The Belmont Mansion!

I go to a school with a MANSION on campus.

It's random. And awesome!

So last Friday we toured the Belmont Mansion. It was my 4th tour but I feel like almost everything I learned was new! Unbelievable!

Something that struck me during our time there was the "obsession" with death that permeated the house and that. It seemed like a strange decorating theme of sorts....paintings of dead relatives, weird little artifacts made from dead relatives' hair. I had never really thought about it before, but as our tour guide pointed out, the mortality rates back in the old days were way higher than now and consequently people dealt with death in a very different way than we do today. 

I think death was revered and even understood in a way that we don't comprehend in today's culture. Today death is an avoided topic of conversation. It's sad and scary and uncomfortable. We avoid it. This was obvious in how we reacted to the death-related artifacts all throughout the mansion. They were weird! 

It was interesting to see how art and artifacts have documented the way that cultural perspectives of death have changed through the years.

Napoleon = Jesus?

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims at Jaffa, by Antoine-Jean Gros. 1804

Napoleon himself commissioned this painting to represent his incredibly gruesome Egyptian Campaign, during which is troops contracted the plague. Notice Napoleon there in the middle, oh-so-bravely touching the infected man, seeming to be heroically restoring hope to his troops. The soldiers look to him as their savior!

The real story was that Napoleon ordered these men to slaughter thousands of their Egyptian prisoners, and then, after learning they had contracted the plague, told their doctors to poison the troops in order to stop the disease from spreading. Pretty horrible stuff! This painting was Napoleon's attempt to cover up his deeds and regain political popularity....by presenting himself as a Christ figure among his soldiers. Thank God for modern photography, eh?