The Afterlife

Heavens, hells, judgments and journeys beyond death, and the tombs, coffins and grave goods made for the life to come.

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About

Beliefs about life after death have produced elaborate art in many traditions. In ancient Egypt, the Papyrus of Ani (c. 1250 BC), a copy of the Book of the Dead, shows the scribe's heart weighed against a feather before he may enter the next world. The Etruscan Sarcophagus of the Spouses (c. 520 BC) presents a couple reclining as if at an eternal banquet, and the terracotta army buried near China's first emperor around 210 BC was made to serve him after death.

Christian artists pictured heaven and hell in detail. Fra Angelico's Last Judgment (c. 1431) sets saints and angels dancing in paradise opposite the torments of the damned, and William Blake's watercolours for Dante's Divine Comedy (1824–27) chart the journey from hell to paradise. In Ghana, Paa Joe builds coffins shaped as fish, cars and buildings, a Ga tradition that links the dead to the lives they led.