A windowless dark room covered floor to ceiling in frescoes, with a fourteen-second echo and the artist's ashes over the door.
Gustav Vigeland made the sculpture park. His younger brother Emanuel made this, and almost nobody goes.
It is the strangest interior in Oslo and possibly in Scandinavia.
What it is
Tomba Emmanuelle, built from 1926 as a museum for Emanuel Vigeland’s own work, and converted by him into his mausoleum.
It is a barrel-vaulted room about twenty metres long with no windows. Every surface — walls, vault, everything — is covered in a single fresco cycle he worked on from 1927 until his death in 1948.
The entrance door is deliberately low, so that everyone who comes in must bow.
His ashes are in an urn above the doorway, so that everyone who leaves passes under him.
The fresco
Vita — Life. Human existence from conception to death, in hundreds of nude figures, painted in a dark, brown-toned palette on a black ground.
It is explicitly and unmistakably about sex, birth and death, in that order and often at once. It was controversial when it was made and it is startling now.
Emanuel bricked up the windows himself so that it could only be seen by the light that leaks in, which means your eyes have to adjust for several minutes before you can see anything at all. That waiting is part of the design.
The sound
The room has an extraordinarily long reverberation — figures between about ten and fourteen seconds are commonly cited, and it is long enough that a single clap decays for an uncomfortable length of time.
Visitors are asked to be quiet, and the effect of a nearly silent, nearly dark, enormously resonant room is not like anything else.
It is occasionally used for concerts, and a small number of recordings have been made in it. If a concert coincides with your visit, go.
Emanuel Vigeland himself
He was a significant artist in his own right — stained glass and frescoes in churches across Norway, including work in Oslo Cathedral — and he spent his life somewhat overshadowed by his brother, with whom his relations were difficult.
Building a windowless mausoleum for himself covered in an epic about sex and death, and requiring every visitor to bow on the way in and pass under his ashes on the way out, is a fairly direct statement about that.
Practical
Opening hours are very restricted. Historically Sunday afternoons for a couple of hours, with additional summer dates. Check the museum’s own site before you go; this catches people out constantly.
Small admission charge. No photography. Silence requested and enforced by the atmosphere more than by staff.
T-bane line 1 to Slemdal, about fifteen minutes from the centre, then a short walk through a wealthy residential suburb. You can combine it with Holmenkollen further up the same line.
Give it forty-five minutes, most of which is standing still.
