Every era has its own mourning - so does the bourgeois 19th century. Since the Romantic period, it has been under the spell of ambivalence; the closeness of death and Eros is evidenced by Wagner's scandalous 'Tristan'. The tomb sculpture is also marked by ambivalences: death itself is eroticized. The angels at the grave represent a mythology of the eternal feminine, transformed into worldly-aesthetic images of thought. They displace the cross and guard the graves of the bourgeoisie, no longer serving as guarantors of heavenly messages. Behind this lies a gospel of beauty, as proclaimed by aestheticism since Ruskin. Between the principle of reality and theatricality, bourgeois mourning develops a habitus that produces certain affects and forms of representation. Mourning is not a private matter; reputation demands staging. Its artistic character increases to the extent that Christian interpretation...