The cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley

I have firmly expressed my desire for my corpse to be cremated, so it was with some interest that I encountered this painting at Sloth Unleashed.  The image is of an 1889 oil painting by Louis Édouard Fournier, entitled The Funeral of Shelley.   I was startled to see the apparent "low-tech" methodology, which seemed more suited to Delhi than to Tuscany.

The source for the image is Frankensteinia: The Frankenstein Blog, where an extended discussion explains that the painting depicts fantasy more than the reality of the cremation.

Fournier’s 1889 painting depicts a bleak, windswept beach, the witnesses swaddled in heavy coats against the cold. At the back, Mary Shelley kneels in prayer. In the foreground, friends and fellow authors Edward John Trelawny, Hunt and Byron strike dramatic, grieving poses. A peaceful Shelley, as if asleep, is stretched out on his smoking pyre. But it’s all wrong.

July 18 was actually a hot, sunny day. Mary Shelley, as was the custom of the times, did not attend. Leigh Hunt sat out the event in a nearby carriage. Byron, upset at the proceedings and suffering from the heat, cooled off in the surf, eventually to swim out to his own boat, leaving Trelawny alone on the beach. Shelley’s body, badly decomposed, the face and hands gone, was burned in a metal furnace lugged out to the shore by hired help.

In the end, Trelawny plucked Shelley’s carbonized heart from the ashes as a gruesome souvenir for himself, but he was eventually persuaded to give it to Mary, who preserved the relic for the rest of her life. Contrary to various reports, the heart was not returned to Shelley’s grave or buried with Mary, in 1851. It was interred with their son, Percy Florence Shelley, in 1889, the very year that Fournier painted The Funeral of Shelley.

There was nothing of the romantic gesture, suggested by Fournier’s art, in the actual cremation of Shelley’s remains. His friends had gathered in respect and duty, to oversee the proper and speedy disposal of his body.

I'll have more to say about Shelley's heart in some future post.   The Frankensteinia blog has lots of good stuff for those interested.

Addendum:  Reposted from 2010 to add this most interesting text found by reader Bulletholes, in a post by kissyface at Charm School:

After the fire was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley's dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time...

The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire...

Some additional details in the comments, or at the text source: Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, by Edward John Trelawny