Suicide in art –  curiosity or contemplation?

Lecture and discussion with Malena Rotter and Kero Fichter

Pictorial representations of suicide make most people cringe when they hear about them. Yet these depictions are visually much closer and more present to us in museums. The Old Masters Picture Gallery with its collection of Italian Baroque painting is a particularly good example. In almost serial production, female protagonists from antiquity and the Old Testament who tragically put an end to their lives have been portrayed. But the theme was also taken up in modern times, albeit with a different focus, as Makart's sensuous Cleopatra in the Neue Galerie shows. The various types of representation, the motivations behind them, and their references to contemporary discourses will be examined in this context.

Kero Fichter is a research assistant at the Neue Galerie of the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel. His research focuses on sexuality, body images and gender relations in the late Middle Ages and early modern period.

Malena Rotter is a research assistant at the Old Masters Picture Gallery of the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel. Her research interests include representations of the afterlife in early modern Italian painting, which were also the subject of her dissertation.