Book Of The Dead And Rottgen Pieta Essay

The Book of the Dead and the Rottgen Pieta both represent the main themes of death and afterlife. The Book of the Dead is a manual for the afterlife and the Rottgen Pieta is meant to induce emotions. Although the Rottgen Pieta from Germany conveys death through its content, the Book of the Dead from Egypt represents what its culture thinks of death and the afterlife better than the Rottgen Pieta. To begin with, the Rottgen Pieta also known as Vesperbild, is from the middle Rhine Region, Germany. It is made out of wood and is 34 ½” tall. Its function is to invoke extreme emotions. The sculpture shows the Virgin Mary holding the grotesque and exaggerated body of Jesus Christ. The sculpture conveys pain, suffering, sorrow, and grief through its many diagonal and chaotic lines. The Rottgen Pieta is a Christian work of art meant to evoke emotions in the viewer. It was also meant to represent the time period’s current events. The content of the sculpture is that
The Book of the Dead does a better a job at doing this by actually portraying the act of going into the afterlife. Conversely, the Rottgen Pieta shows the actual act of death but is not the better of the two at representing at what its culture thinks of it. The Book of the Dead is literally a manual for the afterlife which tells us that the Egyptians thought of death as a really important part of their religion. On the other hand, the Rottgen Pieta does not really represent the whole idea of how its culture thinks of death. The Egyptians saw death as a religious ceremony to be celebrated and remembered. The manual acts as a guide with instructions that leads the person who has passed away through the afterlife. Both the works are almost completely different. One is a sculpture made out of wood and the other is a painting on papyrus. The Book of the Dead has semi-realistic body proportions compared to the Rottgen