Church Monuments 30: Abstracts

7-104. Sally Badham and Sophie Oosterwijk, ‘”Monumentum aere perennius”? Precious-metal effigial tomb monuments in Europe 1080-1430.

Probably the most prestigious monuments produced in the Middle Ages were those constructed from (semi-)precious metals, sometimes enamelled or inlaid with real or fictive jewels. Some survive, especially in England and Germany. However, many more have been destroyed, especially in France, and are known of only through antiquarian sources. This preliminary materiality-based survey comprises 119 extant and lost examples throughout Europe in the 350-year period to 1430, starting with the monument to Rudolph of Swabia (d. 1080). It shows how magnificent such monuments could be, how widespread this type of monument once was and how it was favoured within certain families and locations, but also how much we have lost. To demonstrate the splendour of such memorials and the techniques involved, a case study is provided of the virtually unknown, but internationally important monument of Prince Afonso (d. 1400) in Braga Cathedral in northern Portugal, which has recently been the subject of detailed technical analysis.

105-122. David Green, ‘The tomb of the Black Prince. Contexts and Incongruities’.

In order to resolve a number of apparent incongruities, this paper explores the exequies and funerary monument of Edward the Black Prince (1330-76) in a variety of contexts. It explains the choice of materials for the prince’s militaristic effigy (copper-gilt, not alabaster) and its unusual location (at Canterbury Cathedral, not the Plantagenet mausoleum at Westminster Abbey), which features stand in seeming contrast to the religious implications of his epitaph. This explicit denigration of the earthly body, set upon the tomb-chest designed by Henry Yevele, was based on Petrus Alphonsi’s De Disciplina Clericalis. It offers a striking contrast to the socio-political implications of other aspects of the monument which are a tribute to chivalric achievement and worldly glory. The apparent incongruities, however, reflect a range of socio-political and religious trends evident in the later years of the fourteenth century.

123-166. Jean L. Wilson, ‘Speaking stones. The use of text in the design of Early Modern funerary monuments’.

The viewer of early modern funerary monuments is expected to read a series of texts, some visual, some literary and some symbolic, which are interdependent and together make up the whole of the monumental commemoration. This paper examines the verbal element of these monuments and shows how the incorporation of text into the design means that it itself becomes part of the viewer/reader’s visual experience of the memorial.

167-190. Meredith Crosbie, ‘Giusto Le Court’s seventeenth-century Venetian naval funerary monuments’.

This essay focuses on the sculptor Giusto Le Court and four funerary monuments he worked on in seventeenth-century Venice. They are dedicated to Venetian naval officers and feature both portrait sculptures and allegorical figures. They have never been studied together from a sculptural perspective, so this essay highlights Le Court’s unique style and personalised approach to each of these memorials, which have both commemorative and art-historical significance. A chronological and stylistic analysis (with some new interpretations) of each monument is presented, in order to re-contextualise and illuminate these works by a largely unstudied sculptor.

191-200. Rebecca Senior, ‘Sculpting Heroes. David d’Angers’s Le Jeune Barra (1838) and Edward Onslow Ford’s monument to Percy Bysshe Shelley (1893)’.

This article relates Edward Onslow Ford’s monument to Percy Bysshe Shelley (1893) to David d’Angers’s sculpture Le Jeune Barra (1838), arguing that biographic and artistic affinities between the subjects and sculptors form the basis for a re-interpretation of Ford’s monument and its position within nineteenth-century sculpture. Both Bara’s and Shelley’s radical political views are assessed, as well as the respective positions of d’Angers within the French school of sculpture and Ford within the English New Sculpture movement, to suggest a cross-continental visual language that broached the early- and late-nineteenth-century genres of military and poetic memorialisation.

Also: pp. 201-237. Book Reviews include:

Nicole Marafioti, The King’s Body : Burial and Succession in Late Anglo-Saxon England (University of Toronto Press, 2014)