Fig. 355.—Tomb of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, in the Church of Marburg, Hesse (Thirteenth Century). She is represented upon her death-bed, and the angels are offering her soul to Jesus, who is blessing it, and to the Virgin. To the right are Duke Louis with the cross of the Crusades, St. John the Evangelist, the special protector of St. Elizabeth, St. Catherine, and St. Peter; to the left, St. John the Baptist, St. Mary Magdalene, and a bishop. It was before this bas-relief that the pilgrims knelt in prayer, and their knees have worn hollows into the pavement around it.
Burials above ground again came into vogue after the eleventh century, and from that epoch dates the development of funeral art in the Middle Ages. At first, the tombs, even of the highest personages, consisted only of a plain block of stone or marble, varying in shape, placed upon the ground, or, as was more often the case, raised upon short columns. In the twelfth century we meet with a new kind of monument: tombs in the form of square altars, or altar-tables, with the image of the deceased in relief or cut out on their upper surface. These tombs were in general use throughout the Middle Ages (Fig. 355), and were combined, subsequent to the thirteenth century, with another mode based on quite a different principle. As, in spite of the decrees of the councils, the churches were still full of graves, it was sought to make the tombs erected in them as little cumbersome as possible; and hence arose the custom of placing tablets or sculptures upon the walls, at a certain elevation above the ground, betokening the presence of a coffin in the vault beneath. There were, besides, the flat tombs, the pompous epitaphs on which were effaced by the footsteps of those who walked over them. These were in vogue from the time of Philip Augustus, and the use of them did not die out till the reign of Louis XIV., especially in the northern provinces of France.
Fig. 356.—Tomb in the Church of St. Waudru, at Mons, of Adelaide or Alice, Countess of Hainault, who died in 1168. This tomb is of stone, devoid of all decoration, with a triangular top in the shape of a cross. (Twelfth Century.)
Some detailed account may now be given of the square blocks of stone employed as funeral monuments. These raised tombs (for that is their proper name) were, in the eleventh century, larger at the top than at the sides. They were ornamented with mouldings at the top and at the bottom, and either rested upon a stone slab or upon short columns. Other tombs, equally massive, were prism-shaped, with three, four, or five sides, and they too rested in the same manner. The oldest of these monuments are almost exactly like coffins, and their surface is devoid of all ornamental work (Fig. 356). The presence of sculpture about a tomb constitutes one of the distinctive marks of art in the reign of Philip I. (1059–1108). The sculpture generally consists of simple circles enfolding busts surrounded with foliage. The solid square tombs of that date are decorated with arcades in bas-relief, like the altars of the period.
From this species of vault, is derived the monument in the shape of a table, the dimensions and decorations of which continued to increase during the reign of Louis VIII. It was a block of stone surmounted by a table upon which rested a statue of the deceased, with his hands crossed upon his breast. Tables of this shape were chiefly used for the bronze tombs which became very numerous in the early part of the twelfth century. These bronze tombs, upon which the statue was laid, had for supporters four or six couched lions. When Suger restored his Abbey of St. Denis, he removed to the middle of the choir the grave of Charles the Bald, and erected over it a bronze table with lions for supports, and a statue designed to represent the features of the monarch.
The personages thus typified in stone, marble, or bronze, are always represented with their insignia; kings and sovereign princes with a crown and a mantle; knights bareheaded, with their armour, sword, and spurs of knighthood, and, in many cases, their coat of mail and armorial bearings (Fig. 357); nobles, not knights, with their armorial shield, one or two hounds couched at their feet, a falcon upon the wrist or the glove with which the bird was held in their hand,—that is to say, with emblems signifying their right to take part in the chase, which was the special privilege of the nobility.
In the same way women, lawyers, and the secular and the regular clergy, had the dress betokening their condition upon their tombs; but the sculptors and carvers did not always adhere very closely to the variations of fashion, and they often represented a personage of their own day in a costume belonging to a previous generation. Thus, for several centuries, kings were represented with the primitive mantle clasped or tied in front; the knights appeared, even down to the time of Henry II., with the halberd and the helmet worn only by the ancient order of chivalry. Funeral sculpture had its conventional and traditional rules, like all other arts in the Middle Ages.
