A funeral painting shows who stands closest to the dead. Over more than three thousand years, painters have given that place to a priest in a jackal mask, a knight who doubted a miracle, two saints come down from heaven, a whole small town and, once, a sheepdog.
The pictures range from an Egyptian papyrus of about 1285 BC to Gustave Courbet's A Burial at Ornans, by way of Giotto, Caravaggio, El Greco, Goya, Turner and Böcklin.
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How These Were Chosen
Only farewells still under way made the cut: in each picture, someone carries, lowers, guards, buries or even mocks the dead. Deathbed scenes, where the person is still alive, are left out, and so are graves visited years later.
A procession puts people in order: who carries the coffin, who walks first behind it, who follows at the back. The mourners also show what grief was allowed to look like in their day, loud or silent, in black or in white.
In ancient Egypt, funerals went onto tomb walls and onto rolls of papyrus laid with the body, to help the dead on their way. In Christian Europe, churches wanted the burials of Christ and the saints above their altars, large enough to be seen from the far end of the nave, the long central hall.
Later the funeral left the church for the battlefield and the village road. By the nineteenth century, the burial of ordinary people in a town cemetery could fill a canvas as large as any scene from the Bible.
The countdown starts with lesser known works and ends with the most famous, and in each one the first thing to look at is who stands nearest the dead.
12. Unknown Egyptian scribe and painter, Papyrus of Hunefer, funeral scene (about 1285 BC)
In the Papyrus of Hunefer, painted around 1285 BC by an Egyptian scribe whose name is lost, the mummy of Hunefer stands upright at the door of his tomb. A priest holds it steady, wearing the jackal mask of Anubis, the Egyptian god of embalming.
The dead man was a royal scribe, the steward of King Sety I. The sheet comes from his Book of the Dead, a roll of spells and pictures meant to guide him into the afterlife, and this part of the roll shows his funeral.
The upper part of the sheet lays out the ceremony at the tomb. Two women grieve in front of the mummy, one of them his wife, Nasha. Behind it rises a stela, a stone carved with a prayer for him.
Farther back stands his tomb chapel on the west bank at Thebes, the great city of southern Egypt, on the side of the Nile where it buried its dead.
Beside a heap of offerings, a man in a panther skin burns incense, while others raise ritual tools toward the mummy. They are performing the Opening of the Mouth, a rite meant to reunite Hunefer's spirit with his body so that he could enjoy the afterlife.
Short columns of hieroglyphs record the words they spoke. Below them, a narrower strip shows what the rite required.
Men carry a heart and a foreleg toward a table of offerings, both cut from a calf that is still alive. The painter set the calf beside its mother, the cow.
The finished roll was kept inside a painted wooden figure of Osiris, god of the dead, made for Hunefer. Giotto, El Greco and Courbet would paint their funerals for congregations and crowds. This one was painted for the dead man himself.
At a Glance
Artist: Unknown Egyptian scribe and painter (Nineteenth Dynasty)
Painted: About 1285 BC
Medium: Ink and pigments on papyrus
Size: 40 × 79 cm (15 3/4 × 31 1/8 in), the funeral sheet
Where to see it: British Museum, London
About This Painting
Who painted the Papyrus of Hunefer?
No painter's name survives. The finest Books of the Dead were written by expert scribes and decorated by master draftsmen, and since Hunefer was a royal scribe, he may have written and painted his own.
What is on the other half of the sheet?
Twenty-three lines of hieroglyphs in black and red ink, the opening of Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead, a text so obscure that the Egyptians added notes to explain it. Above them, small scenes show Hunefer in the afterlife, among them one where he plays senet, a board game.
11. Edwin Landseer, The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner (1837)
In The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, which Edwin Landseer painted in 1837, a sheepdog rests its head on a plain wooden coffin, against the shepherd's cloak that still lies over the lid. Nobody else came.
At an English funeral of the time, the chief mourner was the closest relative, the one who walked first behind the coffin. In this bare cottage room, the title gives that place to someone else.