Urn
The urn is the longest-lived mourning symbol of the European jewellery tradition - an antiquising vessel form that, since the late eighteenth century, has represented the ashes and thus, metonymically, the deceased person themselves.
Written by Dr. Helene Vasall
The urn is the most frequently painted mourning symbol of Western European jewellery. Over more than 150 years - roughly 1770 to 1920 - it appears in thousands of sepia miniatures, enamel reliefs, engraved jewels and mourning brooches. Unlike most other symbols of mourning jewellery it is not a religious sign but a neoclassical pictorial quotation from Roman antiquity - and it is precisely that secular origin that makes it attractive to the age of sensibility and to the Biedermeier.
Ancient roots
The burial urn is one of the oldest European grave objects. Etruscan and Roman burials used urns of clay, marble or bronze as ash vessels; in grave reliefs the urn usually appears on a stele, sometimes flanked by mourners. With Christianisation the iconography of the urn disappeared from the Western European pictorial tradition - it was bound to the pagan practice of cremation, which Christianity forbade.
Only the rediscovery of antiquity in the eighteenth century brought the motif back. The excavations at Pompeii (from 1748), Herculaneum and along the Via Appia supplied the visual material; neoclassical painters such as Angelica Kauffmann and Pompeo Batoni took the burial urn into their mourning allegories; and the emerging mourning jewellery of the late Enlightenment drew the motif directly from that iconographic wave.
Composition
The typical mourning urn follows a fixed pictorial canon:
- Form: a bulging vessel with a high foot, a narrow neck and a stepped lid - usually with a flame, a cloth or a small pine-cone finial
- Position: on a stele or a low plinth, often with a classical inscription
- Surroundings: a weeping willow (to the right or left), occasionally a kneeling or standing mourner, sometimes a fallen column stump as a symbol of transience
- Lettering: the initials of the deceased, the date of death, a short inscription such as Sacred to the memory of …
This composition is remarkably stable across the whole of its heyday. A sepia hair painting of the 1790s and a Victorian enamel brooch of the 1860s show the same pictorial elements in almost identical arrangement - the urn is an iconographic constant, not a marker of style.
Meanings
The urn carries three overlapping meanings:
- Literal - as an ash vessel. Even in a period whose burial practice was still inhumation, the urn was the symbolic ash vessel. It denoted death as a reduction to a substance of ash.
- Metonymic - as a reference to the deceased person themselves. The inscription ("Sacred to the memory of E. M., d. 1817") personalised the urn - it was thereby no longer a generic symbol but stood for exactly this one person.
- Allegorical - as a sign of ancient, pre-Christian mourning culture. The urn was a deliberate secular reference; it made mourning a cultural, not (or not only) a religious practice. In the Protestant bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century that was aesthetically most welcome.
Jewellery contexts
The urn appears in almost every genre of the sentimental and mourning jewellery tradition:
- Sepia hair paintings - the standard composition almost always shows an urn with a weeping willow (see Sepia Hair Painting)
- Enamel reliefs on mourning rings and brooches - the urn as a small gold relief element on black enamel
- Engraving on gold mounts - the urn as a graved pictorial cipher on the reverse of mourning lockets
- Berlin iron pieces - the urn as a cast relief, usually combined with oak leaves or antiquising heads
- Jet carvings - rarely as a full sculpture, more often as a relief on Whitby cabochons
In Victorian full-mourning jewellery from about 1860 onwards the urn recedes. The Victorian bourgeoisie preferred material (jet, onyx) and inscription as the bearers of meaning; pictorial symbols were regarded as too delicate, too Georgian. In half-mourning pieces the urn then reappears, often in combination with amethyst and moonstone.
Decline
With the end of formal court mourning around 1900 and the growing realism of mourning imagery, the urn disappears from jewellery iconography. Photography had displaced the painted portrait; and the painted portrait had displaced the symbolic image. What remains is the urn as a cemetery object - on gravestones and in funeral halls the antiquising stone urn is standard to this day.
In the jewellery practice of the twentieth century the urn plays no further part; individual Art Deco pieces take it up ironically or decoratively, but as a mourning symbol it is extinguished.
Today
In modern memorial jewellery the urn barely appears as a pictorial motif - the iconographic language has shifted. What has remained is the idea of the urn as a bearer of ashes: today's ash pendants and ash diamonds are the functional descendants of the ancient burial urn. Anyone who knows the iconographic tradition sees in a modern ash pendant not an invention but a continuation - the urn has returned from image to container.
When placing historical pieces, the form of the urn is a useful aid to dating: slender, antiquising urns with a flame finial are neoclassical (1780–1820); bulging urns with a cloth and rich ornament are Biedermeier (1820–1850); severe, almost geometric urns are Victorian (1850–1880).
Questions about this entry
- Why does the urn suddenly appear in the eighteenth century?
With the rediscovery of Pompeii (excavations from 1748 onwards) and the neoclassical taste of the late Enlightenment, the imagery of antiquity returned. The burial urn was a standard motif on Roman gravestones; it fitted aesthetically into the new mourning iconography, which sought to distance itself from the drastic memento mori symbolism of the Baroque. By 1800 the urn is the most important mourning symbol of sentimental jewellery.
- What distinguishes a mourning urn from a simple vase?
The iconographic urn follows a fixed canon of form: a raised foot, a bulging body, a stepped neck and a flat lid, usually crowned with a flame or a cloth. It frequently stands on a stele or a plinth, occasionally entwined with willow branches or ivy.
- What inscription does the urn typically carry?
The initials of the deceased, sometimes the date of death, occasionally short mottoes such as Souvenir, À jamais or Im Gedenken. On English pieces also Sacred to the memory of …. The inscription is part of the picture, not of the mount - it is painted with the same brush as the rest of the scene.
- Is the urn still alive in modern memorial jewellery?
Only sporadically - as a relief element on classically conceived mourning rings, for instance, or as a small gold symbol on pendants. As a principal motif it has become rare. What has stayed alive is the idea of the urn as a container for ashes: modern ash pendants and memorial diamonds continue the idea of wearing the material of the deceased person.
Further reading
- Death Becomes Her - A Century of Mourning Attire - Jessica Regan (2014)
- Sentimental Jewellery - Shire Library - Ann Louise Luthi (2007)
- Friedhof und Denkmal - Zeitschrift für Sepulkralkultur
Related entries
- 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.
- 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 conceptsMemento mori
Memento mori is the Christian-Stoic exhortation to be mindful of one's own death - and at the same time the iconographic soil from which European mourning jewellery of the 17th century grew.
- 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 & motifsAnchor
In mourning and memorial jewellery the anchor is the classic symbol of *hope* - usually paired with the cross (faith) and the heart (love) as a threefold emblem of the virtues; a constant form in Victorian jewellery, and living on in modern memorial jewellery as a many-layered symbol of steadiness, anchorage and constancy.
- Techniques & craftSepia Hair Painting
Sepia hair painting combines two sentimental techniques: chopped human hair is worked with sepia ink into a pigment mixture and used as the medium for tiny mourning miniatures set beneath rock crystal.
- Jewellery formsMourning Brooch
The mourning brooch is the central women's jewellery form of Victorian mourning wear - a brooch, often the size of a palm, pinned to dress, collar or veil, and today an almost exclusively historical field of collecting.
- 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.
- Modern memorial jewelleryAsh Jewellery
Ash jewellery is a modern memorial piece in which a small quantity of cremation ashes is permanently enclosed - usually in a hollow setting with a rock-crystal window, or embedded in synthetic resin.
- 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.