The history of portraiture itself is based on a shadow the outline of a departing lover’s profile, traced on a wall by a maid of Corinth: absence pictured as presence. 14, but his exalted status and his deification ensured that portraits would be made after his death. It is only when we realize that Victorian society actually dealt with death simultaneously in two extremely different ways-denial and romantic acceptance-that these ostensibly contradictory types of images begin to make sense. The posthumous portrait was in effect a shadow, a memory preserved in colored pigments on canvas. Description: Augustus, first emperor of Rome, died in A.D. This thesis considers these two types of mourning images which flourished side by side for over sixty years, and addresses the question of why the same society would find two such seeming opposites-in format and subject-equally suitable and acceptable as forms through which to remember a deceased child. The simultaneous acceptance and denial of death is personified in both the painted posthumous mourning portraits which represented the dead child as alive and often life-size, and the much smaller, blatant images of corpses found in the postmortem photographs. In fact, many Victorian parents both accepted and denied the deaths of their children. But to believe that with the reality of high infant and child mortality rates came total acknowledgment and resignation is an inaccurate assumption. Faced with high infant mortality rates, Victorian parents used culture in diverse ways to mourn and remember their dead children. The Victorian romanticizing of death, childhood and the family helped people to cope with flux and uncertainty in an era of social upheaval.
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