FUNERARY ART

Despite the scale of destruction, the innumerable tombs that have been spared give a good idea of the host of funerary monuments of all kinds which populated the churches and cloisters of the Middle Ages. If the pride of princes and churchmen shows itself all too clearly in imposing, lavishly decorated monuments, the necessarily modest tastes of less wealthy clients were content with ssmpler tombs or votive reliefs. But the dessre to stay present in the memory of the hying is common to them all. The type of tomb with a sculptured recumbent figure (gisaot) and weeping mourners beneath a series of arches, was now firmly established and spread universally (tomb of  Bishop Ramn Escales by Antoni Canet, 1409-1412, Barcelona Cathedral). It lasted down to the end of the Middle Ages with some variations touching, in particular, the arrangement of the funeral procession or the handling of the deceased person’s effigy.
On the tomb of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, commissioned from Jean de Marville in 1384 and continued by Claus Sluter and Claus de Werwe, the mourners are no longer conceived as applied reliefi placed side by side in the niches but as independent statuettes circulating beneath a veritable gallery of arcading. The revival of portraiture, which stems from the fourteenth century, bursts out in some of the recumbent figures: the ugly face of Jean de Berry is uncompromisingly rendered on the tomb statue at Bourges carved by Jean de Cambrai between 1405 and 1416, the date of rhe duke’s death.
From the idealized image ro the faithful portrait of the deceased, the evolunou of funerary sculpture also led to the representation of the emaciated or withered corpse (transi), which reproduces the grim visions of the plague and recalls the vanity of the things of thss world. In France, the oldest withered corpse statues, contemporary with the first dissections of the human body authorized in 1396, are those of the physician Guillaume de Harcigny (died s393) who attonded Charles VI (Archaeological Museum, Laon) and of Cardinaljean de La Grange (died 1402) at Avignon. The latter, remarkable for its anatomical accuracy, is accompanied by an inscription which gave to the macabre portrayal its full significance: “If all see, great and small, to what state they shall be reduced. . . then wherefore pride? For thou art dust and like me thou shalt again become a fetid corpse, ashes and food for worms.”
The tomb La Grange had built for himself in the choir of Saint—Martial of Avignon was remarkable for its size, its wealth of decoration and the range of its iconographic programme; this is clear from a seventeenth—century drawing and the surviving elements in the Petit Palais Museum at Avignon. Above the withered corpse, the tomb effigy and the College of Apostles, five successive storeys rose some fifty feet from the ground and showed La Grange, Louis of Orleans, Charles VI, Charles V and Pope Clement VII each kneeling and commended by a patron saint before a scene from the life of the Virgin. The theme of the Coronation of the Virgin, image of Paradise, and that of the Apostolic College, which evoked the desire to unite the Avignon Curia with the Apostles and thereby affirm its legitimacy, recall the traditional formula of the cardinal’s tomb at the time of the Schism.
The first example of this type, carved under the direction ofBarthlemy Cavalier from 5372 to 1377, was the funerary monument of Cardinal Philippe Cabassole; its design and layout may have inspired the great Neapolitan tombs of the late fourteenth century.
But La Grange enriched the usual design with a taste for pomp and a purpose of political commemoration already obvious in the statues of the “Bean Pilier” at Amiens Cathedral, which he had commissioned about ay. Adviser to King Charles V of France and instigator of the schismatic election of Pope Clement VII in 5378, Cardinal de La Grange chose to have portrayed on his tomb as the representanves of his spiritual family the Pope and the Royal House of France. The sculptures, of varied styles and uneven qnahty, bear witness to the diversity of influences mixing in the Avignon crucible and engendering international Gothic art. One of the main currents had its sources in France in the royal or princely circles of the end of the century.
On German soil, episcopal pomp found a new mode of expression: the wall-tomb, which, in a profusely ornamented frame, presented the sculptured image of the deceased in a standing position, supported by the wall or a pillar and no longer recumbent on a tombstone (Johann II von Nassau, died 1459, Mainz Cathedral).