A cadaver monument or transi is a type of funerary monument to a deceased person, featuring a sculpted tomb effigy of a skeleton, or of an emaciated or decomposing dead body, with closed eyes. It was particularly characteristic of the Late Middle Ages [2] when they were designed as a memento mori to remind viewers of the transience and vanity of mortal life compared to the eternity and desirability of the Christian after-life. The format is in stark contrast to gisants, which are always recumbent, in full dress, with open eyes and hands clasped and raised in prayer. [3] [4]
Cadaver monuments first appeared in the 1380s and remained a popular form of funerary art for 200 subsequent years. [5] In a still widely debated theory popularized by the historians Helen M. Roe and John Aberth, [6] cadaver monuments are often interpreted as a form of memento mori or adaption of the motif of "The Three Living and the Three Dead". They show the human body's "transition" from life to decomposition, [7] highlighting the contrast between worldly riches and elegance and the degradation of death. [4]
Over the centuries, the depictions became more realistic and gruesome, while earlier tendencies to line the tombs with moralizing inscriptions on the vanities of life were abandoned. The morbid art form reached its peak in the late 16th century, with more extreme effigies depicting putrefied corpses outside of the funerary monument context, and taking centre stage as stand-alone sculptures. [8]
A depiction of a rotting cadaver in art (as opposed to a skeleton) is called a transi. However, the term "cadaver monument" can really be applied to other varieties of monuments, e.g. with skeletons or with the deceased completely wrapped in a shroud. In the "double-decker" monuments, in Erwin Panofsky's phrase, [10] a sculpted stone bier displays on the top level the recumbent effigy (or gisant) of a living person, where they may be life-sized and sometimes represented kneeling in prayer, and in dramatic contrast as a rotting cadaver on the bottom level, often shrouded and sometimes in company of worms and other flesh-eating creatures. The iconography is regionally distinct: the depiction of such animals on these cadavers is more commonly found on the European mainland, and especially in the German regions. [11] The dissemination of cadaver imagery in the late-medieval danse macabre may also have influenced the iconography of cadaver monuments. [12]
In Christian funerary art, cadaver monuments were a dramatic departure from the usual practice of depicting the deceased as they were in life, for example recumbent but with hands together in prayer, or even as dynamic military figures drawing their swords, such as the 13th- and 14th-century effigies surviving in the Temple Church, London. Cadaver monuments often acted as a portrait of the deceased in death. [13]
The term can also be used for a monument which shows only the cadaver without a corresponding representation of the living person. The sculpture is intended as a didactic example of how transient earthly glory is, since it depicts what all people of every status finally become. Kathleen Cohen's study of five French ecclesiastics who commissioned transi monuments determined that common to all of them was a successful worldliness that seemed almost to demand a shocking display of transient mortality. A classic example is the "Transi de René de Chalons" by Ligier Richier, in the church of Saint Etienne in Bar-le-Duc, France, pictured below right. [14]
Cadaver monuments were made only for high-ranking persons, usually royalty, bishops, abbots or nobility, because one had to be wealthy to have one made, and influential enough to be allotted space for one in a church of limited capacity. Some monuments for royalty were double tombs, for both a king and queen. The French kings Louis XII, Francis I and Henry II were doubly portrayed, as couples both as living effigies and as naked cadavers, in their double double-decker monuments in the Basilica of Saint-Denis near Paris. Other varieties also exist, such as cadaver imagery on incised slabs and monumental brasses, including the so-called "shroud brasses", of which many survive in England. [15]
France has a long history of cadaver monuments, though not as many examples or varieties survive as in England. One of the earliest and anatomically convincing examples is the gaunt cadaver effigy of the medieval physician Guillaume de Harsigny (d. 1393) at Laon. [16] Another early example is the effigy on the multi-layered wall-monument of Cardinal Jean de La Grange (died 1402) in Avignon. Kathleen Cohen lists many further extant examples. A revival of the form occurred in the Renaissance, as testified by the two examples to Louis XII and his wife Anne of Brittany at Saint-Denis, and of Queen Catherine de' Medici who commissioned a cadaver monument for her husband Henry II.
The earliest known transi monument is the very faint matrix (i.e. indent) of a now lost monumental brass shrouded demi-effigy on the ledger stone slab commemorating "John the Smith" (c.1370) at St Bartholomew’s Church in Brightwell Baldwin in Oxfordshire. [17] In the 15th century the sculpted transi effigy made its appearance in England. [18] Cadaver monuments survive in many English cathedrals and parish churches. The earliest surviving one is in Lincoln Cathedral, to Bishop Richard Fleming who founded Lincoln College, Oxford and died in 1431. Canterbury Cathedral houses the well-known cadaver monument to Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury (died 1443) and in Exeter Cathedral survives the 16th-century monument and chantry chapel of Precentor Sylke, inscribed in Latin: "I am what you will be, and I was what you are. Pray for me I beseech you." Winchester Cathedral has two cadaver monuments. Exeter Cathedral has an example.
The cadaver monument traditionally identified as that of John Wakeman, Abbot of Tewkesbury from 1531 to 1539, survives in Tewkesbury Abbey. Following the dissolution of the monasteries, he retired and later became the first Bishop of Gloucester. The monument, with vermin crawling on a sculpted skeletal corpse, may have been prepared for him, but his body was in fact buried at Forthampton in Gloucestershire.
A rarer, modern type is the standing, shrouded effigy type exemplified by the tomb of the poet John Donne (d. 1631) in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral in London. [16] Similar examples from the Early Modern period signify faith in the Resurrection. [19]
Cadaver monuments are found in many Italian churches. Andrea Bregno sculpted several of them, including those of Cardinal Alain de Coëtivy in Santa Prassede, Ludovico Cardinal d'Albert at Santa Maria in Ara Coeli and Bishop Juan Díaz de Coca in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. [20] Three other prominent monuments are those of Cardinal Matteo d'Acquasparta in Santa Maria in Ara Coeli and those of Bishop Gonsalvi (1298) and of Cardinal Gonsalvo (1299) in Santa Maria Maggiore, all sculpted by Giovanni de Cosma, [20] the youngest of the Cosmati family lineage. St Peter’s Basilica in Rome contains the tomb of Pope Innocent III, sculpted by Giovanni Pisano. [20]
Many cadaver monuments and ledger stones survive in Germany and the Netherlands. An impressive example is the 16th-century Van Brederode double-decker monument at Vianen near Utrecht, which depicts Reynoud van Brederode (d. 1556) and his wife Philippote van der Marck (d. 1537) as shrouded figures on the upper level, with a single verminous cadaver below.
A total of 11 cadaver monuments have been recorded in Ireland, many of which are no longer in situ. The earliest complete record of these monuments was compiled by Helen M. Roe in 1969. [21] One of the best known examples of this tradition is the monumental limestone slab known as "The Modest Man", dedicated to Thomas Ronan (d. 1554), and his wife Johanna Tyrry (d. 1569), now situated in the Triskel Christchurch in Cork. This is one of two examples recorded in Cork, with the second residing in Church of St Multose in Kinsale. A variant is in the form of Cadaver Stones, which lack any sculpted superstructure or canopy. These may merely be sculptural elements removed from more elaborate now lost monuments, as is the case with the stone of Sir Edmond Goldyng and his wife Elizabeth Fleming, which in the early part of the 16th century was built into the churchyard wall of St. Peter's Church of Ireland, Drogheda. [22]
An effigy is a sculptural representation, often life-size, of a specific person or a prototypical figure. The term is mostly used for the makeshift dummies used for symbolic punishment in political protests and for the figures burned in certain traditions around New Year, Carnival and Easter. In European cultures, effigies were used in the past for punishment in formal justice when the perpetrator could not be apprehended, and in popular justice practices of social shaming and exclusion. Additionally, "effigy" is used for certain traditional forms of sculpture, namely tomb effigies, funeral effigies and coin effigies.
Germain Pilon was a French Renaissance sculptor.
A church monument is an architectural or sculptural memorial to a deceased person or persons, located within a Christian church. It can take various forms ranging from a simple commemorative plaque or mural tablet affixed to a wall, to a large and elaborate structure, on the ground or as a mural monument, which may include an effigy of the deceased person and other figures of familial, heraldic or symbolic nature. It is usually placed immediately above or close to the actual burial vault or grave, although very occasionally the tomb is constructed within it. Sometimes the monument is a cenotaph, commemorating a person buried at another location.
The Scaliger Tombs is a group of five Gothic funerary monuments in Verona, Italy, celebrating the Scaliger family, who ruled in Verona from the 13th to the late 14th century.
The Tomb of Antipope John XXIII is the marble-and-bronze tomb monument of Antipope John XXIII, created by Donatello and Michelozzo for the Florence Baptistry adjacent to the Duomo. It was commissioned by the executors of Cossa's will after his death on December 22, 1419 and completed during the 1420s, establishing it as one of the early landmarks of Renaissance Florence. According to Ferdinand Gregorovius, the tomb is "at once the sepulchre of the Great Schism in the church and the last papal tomb which is outside Rome itself".
The Meigle Sculptured Stone Museum is a permanent exhibition of 27 carved Pictish stones in the centre of the village of Meigle in eastern Scotland. It lies on the A94 road running from Coupar Angus to Forfar. The museum occupies the former parish school, built 1844. The collection of stones implies that an important church was located nearby, or perhaps a monastery. There is an early historical record of the work of Thana, son of Dudabrach, who was at Meigle in the middle of the 9th century during the reign of King Pherath. Thana was likely to have been a monk serving as a scribe in a local monastery that could have been founded in the 8th century. The stones contained in the museum were all found near Meigle, mostly in the neighbouring churchyard or used in the construction of the old church. The present church building dates to about 1870, the previous building having been destroyed in a fire on 28 March 1869. The stones were rescued by William Galloway immediately after the fire. The stones are Christian monuments to the dead of the Pictish warrior aristocracy, who are depicted on the stones bearing their weapons or hunting.
Funerary art is any work of art forming, or placed in, a repository for the remains of the dead. The term encompasses a wide variety of forms, including cenotaphs, tomb-like monuments which do not contain human remains, and communal memorials to the dead, such as war memorials, which may or may not contain remains, and a range of prehistoric megalithic constructs. Funerary art may serve many cultural functions. It can play a role in burial rites, serve as an article for use by the dead in the afterlife, and celebrate the life and accomplishments of the dead, whether as part of kinship-centred practices of ancestor veneration or as a publicly directed dynastic display. It can also function as a reminder of the mortality of humankind, as an expression of cultural values and roles, and help to propitiate the spirits of the dead, maintaining their benevolence and preventing their unwelcome intrusion into the lives of the living.
The Royal Monastery of Brou is a religious complex located at Bourg-en-Bresse in the Ain département, central France. Made out of monastic buildings in addition to a church, they were built at the beginning of the 16th century by Margaret of Austria, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and Governor of the Habsburg Netherlands. The complex was designed as a dynastic burial place in the tradition of the Burgundian Champmol and Cîteaux Abbey, and the French Saint-Denis. The church is known as the Église Saint-Nicolas-de-Tolentin de Brou in French.
A tomb effigy is a sculpted effigy of a deceased person usually shown lying recumbent on a rectangular slab, presented in full ceremonial dress or wrapped in a shroud, and shown either dying or shortly after death. Such funerary and commemorative reliefs were first developed in Ancient Egyptian and Etruscan cultures, and appear most frequently in Western European tombs from the late 11th century, in a style that continued in use through the Renaissance and early modern period, and is still sometimes used. They typically represent the deceased in a state of "eternal repose", with hands folded in prayer, lying on a pillow, awaiting resurrection. A husband and wife may be depicted lying side by side.
The Cadaver Tomb of Guillaume de Harsigny is a 1394 cadaver monument (transi) now in the Musée d'art et d'archéologie de Laon. It is notable as one of the earliest known French transi, and the first to be sculpted in the round. The original monument contained a tomb chest holding his remains, however this was lost in 1841. Similarly, the effigy had been painted black, this too is lost.
Conrad Meit or Conrat Meit was a German-born Late Gothic and Renaissance sculptor, who spent most of his career in the Low Countries.
Christophe Cochet, known in Rome under the name Cristoforo Coscetti or Coscietti was a 17th-century French sculptor.
Pleurants or weepers are anonymous sculpted figures representing mourners, used to decorate elaborate tomb monuments, mostly in the late Middle Ages in Western Europe. Typically they are relatively small, and a group were placed around the sides of a raised tomb monument, perhaps interspersed with armorial decoration, or carrying shields with this. They may be in relief or free-standing. In English usage the term "weepers" is sometimes extended to cover the small figures of the deceased's children often seen kneeling underneath the tomb effigy in Tudor tomb monuments.
The Church of All Saints in Radwell in Hertfordshire is an Anglican parish church which falls within the Diocese of St Albans. It is a Grade II* listed building, having gained that status in 1968.
The tomb of Philippe Pot is a funerary monument in the Louvre in Paris. It was commissioned by the military leader and diplomat Philippe Pot around the year 1480 to be used for his burial at the chapel of Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Cîteaux Abbey, Dijon, France. His effigy shows him recumbent on a slab, his hands raised in prayer, and wearing armour and a heraldic tunic. The eight mourners are dressed in black hoods and act as pallbearers carrying him towards his grave. Pot commissioned the tomb when he was around 52 years old, 13 years before he died in 1493. The detailed inscriptions on the slab's sides emphasise his achievements and social standing.
The Tomb of Philip the Bold is a funerary monument commissioned in 1378 by the Duke of Burgundy Philip the Bold for his burial at the Chartreuse de Champmol, the Carthusian monastery he built on the outskirts of Dijon, in today's France. The construction was overseen by Jean de Marville, who designed the tomb and oversaw the building of the charterhouse. Marville worked on the tomb from 1384, but progressed slowly until his death in 1389. That year Claus Sluter took over design of Champmol, including the tomb. Philip died in 1404 with his funerary monument still incomplete. After Sluter's death c. 1405/06, his nephew Claus de Werve was hired to complete the project, which he finished in 1410.
The Cadaver Tomb of René of Chalon is a late Gothic period cadaver monument (transi) in the church of Saint-Étienne at Bar-le-Duc, in northeastern France. It consists of an altarpiece and a limestone statue of a putrefied and skinless corpse which stands upright and extends his left hand outwards. Completed sometime between 1544 and 1557, the majority of its construction is attributed to the French sculptor Ligier Richier. Other elements, including the coat of arms and funeral drapery, were added in the 16th and 18th centuries respectively.
The Tomb of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany is a large and complex silver-gilt and marble sculptured 16th century funerary monument. Its design and build are usually attributed to the Juste brothers although the work of several other hands can be distinguished. Designed for and installed at the Saint-Denis Basilica, France, it was commissioned in 1515 in memory of Louis XII and his queen Anne of Brittany, probably by Louis' successor Francis I, and after years of design and intensive building was unveiled in 1531.
Guillaume de Harsigny was a French doctor, a court physician to Charles V of France, and one of the most notable physicians of his time.
The Tomb of Valentina Balbiani is a white marble tomb sculpture constructed by the French sculptor Germain Pilon c. 1580 for Jeanne Valentine Balbiani (1518–1572), the Italian wife of the French statesman, chancellor and cardinal René de Birague (1506–1583).