Art of death goes digital

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Death for the great and good used to be a lavish affair surrounded by pomp and ceremony on a grand scale. But the grandest thing of all would have been a magnificent monument in memory of your life.

Today thousands of carved stone tombs, adorned with effigies and heraldic symbols, can be found in places of worship all over Britain. Yet they have never been studied as a cultural art form and their existence has never been properly catalogued ... until now.

Using the latest in computer technology and £136,000 funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), art historian Dr Nigel Llewellyn is about to conduct a pilot study to design a database of the funeral monuments of East and West Sussex.

If it's successful, Nigel, who curated the hugely popular Art of Death exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1992, hopes to turn his project into a national database.

He said: "Our approach to death these days is to keep our response low key. But our ancestors confronted death very readily and made preparations before they died. These monuments often tell extra-ordinary stories and are of interest not just to art historians, but also to genealogists, social historians and those interested in local history." More than 300 local monuments dated between 1530 and 1900 are to be doc-umented on the Sussex database, which will contain digitised visual images and text. The idea is that users will be able to identify and compare different mon-uments in an easy and accessible way.

The study, which Nigel will carry out in association with the Sussex Centre for Research in the History of Art, the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (COGS) and the Environmental Science Laboratory, is expected to take two years.

Two other bids to the AHRB by art historians on campus have also been successful. Dr Evelyn Welch has been awarded £252,000 for a three-year project that will bring together art, economic and cultural historians to explore issues of consumption in Renaissance Italy. "Our group is interested in whether art objects were bought and sold in ways that made them different from everyday objects," she said.

A project led by Professors Craig Clunas and Partha Mitter has been awarded £31,000 to explore the connections among a diverse group of scholars around the world who work with texts on visual arts and aesthetics in India and China. "This research is aimed at a clearer understanding of the arts in a global context and of the network of cultures in the contemporary world," explained Craig.

In a similar vein, Craig also leads a consortium that has received £250,000 from the HEFCE Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning, for a project entitled 'Globalising Art, Architecture and Design History'. Run in partnership with the Open University and the University of Middlesex, the three-year project aims to support curriculum development in art and design history nationally, by incorporating art from outside western Europe and North America.

"The obstacles to diversifying the curriculum in art history are as much practical as ideological," said Craig. "People want to incorporate other cultural traditions but are unsure how to proceed. This project is designed not to lecture people about change but to show them how to change in ways they already want to. I'm confident our experience here at Sussex can be of use in this."