The Art of Suicide - Ron Brown

The Art of Suicide is a history of the visual representation of suicide from the ancient world to its decriminalization in the twentieth century. After looking at instances of voluntary death in ancient Greece, Ron Brown discusses the contrast between the extraordinary absence of such events in early Christianity and the proliferation of images of biblical suicides in the late medieval era. He emphasizes how differing attitudes to suicide in the early modern world slowly merged, and pays particular attention to the one-time chasm between so-called heroic suicide and self-destruction as a 'crying crime'.