context: it is the only mourning gesture that functions simultaneously as a mourning symbol. Other mourning symbols (cross, anchor, weeping willow, butterfly) are references to other concepts - the tear, by contrast, is what it symbolises: a bodily expression of grief. This immediate union of body and symbol makes it especially honest and especially condensed.
In modern memorial jewellery the tear is often combined with other symbols - tear and heart (love and pain), tear and butterfly (grief and consolation), tear with a fingerprint element (pain and concrete remembrance). Such combinations allow a differentiated gesture of remembrance that names several facets of grief at once.
Questions about this entry
- What is an ancient tear bottle (lacrimarium)?
A small vessel of glass or clay (5–15 cm high) used in Roman antiquity to keep tears. The bereaved wept into the vessel and placed it in the grave with the deceased - symbolically, as visible proof of the intensity of their grief. Many thousands of lacrimaria survive from Roman excavations. In the nineteenth century Victorian mourning fashion took up the tradition again: small glass tear catchers were made in which a widow caught her tears; at the end of the mourning period the bottle was corked and kept as a keepsake. A modern revival occurs occasionally in the funeral trade.
- Which jewellery forms use the tear symbol?
Several. The teardrop pendant - a pendant in the shape of a tear (often worn on a gold chain); frequently with a relic setting inside. The teardrop pearl - a drop-shaped natural pearl as a pendant (see The Pearl in Mourning Jewellery). Drop earrings - long-drop earrings in teardrop form (see Mourning Earrings). The painted tear on a miniature portrait - on sentimental miniature pendants a small painted tear sometimes runs down the cheek of the mourning figure (see Sentimental Jewellery). The tear brooch - a brooch whose form reproduces a stylised tear, often combined with a weeping willow or an angel motif.
- Are teardrop ash pendants a modern invention?
The ash variant, yes (see Ash Pendant); the teardrop-with-hollow-setting as such, no. The teardrop pendant with an integrated memorial element has existed since the eighteenth century - as a sentimental drop with a lock of hair under rock crystal, later as a Victorian drop with a photographic miniature. The modern variant is the teardrop pendant with ashes behind a laser-cut threaded closure, or with ashes cast into an acrylic resin drop. New in content (ashes instead of hair), traditional in form.
Further reading
- The Cultural History of Tears - Tom Lutz (1999)
- Sentimental Jewellery - Shire Library - Ann Louise Luthi (2007)
- Mourning and Memorabilia - A History - John S. C. Abbott (1996)
Related entries
- Core conceptsMourning Jewellery
Mourning jewellery is body adornment that signals a death, binds the memory of a deceased person, or does both at once - since the 17th century a jewellery type in its own right, with a material language of its own.
- Core conceptsMemorial Jewellery
Memorial jewellery is jewellery that deliberately binds itself to one particular person - through an inscription, a photograph, hair, ashes or, the defining medium today, a digitally captured fingerprint.
- Core conceptsSentimental Jewellery
Sentimental jewellery is the jewellery of the age of sensibility between 1760 and 1840 - pieces in which love, friendship and grief share the same imagery, and in which hair, miniature painting and personal inscriptions first become the load-bearing form.
- Symbols & motifsHeart
The heart is the third element of the Christian triad of virtues (faith - hope - love) and at the same time the strongest secular symbol of love and affection in mourning and memorial jewellery - from the medieval Sacred Heart via the Georgian heart locket to the modern ash pendant in the shape of a heart.
- Symbols & motifsWeeping Willow
The weeping willow is the most formative botanical mourning symbol of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - born in the English landscape garden of the Enlightenment, adopted by sentimentalism as an image of silent sorrow, and become in Victorian mourning iconography the dominant mourning scene on pendants, miniatures and grave stelae.
- Symbols & motifsAngels and Putti
In mourning jewellery, angels and putti form the iconographic bridge between death and redemption - the angel as the soul's companion into the hereafter, the putto as an image of the innocent child's soul. Both motifs are widespread in sentimental and Victorian mourning jewellery, above all in the context of mourning for children.
- Jewellery formsMourning Locket
The mourning locket is a pendant worn on a neck chain with an interior compartment - a concealed carrier of hair, photograph or inscription that keeps the memento close to the body and has been, from the eighteenth century to the present, the most important private form of mourning jewellery.
- Jewellery formsMourning Earrings
Mourning earrings are matt black or muted pieces of ear jewellery which in the nineteenth century were an obligatory component of the female mourning toilette, and which live on today as a discreet remembrance variant with a tiny relic setting.
- MaterialsThe Pearl in Mourning Jewellery
The pearl is the most important white material in the mourning context - symbol of the tear, of purity and of innocence - and in the 19th century was the preferred gemstone substance above all in half-mourning and final mourning as well as in mourning jewellery for deceased children.
- MaterialsAmber
Amber - fossilised tree resin, above all from the Baltic region - was worked in the 19th century as a light brown or reddish alternative to black Whitby jet and is today the bearer of its own East-Central and Eastern European mourning jewellery tradition, with casting-in techniques for modern memorial substances.
- PeriodsThe Georgian Era (1714–1837)
The Georgian era spans the reigns of the four kings George I to George IV and of William IV in Britain. In mourning jewellery it is the epoch in which sentimental jewellery was invented - sepia hair painting, the lover's eye, the miniature portrait on ivory, and the posy ring in transition to the memento mori ring.
- PeriodsThe Victorian Era (1837–1901)
The Victorian era is the heyday of mourning jewellery - a period of more than sixty years in which court mourning codes, industrial mass production, new materials (jet, vulcanite, Berlin iron) and Queen Victoria's personal widowhood combined to produce a system of public and private mourning visibility without precedent in European history.