Abstract
The literature on Gothic and late Gothic tomb sculpture has, like that of most other fields, exploded in the last quarter century. Fascinating for the access it promises to real people and their concerns, tomb sculpture has also lent itself readily to some of the methods of recent art-historical inquiry, for example, the roles of works of art in their social, political, and functional contexts and the portrayal of women and their place in society and family. When I was assigned the topic Commemorative Monuments and Practices for a qualifying exam question in the late 1970s, it was still relatively easy to get an overview of the subject. The largest number of works, mostly German dissertations, catalogued the tombs of a given region, whether or not they had anything in common with one another. A second group of works placed single tombs or groups of related tombs into stylistic contexts or, less frequently, political or social ones. A third group examined the sources and forms of specific aspects of tomb iconography: the gisant, the animals at its feet, the angels, or the so-called pleurants, the smaller figures, usually arranged in arcades, around the tumba. A fourth established a formal typology of tomb monuments: baldachin tombs, table tombs, wall tombs, double tombs, etc., while a fifth, relatively small group addressed burial practice, the funerary liturgy and Office of the Dead, and the function of tombs in liturgical and paraliturgical practices of the time. Finally, a handful of works offered larger overviews: Henriette s'Jacob, Erwin Panofsky, and the new book by Kurt Bauch.1
Published Version
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