An 1889 oil painting by Louis Édouard Fournier, The Funeral of Shelley, depicts a somber ceremony as the body of Percy Bysshe Shelley is cremated on a Tuscany beach, July 18, 1822.
29 and drowned in a boating accident. :(
In the end, Trelawny plucked Shelley’s carbonized heart from the ashes as a gruesome souvenir for himself, but he was eventually persuaded to give it to Mary, who preserved the relic for the rest of her life. Contrary to various reports, the heart was not returned to Shelley’s grave or buried with Mary, in 1851. It was interred with their son, Percy Florence Shelley, in 1889, the very year that Fournier painted The Funeral of Shelley.
That’s pretty metal.
It’s going to take a while to cremate open air with just wood. Using tires and diesel over wood it still takes most of a day.
I suppose a lot of that heat goes up and out into the atmosphere instead into the body, like in a modern crematorium.
Yeah, and these guys definitely had bricks and even ceramics. They were just being dramatic. On brand
The scene is wildly inaccurate in all its details.
July 18 was actually a hot, sunny day. Mary Shelley, as was the custom of the times, did not attend. Leigh Hunt sat out the event in a nearby carriage. Byron, upset at the proceedings and suffering from the heat, cooled off in the surf, eventually to swim out to his own boat, leaving Trelawny alone on the beach. Shelley’s body, badly decomposed, the face and hands gone, was burned in a metal furnace lugged out to the shore by hired help.
Thanks for the clarification. That makes so much more sense than the picture. Although, I do like the painting and artistic license is important and necessary. A painting of Byron swimming while one guy watches the help load a badly decomposed body into a furnace could also by good. Maybe a job for AI
This is beautiful and haunting.
