change of Gothic

This change was combined with another vital change. The work of art became mobile. Its format was reduced. It tended to become an object possessed by individuals and thenceforth private commissions won the day. Here social changes came into play. The movement which for generations had gradually freed the individual from collective constraints made both wealth and pleasure increasingly personal. Now people took their pleasures in private and salvation was also won in private. During its development, pastoral action had established a sort of turning inward of piety. Devotion, in its most modern aspect, moved away from public places. The ardour of his desire led the Christian to withdraw, far from the bustle and din of the world, into seclusion to advance in his imitation ofjesus Christ. Sculpture responded to this trend. It withdrew into the domestic space. Perhaps not as an individual possession, but at least belonging to the household, the family line, from then on it mainly served to decorate chapels and tombs.
Everyone who had the means engaged the services of a salaried clerk, built a private altar and fitted up a place in which to pray, follow the service and recite the hours in company with his household. If possible he placed some relics in it, but at all events he there installed some of the images he relied on to touch the heart and bring him nearer the divine. In its earliest origins, the chapel had been royal, available for the orisons of the divine monarch, Charlemagne at Aachen, St Louis in his Parisian palace, the Emperor Charles IV at Karlstein. For a long time, all the heads of houses who had seized regalian powers, followed the kings’ example. The rich imitated them in their turn. By the fifreenth century the chapel, too, had become fashionable. It established itself in even the least important chteaux and in patrician dwellings. It invaded the side aisles of urban churches where the great families of the city obtained the concession of a site reserved for their own devotions. Founding a chapel was a sign of social success. So the chapel was a place of ostentation, strewn with heraldic signs clearly designating its owners, whose power and wealth were measured by the profusion and brilliance of a decoration in which, as on the furnishings of the choir and the great altarpieces, sculpture was associated with painting and goldsmiths’ work, on a smaller scale, but with the same concern to move and convince.
One of the chapel’s main functions was funerary. It housed the tombs of the family ancestors and thus preserved their memory. In accordance with their last wishes, masses were said there for the repose of their souls. Fifteenth—century preachers gave vivid pictures of the punishments in store for sinners in the next world. They also taught that the sojourn of the dead in purgatory could be cut short by the prayers of the living. Consequently who would not be preoccupied with staying alive in the mcmnry of those who survived them? Every man who ptssessed some property and, thinking about his last end, arranged for its transmission, accordingly took pains, not only to institute religious services which would be repeated until the end of the world on the anniversary of his passing, but to prepare his own tomb, engage sculptors or leave money with which to pay them to his heirs (his wife in particular, since care of the dead was a woman’s business), ordering the artists to fashion on this memorial the obvious signs which would remind every visitor of the duty to help him whose mortal remains rested under the slab with his intercessory prayers.
Very soon, the wealthiest men had made such arrangements. From the end of the twelfth century sculpture’s task was to perpetuate the pomp of funeral ceremonies. On such days the deceased was exhibited in a final parade in all the brilliance of his life on earth. Made up, adorned with the attributes of power, his body stretched out on the catafalqiie remained exposed to the view of those who mourned him. It was in this magnificent aspect that great men wanted to be represented so that their presence among men would be prolonged. Carved in wood or stone, the gisant found his place on top of the tomb. So that the dead could be recognized by other means than their coats of arms, artists were soon asked to reproduce the features as preserved by the death mask. Faces became portraits. Lastly, as the desire to survive demanded even more, contracts between sculptors and the representatives of great lords stipulated