Mourning and the Face: Two Kinds of Preparation

A funeral requires two faces, and they are prepared by opposite rules.

The face of the dead is worked on. It is washed, closed, arranged and in many traditions painted, so that the body can be looked at. The face of the mourner is required to show damage: no colour, no ornament, no scent, and in some traditions no washing, because a person who looks well is a person who is not sufficiently sorry.

Both are cosmetic practices in the strict sense, and both are unusually well documented, because both have repeatedly been regulated in writing. The Egyptian dead were buried with complete cosmetic kits - palettes, pigment, pots and applicator sticks - from the predynastic period onward.^[1]

Egyptian burial treats cosmetics as equipment for a continuing life rather than as a farewell gesture. Pots of galena and malachite, grinding palettes, applicator sticks and sealed jars of oil appear in graves of both sexes across three thousand years.^[2]

The offering ritual formalised the provision. The Metropolitan Museum holds one such object: an offering slab cut for Ankhwadjes in travertine, of Dynasty 5 or 6, with seven depressions for the seven sacred oils of the mortuary ritual, so that the supply continued in stone whether or not anyone renewed it in kind.^[3] That is a single Old Kingdom example rather than a statement about the form as a class. The canonical offering list sets those oils beside two eye paints, the green and the black, as standard equipment for the dead.^[2]

The purpose is not decorative. A face that can see, and that is protected, is a face fit for what comes next, and the same paint worn in life is supplied for use after it. The containers were often finely made, which is not what is done for a purely functional substance.^[4]

Greek mourning ran the other way. The mourner's face was the medium: women tore their cheeks, cut their hair and beat themselves at the graveside, and professional mourners were hired to do it visibly and audibly.

It was legislated against. Plutarch, in his Life of Solon, reports that Solon forbade laceration of the flesh by mourners, set lamentations, and the bewailing of anyone at another person's funeral, as part of a wider law restricting the public appearances of women at funerals and festivals.^[5]

A law is evidence that the thing was happening, and evidence of who was thought to be doing it. Solon's Athens is the earliest well-documented case of a state deciding how far a face may be marked in grief. It was not the last.

Jewish mourning law codifies the same instinct as a set of abstentions. During shiva, the seven days following burial, the mourner is prohibited from bathing and from anointing - from oils, and by extension from perfumes, creams and cosmetics. The Babylonian Talmud states the rule at Moed Katan 15b and derives it from scripture rather than from any theory of pleasure. A mourner is prohibited from bathing, it says, because it is written "and do not anoint yourself with oil, but be as a woman that had for a long time mourned for the dead"; and bathing is folded into the category of anointing because both activities serve the same end, cleanliness.^[6]

The reasoning that turns the rule into a judgement about intent belongs to the later codes. The Shulchan Arukh holds at Yoreh De'ah 381 that anointing of any kind is forbidden if the intention is merely for the sake of pleasure, but permitted if it is to remove dirt, and permitted without argument as a medicine.^[7] That is the same move medieval Christian writers made about cosmetics in general: the substance is not the fault, the purpose is.

Comparable abstentions are documented for classical Greece. Robert Garland's account of Greek funerary practice describes mourners in dark clothing, with hair cut or torn, maintaining a conspicuous neglect of their own appearance for the duration.^[8] It is the exact inverse of the Egyptian burial kit, and the inversion is the point: the same kind of preparation is supplied to the dead and withheld from the living.

Nineteenth-century mourning is the most elaborate version on record, and it was a clothing system before it was anything else. The Metropolitan Museum's 2014 exhibition of a century of mourning attire set out the sequence: full mourning in dull black crape, then second mourning, then half-mourning in grey, mauve and white, with the duration of each stage fixed by the mourner's relationship to the dead.^[9]

Queen Victoria's mourning for Prince Albert, who died in 1861, gave the black dress a public face for four decades and is the usual explanation for the system's reach. It is an incomplete one. Mourning dress was also a fashion business, and the exhibition's premise was precisely the pressure of high-fashion standards on the dress of bereavement.^[9]

On the face itself the sources are thinner than the confident retellings suggest. Mourning etiquette regulated fabric, jewellery and veil in great detail; what it said about cosmetics is mostly implied by the period's general rule that nothing should look applied.^[10] The claim that Victorian women were specifically forbidden cosmetics while in mourning is better treated as an inference than as a documented prohibition.

The modern American funeral inverted the Victorian priority. Instead of a mourner made plain it produced a corpse made presentable, and it built a profession around doing so.

The mechanism was embalming, which spread in the United States during and after the Civil War of the 1860s as a means of getting the dead home recognisable, and which by the early twentieth century had become the normal treatment of a body before viewing. Gary Laderman's history of the American funeral home traces how the embalmed and cosmeticised body came to be what families expected rather than merely what they were sold.^[11]

Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death, published in 1963, put the trade's own phrase into general circulation. The corpse, in the industry's words that she quotes back at it, is transformed into a "Beautiful Memory Picture", and she set the phrase beside the rest of the trade vocabulary - restorative art, feature-setting, cosmetology - as the language of a business selling grief a product. The phrase is the industry's; the charge is hers.^[12]

The two books disagree about the industry and agree about the practice.

They are both for an audience.

The prepared corpse is prepared for viewers. Embalming and cosmetic restoration exist because a body is going to be looked at by people who are expected to take comfort from what they see. The mourner's bare face is also for viewers: the removal of paint, jewellery and scent is a signal sent outward, and the statutes and etiquette manuals that regulate it are regulating the signal rather than the grief.

That is the sharpest available answer to the question of what a painted face has ever been for. Death strips the question down. Nobody paints a corpse for the corpse's benefit, and nobody goes bare-faced in grief in an empty room.