i 
 

 

 

 

 

A STRATIFICATION OF DEATH IN THE NORTHERN RENAISSANCE:   

A RECONSIDERATION OF THE CADAVER TOMBS  

OF ENGLAND AND GERMANY 

 

___________________________________________________________________ 

 

 

A Dissertation  

Submitted to 

The Temple University Graduate Board 

 

 

___________________________________________________________________ 

 

 

In Partial Fulfillment  

of the Requirements for the Degree  

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 

 

 

___________________________________________________________________ 

 

by  

Scott Gratson  

Diploma Date May 2019 

 

 

 

 

Examining Committee Members:  

 

Ashley West, Advisory Chair, Art History 

Tracey Cooper, Art History 

Philip Glahn, Painting 

Laura Weigert, External Member, Rutgers University   

 

  



ii 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© 

Copyright 

2019 

 

by 

 

Scott Gratson 

_____________ 

All Rights Reserved 

 

  



iii 
 

ABSTRACT 

 

This analysis is on the function of cadaver or transi tombs in the south of England and 

Germany from the fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries, at particular moments when 

theological and cultural shifts related to Church reforms and the Reformation were 

tethered to new considerations about death, memorial, and changing concepts of the soul 

and matter. The study begins with a focus on the tombs of Henry Chichele (1364–1443) 

in Canterbury Cathedral in Canterbury, England, and Alice de la Pole (1404–1475) of 

Saint Mary’s Church in Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England. Additionally, the memorial relief 

of Ulrich Fugger (1441–1510) in Saint Anna's Church in Augsburg, Germany, acts as a 

bridge to Hans Holbein’s painted Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521) in the Kuntsmuseum 

Basel, in which Christ is simultaneously portrayed as an effigy, transi, and resurrected 

body. This was also an extended period when notions of visuality changed, along with 

preferences for different media and pressures on images and objects. As the demands of 

verisimilitude and discourses about presence and matter changed, media progressed from 

three-dimensional sculpture and carved relief to oil paint on wood. Transi tombs 

embodied this trajectory, altering uses and impressions of materials as they progressed 

from metal to stone to relief carving and paint. Transi tombs, in particular, structured 

time as a malleable construct, through the incorporation of varying images and their 

configuration in different visual strata and degrees of vividness and decay. By merging 

motifs of the dead with the Resurrected Christ, the transi tomb phenomenon situated 

death in relation to the viewer’s experience of mortality, memorial, and remembrance. 

Through these changing images and media, public perception of death was inextricably 

transformed, coinciding with the advent of the Reformation. 



iv 
 

 

DEDICATION  

For Jodi. For Devon. For Aria. Forever.  

 

“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle 

in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what 

follows after.” 1 

  

                                                           
1Virginia Woolf, Orlando (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1992), 78 



v 
 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  

I have been a student in the Tyler School of Art for almost a decade. I could not 

have asked for a more superb group of faculty members to instruct, mentor, and guide me 

in my new and fascinating field. I have had the chance to complete my education with 

some of the best art historians in the world, a gift given to me through Temple University. 

For that opportunity, I am deeply thankful. 

There are no words to adequately express my regard for the members of my 

dissertation committee: Dr. Ashley West, Dr. Tracy Cooper, and Dr. Philip Glahn from 

the Tyler School of Art, as well as Dr. Laura Weigert from Rutgers University. They 

willingly read hundreds of pages of research, considered innumerable theories and 

citations, and perpetually provided me with the guidance necessary to complete a degree 

in this incredible discipline. I am humbled by their dedication and acumen.  

In particular, I wish to recognize the mentorship and assistance of Dr. West, who 

guided my research and writing since we first considered the topic of this dissertation 

while strolling through Sebalduskirche in Nuremberg several years ago. Her knowledge 

of all things pertinent to the Reformation and Northern Renaissance art is as boundless 

and inspirational as her dedication to scholarship, research, and academe. I can only hope 

to be as erudite and learned as her.  

I am a Professor of Instruction in the Lew Klein College of Media of 

Communication. I am deeply appreciative for my colleagues’ continuing willingness to 

support me in my art history endeavors, especially the members of the deans’ suite and 

the faculty throughout my college.   



vi 
 

Some time ago, my students in the Communication Studies Program remarked 

that they had deepened their knowledge of art history through my affiliation with the 

Tyler School of Art. I am humbled that a student who may have known me through my 

work with LGBTQ issues or student athletic advising or philanthropic endeavors would 

come to see art as an important part of their lives through my tutelage. I hope that my 

explanations have been as illuminating as their interest in my work has been inspiring.  

I joke with my students that I almost became the topic of my own dissertation 

when I was struck by a car while bicycling in March, 2017. My students consistently 

reminded me that my time in a wheelchair would end, and that I would be back to 

walking through the cathedrals, chapels, galleries, and museums that I admire so much. 

My process of recuperation has been a fortuitous one, accomplished in no small means 

through my students’ support as they pushed and moved me onward toward recovery— 

in the case of Temple’s football team, quite literally.  I am deeply grateful.  

I must note a day trip in the late 1980s that led me to Saint George’s Chapel, 

Windsor Castle. The day was rainy, dreary, and unseasonably cold, but the view of that 

immense collection of art could not have been more uplifting and memorable. It was 

there that the Cleaveley family of Sussex, England first introduced me to the depths and 

wonder of British art. It became a lesson well-learned and never forgotten, an inspiration 

for my work that continues to this day.  

 Finally, thank you to Dr. Deborah DeZure, who introduced me decades ago to the 

tailless lion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shepherding my ongoing interest and 

fascination with the artistic progression of humankind, and to the New York Public 

Library, where I started and finished my writing.   



vii 
 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Page 

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...iii 

DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………iv 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………….…..v 

LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………………..….……….....ix 

CHAPTER 

1. A RECONSIDERATION OF TRANSI TOMBS AND THEIR IMPACT 

THROUGHOUT THE REFORMATION 

 Project Justification and Theoretical Overview………………....……………….1 

 Summary and Exploration………………………………...…………………..…7 

2. STRUCTURES AND IMAGES IN THE TRANSI TOMB OF ARCHBISHOP 

HENRY CHICHELE: A REACTION TO A GROWING REFORMIST MOVEMENT 

Description of The Tomb of Archbishop Chichele…………………..……..……15 

The Rise of Archbishop Henry Chichele and Reformist Fissures of the Church in 

England…………………………………..………………………………………28  

Transi Tombs and Late Medieval Piety in Relation to Death…..…….........……39 

3: A GENDERED RESPONSE TO TRANSI TOMBS THROUGH A 

CONSIDERATION OF ALICE DE LA POLE 

An Overview of the Tomb of Alice de la Pole…………………………………..52 

Visions and Interactions: Materiality and Womanhood in Alice’s Tomb…...…..69 

Viewership of Alice’s Tomb in the Practice of Death: A Consideration of 

Gender…….………………………………………………………………...……77 

 



viii 
 

4: THE FUGGER CHAPEL AS A NEW [CONCEPTUALIZATION OF] TRANSI 

TOMBS     

 Examination of Memorial Stones: The Fugger Epitaphs………………..………87 

 The Growing Position of Augsburg and the Fuggers within the Reformation...108 

A Reconceptualization of Death and the Implications of the Fugger Chapel  

within the Reformation………………………..……………………………….115 

 

5: RECONSIDERING HANS HOLBEIN’S THE DEAD CHRIST IN THE TOMB AS 

TRANSI, EFFIGY, AND RESURRECTION 

 Explication and Analysis of the Dead Christ and its Impact…………...……...123 

 Holbein and Navigating Death through the Reformation………………………131 

 The Ontological Turn of the Dead Christ and its Legacy……………...………139 

 A Novel Memento Mori: Re-Reading the Dead Christ as a Transi Figure….…149 

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS……………………….………………...…...157 

REFERENCES CITED…………….………………………………………………...…172 

APPENDIX 

 FIGURES………………..…………………………………………...…………197 

  



ix 
 

LIST OF FIGURES 

Figure               Page 

1.1 Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele of Canterbury Cathedral (d. 1443), 

Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, Kent, England……………………………..197 

1.2  Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele of Canterbury Cathedral, marble, effigy  

  detail, Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, Kent, England ………………….….198 

 

1.3 Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele of Canterbury Cathedral, marble, transi 

detail, Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, Kent, England...................................199 

1.4 Church of Saint Mary the Virgin Church (c. 1435 – 1440), Ewelme, Oxfordshire, 

England….……………………………………………………………..…..……200 

1.5 Tomb of Alice de la Pole, Duchess of Suffolk (d. 1475), alabaster, effigy detail, 

Ewelme Parish Church, Oxfordshire, England……..…………………………..201 

1.6 Tomb of Alice de la Pole, Duchess of Suffolk (d. 1475), alabaster, transi detail, 

Ewelme Parish Church, Oxfordshire, England …………………………..….....202 

1.7  Fuggerkapelle Memorial plaque of Ulrich Fugger, d. 1510 (1509 - 1512), marble, 

Saint Anna’s Church, Augsburg, Germany…….................……………………203 

1.8  Hans Holbein the Younger. The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (c. 1521), 
oil on wood, 12 x 79 in., Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland…………………..204   

2.1  Chichele Gate, outside tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), Canterbury 
Cathedral, Canterbury, England……...………………………………...……….205 

2.2  Modern chair of the Archbishop of Canterbury, view from the tomb of 
Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, 
England………………………………………………………………….……...206 

2.3 Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), side view, Canterbury Cathedral, 

Canterbury, England…………………………………………………………... 207 

2.4 Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), marble, upper tier canopy detail, 

Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England ………………………………..….208 

2.5 Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), marble, Bosom of Abraham detail, 

Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England …………………………………...209 

 

2.6  Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), marble, Virgin Mary detail, 

Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England ……………….……………….….210 

2.7 Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), marble and gilt, effigy with angels 

detail, Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England……………………….……211 

2.8 Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), marble, transi body detail, 

Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England………………………………..…..212 



x 
 

2.9 Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), marble, transi face detail, 

Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England …………………….……………..213 

3.1 Saint Mary’s Church and Complex (c. 1435 – 1440), Ewelme, Oxfordshire, 

England…………………………………………………………………………214 

3.2 Tomb of Alice de la Pole (c. 1475) alabaster, Saint John’s Chapel, Saint Mary’s 

Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England.…….……………….…….…………..215 

3.3 Monogram of Saint John’s Chapel (c. 1435 – 1440), polychrome and gilt, Saint 

Mary’s Church Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England ……………………………….216 

3.4  Tomb of Alice de la Pole (c. 1475), alabaster, Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, 

Oxfordshire, England ……………...……………………………………….…..217 

3.5  Memorial Plaques of Thomas Chaucer and Matilda Chaucer (née Burghersh) (c. 

1438), brass, Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England..……….…218 

 

3.6 Tomb of Thomas Chaucer and Matilda Chaucer (c. 1438) Saint Mary’s Church, 

marble, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England....…...219 

3.7 Effigy of Alice de la Pole (c. 1475), alabaster, Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, 

Oxfordshire, England.……...……………………………………………..…….220 

3.8 Tomb of Alice de la Pole (c. 1475), wood, angels at top of canopy detail, Saint 

Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England..……….……………………..221 

3.9  Effigy of Alice de la Pole (c. 1475) alabaster and gilt, angels and pillow detail, 

Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England...…………………...…..222  

3.10  Master E. S., Ars Moriendi (c. 1450) engraving, 3.58 x 2.71 in., Ashmolean 

Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford, England………………….………...223 

3.11  Effigy and transi of Alice de la Pole (c. 1475), alabaster, Saint Mary’s Church, 

Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England…………………………………………….…...223 

3.12  Tomb of Alice de la Pole, The Annunciation, transi tomb painting (c. 1475) Saint 

Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England……………….........................225 

3.13  Tomb of Alice de la Pole, John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene, (c. 1475), 

polychrome, Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England…………...226  

3.14 Tomb of Alice de la Pole, The Annunciation, polychrome, transi tomb detail (c. 

1475) Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England………………......227  

4.1 Sebastian Loscher, Fugger chapel with epitaphs, marble, Saint Anna’s Church (c. 

1525), Augsburg, Germany…….…………………………………….………....228 

4.2 Albrecht Dürer, Design for the Fugger Chapel in Augsburg, Christ Resurrected, 

Ulrich Fugger epitaph sketch, 1510, pen, charcoal, and chalk on paper, 12.63 x 

6.14 in., Albertina, Vienna, Austria…………………………..………………...229 



xi 
 

4.3 Albrecht Dürer, Samson Slaying the Philistines, sketch for the Georg Fugger 

epitaph, 1510, pen, charcoal, and chalk on paper, 12.63 x 6.14 in., 

Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin……………………………...230 

4.4 Attrib. to Sebastian Loscher, Epitaph for Georg Fugger (c. 1525), marble, Saint 

Anna’s Church, Augsburg, Germany………...……..…………………………..231        

4.5  Attrib. to Sebastian Loscher, Epitaph for Ulrich Fugger, (c. 1525), marble, Saint 

Anna’s Church, Augsburg, Germany…..……………………………...………..232 

4.6  Attrib. to Sebastian Loscher, Epitaph for Jakob Fugger (c. 1525), marble, Saint 

Anna’s Church, Augsburg, Germany …………………………………...….......233 

4.7  Attrib. to Sebastian Loscher, Epitaph for the Fugger Famil (c. 1525), marble, 

Saint Anna’s Church, Augsburg, Germany…...……………………………......234 

4.8   Hans Daucher, Lamentation of Christ and Altar, (c. 1522) marble, Saint Anna’s 

Church, Augsburg, Germany ….…………………………………………….....235  

 

4.9 Memorial plaque of Ulrich Fugger, d. 1510 (1509 - 1512), marble, Chapel of 

Saint Mark, The Fuggerei, Augsburg, Germany………………………………..236 

4.10 Saint Anna’s Church (c. 1321), Augsburg, Germany….…..………………..….237 

4.11 Figure 4.11: Crypt Entryway and marker (1538) marble, 118 x 157 in. Saint 

Anna’s Church, Augsburg, Germany …………………………………………..238 

5.1 Hans Holbein the Younger, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (c. 1521) 
Oil on wood, 12 x 79 in., Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland………………….239 

5.2 Matthias Grünewald, The Crucifixion (c. 1512–1516) oil on wood, predella detail, 

30 x 134 in., Colmar, France, Unterlinden Museum……….………….….……240 

5.3  Unidentified artist, after Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497–1543), The Dead 

Christ in the Tomb, c. 1521 silverpoint, chalk on paper, blue ground, 5 x 11.5 in., 

Winnipeg, Canada, Winnipeg Art Gallery…………….…………………….….241 

5.4 Hans Holbein the Younger (1521), The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, oil 

on wood, face and head detail, Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland ……...…….242 

5.5  Hans Holbein the Younger (1521), The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, oil 

on wood, hand wound detail Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland....…...…….…243 

5.6  Hans Holbein the Younger (1521), The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, oil 

on wood, feet and legs detail, Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland…….......…...244 

5.7 Hans Holbein the Younger, Pictures of Death, The Emperor (c. 1526), woodcut, 

2.55 x 1.92 in., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art …….…………. 245 

5.8 Hans Holbein the Younger. Pictures of Death, The Plowman (c. 1526), woodcut, 

2.55 x 1.92 in., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art…………………246 



1 
 

 CHAPTER 1: 

A RECONSIDERATION OF TRANSI TOMBS AND THEIR IMPACT 

THROUGHOUT THE REFORMATION 

 

 

Project Justification and Theoretical Overview 

 

Tombs lie at the juncture of interpretations of death, theological doctrine, and 

individual and communal identity.1 This study is a new consideration of visual 

conceptions and depictions of death from the mid-fifteenth through early sixteenth 

centuries in western Europe, specifically England and Germany, a period when notions of 

death were changing due to altering theological and socio-historical ideas about the 

relationships between individuality, physical matter, and the soul. Changes in this period 

resulted from a novel means of seeing how the divine was manifested and illustrated 

through physical works, echoing what Caroline Walker Bynum would link to shifting 

Christian theological ideas about matter and materiality.2 In particular, the phenomenon 

of cadaver or transi tombs in England and Germany forms the basis of this 

study.3Attention is paid to the rendering of different forms of matter, representations of 

the body, its coverings and attire, and other forms of ornamentation.4 I argue that these 

tombs and their imagery participate in developments of Reformation theology and that 

                                                           
1 Ann Marie Yasin, “Funerary Monuments and Collective Identity: From Roman Family to 

Christian Community,” Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005): 433–57, esp. 433.  
 

2 See Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval 

Europe (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 20110, esp. 71—80.   

 
3 For an overview of the differences developing concerning reformist ideology developing in 

Germany and England versus France, see R. J. Knecht, “The Early Reformation in England and France: A 

Comparison,” History 57, no. 189 (1972), 1–16, esp. 1-8.  

 
4 The term transi likely derives from the Latin verb transire, an etymological development of the 

phrase trans, “across”, and eō, “go.”   

 



2 
 

the aspects of presence, verisimilitude, and materiality so central to transi tombs will find 

full expression in other increasingly prominent mediums, such as oil paint. Their 

engagement with the viewers and their environments is central to the development of 

notions of subjectivity and the role of art within the Northern Renaissance. 

Transi, or cadaver tombs are structured and operate as a series of horizontal strata in 

identifying and recognizing the dead. First, the deceased person is memorialized in effigy 

on the top level or tier of the memorial. The sculpted effigy depicts the deceased person 

in full period attire, either in his or her youthful prime or near the end of adult life. The 

bottom tier of the tomb located closest to the ground typically includes a sculpture of a 

decomposing corpse, or a transi. The transi is often not an outright skeleton, but rather a 

corpse in the process of desiccation, putrefaction, and decay.5 While tombs with stone 

effigies may include two effigies side by side, such as a husband and wife, the transi is 

often singular. The transis are typically at or near life size and are usually depicted as 

gisant, being recumbent or reclining. In most cases, the physical remains of the deceased 

person are interred below the lower tier in accordance in local and church regulations.  

Cadaver tombs were described by Erwin Panofsky as “double decker memorials” 

with the deceased being represented in two states of being.6  His “Tomb Sculpture: Four 

Lectures on its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini” marked the 

reconsideration of tombs as artistic and memorial objects. Panofsky noted that tombs 

                                                           
5 Each of these stages are fully defined and described in Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of 

Human Cadavers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), esp. 61—86; and Kenneth V. Iserson, 

Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies (Tucson, AZ: Galen Press, 1994, esp. 41—43. 

 
6 Erwin Panofsky and H. W. Janson, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from 

Ancient Egypt to Bernini (New York: Harry N Abrams, 1992, originally published in 1964), 78.  

 



3 
 

should be considered not only as artistic works, but also as emblematic of prevailing and 

changing attitudes toward the dead.7 He contended that tombs were indicative of and 

generated novel sources of style, form, and function. Further, Panofsky explained that 

tombs were representative of how deceased people were viewed within a broader cultural 

lens, serving as images of shifting, and at times conflicting, mentalities toward death.  

Panofsky theorized that tombs should be viewed as veritable and important iconological 

signifiers, and that memorials were emblematic of wide-spread cultural and philosophical 

concepts.  Tombs were representative of a larger nexus of belief that included visuality, 

viewership, and representations of identity.  Building on Panofsky’s view of tombs as 

cultural emblems, I argue that these works can also be viewed as extensions of 

temporality, in that they posit alternate reconstructions of time. More importantly, transi 

tombs suggest an interpretation of death and responses to it in a novel light. By 

investigating the intersection between public memorial, theology, and an unfolding 

reconceptualization of time in select but representative transi from southern England and 

Germany, I posit that portrayals of death shifted during the Northern Renaissance in ways 

that help us better understand altering beliefs about matter, self-representation, and 

memorial.  

In prior research, transi tombs were often associated with the study of medieval art, 

complete with references to pervasive ideologies of the period about death. Throughout 

the medieval period, transi tombs established for viewers a universally shared and 

                                                           
7 Ibid., 7. 



4 
 

inevitable pathway of mortality, while also suggesting elements central to Christian faith 

and ideas about resurrection. These stone memorials served distinct theological purposes:  

What the transi tomb did, of course, was contrast or replace altogether the idealized 

effigy with its opposite:  a decomposing or desiccated cadaver (the representacion de 

la mort, or representation of death).  The macabre was an important element of these 

tombs, but their main purpose was as preparation for the Apocalypse, not as a 

moralizing message or appeal for prayers… a perfectly balanced union of two 

sensibilities, mortification and glorification, fear and hope that made up the process of 

death and resurrection.8  

Medieval transi tombs thus suggest popularized ontological and theological views about 

death and daily life, as well as the fate of the body and soul after death.  

  What has been less well studied, however, has been the intersection between the 

continued development of this tomb type and emerging mentalities and debates of the 

Northern Renaissance, a period when the creation of transi tombs continued unabated. 

Coupled with the theological shifts of the Reformation, these tombs are both a durable 

phenomenon and reinvention of period concepts related to death and matter. Transi tombs 

became a desirable form of memorial for those of the noble classes. Kathleen Cohen 

catalogued almost two hundred transi tombs from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 

with the majority located in England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.9 Primarily, 

these were situated inside chapels, churches, and occasionally cathedrals, with their exact 

locations varying from placement in the nave to the less accessible choir.  

                                                           
8 John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in 

the Later Middle Ages (New York:  Routledge, 2002), 248. 

 
9 For additional descriptions of the transi tombs, see Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death 

Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California 

Press, 1973), a publication based upon her dissertation from 1969, see Kathleen Rogers Cohen. "The 

Changing Meaning of the Transi Tomb in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Europe" Faculty 

Publications (1969).  

 



5 
 

  Transi tombs reflect and promote religious developments and contemporary 

ideological debates. As a further display and construction of identity, they incorporated 

funeral achievements, regalia which are replications of, or actual, physical accessories 

commonly used by the deceased person, such as armor, clothing, and military standards.10 

Transi tombs enriched Christian conceptualizations of death and incorporated aspects of 

classical, as well as medieval, motifs in their construction. Incongruent with Bynum’s 

findings about late medieval images, blood is noticeably absent from transi imagery. This 

variation, however, suggests a potential application of corporeal depictions to the role of 

the sacred. With images of Christ and the saints typically entailing images of blood to 

emphasize their humanity and suffering, the lack of it may illustrate death’s unique link 

to human mortality as an abstract state rather than individual contingency. As Bynum 

states, by the 1400s bloody depictions are ubiquitous as the motif within Christian art 

changes narrative form. Images of Christ became constantly awash in blood, actions that 

are assumed to link humankind to the divine in a pouring of oneself through blood back 

to God.11 Transi tombs, however, illustrate a passage beyond the physicality of blood. 

Coupled with the emerging theological turbulence that erupted in both England and 

Germany over Church doctrine, transi tombs altered local ideological landscapes and 

frameworks about individual and communal memory, through the conglomeration and 

genesis of myriad artistic motifs.  Additionally, they both reified and suggested new 

                                                           
10  The role of death and its implication within the public sphere was inherently tethered to 

perceptions of the self and others. See John Helgeland, “The Symbolism of Death in the Later Middle 

Ages,” OMEGA--Journal of Death and Dying 15, no. 2 (1984): 145–60, esp. 145; and Raymond L. M.  

Lee, “Modernity, Death, and the Self: Disenchantment of Death and Symbols of Bereavement,” Illness, 

Crisis, & Loss 10, no. 2 (2002): 91–107, esp. 91. 

 
11 See Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval 

Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), esp. 1—22.   

 



6 
 

methods of understanding prevalent mentalities toward death and remembrance, posing a 

range of art historical meanings and conclusions.  

The preponderance of transi tombs are located in England and the German-

speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire and are worth further consideration in their 

respective local contexts.12 To better understand how these works functioned for their 

presumed viewers and as fabricated objects in space, we can learn much from Michael 

Baxandall’s approach to German Renaissance sculpture, advocating as Malcolm Baker 

does, that scholars should “bring production and reception into conjunction, bring more 

into play the spectators’ responses to materials and making.”13  As Baxandall 

demonstrated in his foundational study of German limewood sculpture, even the choice 

of a piece’s support is a cultural decision replete with meaning, what Allan Langdale 

summarized as “an anthropological analysis of a society’s visual culture.”14 Baxandall’s 

notion of a period eye suggests the vital role that ideology, a shared visual language, and 

materiality play in understanding art. While Baxandall applied his theory to the limewood 

sculptures of Germany to elucidate the cultural and artistic importance of multi-winged 

altarpieces, in particular, he did not consider other prominent forms and functions of 

                                                           
12 The role of death and its implication within the public sphere in this period was inherently 

tethered to perceptions of the self and others. See Helgeland, Symbolism of Death, 145, and Lee, 

Modernity, 91. 

 
13  Malcolm Baker, “Some Object Histories and the Materiality of the Sculptural Object,” in The 

Lure of the Object, ed. Stephen Melville (Dudley, MA: Studley Press, 2005), 119–34, at 130.  

 
14 See Allan Langdale, “Aspects of the Critical Reception and Intellectual History of Baxandall’s 

Concept of the Period Eye,” in About Michael Baxandall, ed. Adrian Rifkin (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 

1999), 17–35, at 18; and Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, 1475–

1525 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). 



7 
 

German sculpture, such as stone or metal tombs, funerary achievements, or memorials as 

will be rectified in this study.  

My analysis of cadaver tombs further amplifies other earlier studies of the topic, as 

well. I return attention to the important cataloguing efforts of Kathleen Cohen, to add 

consideration of the impact of reformist theologies on the presentation and meaning of 

transi and situate the examples in broader Reformation-related debates about the 

phenomenology of death and the materiality of the body. An examination of the 

relationship between monument, matter, artistic medium, and the viewer have not been 

investigated in the context of such debates in both England and Germany as comparative 

and linked examples. In addition, this is the first sizable study to consider how transi 

tombs function structurally and visually in multidirectional ways that have broader 

implications for perceptions of time. My study expands upon these earlier inquiries, 

furthering the geographic scope and range of artifacts and materials that were part of the 

cadaver tomb phenomenon, to offer a better understanding of their active function as 

agents of performative, theological, and artistic change.    

Summary and Exploration 

Coupled with other aspects of theological thought, conclusions about materiality, 

and the impact of temporal multidimensionality, this analysis will augment studies of 

tombs by investigating shifting notions of their ontology. Beyond these findings, tombs 

are more than mere representations of religious or cultural shifts. Christopher Wood and 

Alexander Nagel have theorized that a work of art exists in temporal instability, negating 

the expectation for a successive ordering of time and instead referencing earlier ‘original’ 



8 
 

authoritative types or forms.15 By presenting the dead not only as enduring effigy, but 

also as a figure linked to his or her material demise in both sculpture and actual physical 

remains, the artist manipulated time and presented a unique interpretation of death. Transi 

tombs depict life, death, and resurrection as states that are very much part of the material, 

physical world—as sculpted figures that can be seen, touched, and experienced—while 

also falling decidedly outside of earthly chronology.  

In the following chapters, changing meanings of how religious thought was altered 

by, and is replicated in, tombs are considered. The phenomenon of transi tombs in 

Chapter Two is introduced by analyzing memorial discourse and its intersection with 

differing ideologies between the Church and early reformists, such as in the tomb of 

Archbishop Henry Chichele (d. 1443) of Canterbury, a stalwart supporter of the papacy 

(figure 1.1). Beyond being covered with meaningful Latin inscriptions and surrounded 

by myriad strata of saints, Chichele’s tomb is of interest due to its good state of 

preservation and polychromy. The sculpture showcases the naturalism that underscored 

the artist’s work to create a vivid and memorable encounter between the viewers of the 

tomb with theological doctrines of resurrection. Productive comparisons between 

Chichele’s effigy and its transi abound. Sculptural details such as pink pigments to 

suggest flesh tones overlay pronounced facial and hand muscles (figure 1.2). The 

luxurious fibers of the archbishop’s cloak and miter are replaced with the transi’s 

desiccated face, neck, and chest (figure 1.3). I shall also explore the importance of such 

verisimilitude in effigies, a feature that will have cross-application later in Chapter Five 

                                                           
15 Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel, “Interventions: Toward a New Model of Renaissance 

Anachronism,” Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005): 403–32; and Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, 

Anachronic Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2010), esp. 45–50.  

 



9 
 

the study of Hans Holbein the Younger’s Dead Christ in the Tomb, as well as its visual 

impact on the public perception of death.  

Chapter Three focuses on an investigation of the relationship between transi tombs 

and the fashioning of individual and civic identity by considering the representation of 

gender in the tomb of Alice de la Pole (d. 1474) in Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, 

Oxfordshire (figure 1.4). While most effigies in transi tombs are either male or a male-

and-female couple, singular female transi tombs such as that of Alice de la Pole were 

rare but did exist. Her tomb is one notable highpoint, her effigy detailed in its full finery, 

complete with allusions to architectural elements, fabrics, and religious themes (figure 

1.5). Her transi, however, is stripped of individuality; although clearly female, none of 

her personal or social accouterments are featured (figure 1.6). This chapter will include 

an analysis of personal effects as indicators of identity, noting aspects of gender, status 

and position, and how these variations underwent novel interpretations throughout this 

time period. The focus on political achievements that is pronounced in tombs of men is 

slight in Alice’s tomb, allowing for conclusions about the public formation of identity 

through tombs.  

This analysis will shift in Chapter Four to Germany to explore what happens to the 

monumental sculpted transi tomb there, notably in the stone relief memorials of the 

Fugger family in Saint Anna's Church in Augsburg (1511–1525), which play with this 

tradition in new form and significance. Concepts of death and memory changed and 

became sites of renewed inquiry as the Reformation took hold unsteadily and to 

differing extents in various parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Cadaver or transi tombs 

investigate how images of the body interconnect with changing concepts of theology, 



10 
 

viewership, and temporality during the Reformation period, particularly in the south of 

England and German-speaking lands. The localized history and receptivity of the 

Reformation is a textured one, as Johannes Schilling16 and Martin Luther (1483–1546) 

delivered or inspired sermons in Augsburg in the first decades of the sixteenth century, 

though the city’s official turn to Reformation theology was officially enacted relatively 

late in 1537.17 The city’s larger complicated relationship with the Reformation was 

echoed in the lives of the Fuggers, one of the city’s, and indeed Europe’s, most 

economically powerful families. The beliefs and patronage of the Fugger family reached 

across the Protestant and Catholic divide. The memorial plaque of Ulrich Fugger (1441–

1510), one of the most revered and influential of the Fuggers, is a relief sculpture 

possibly designed by or after Albrecht Dürer depicting a profile of a transi entombed 

below an image of the Resurrection and forms a logical extension of my analysis (figure 

1.7).  

My investigation in this chapter will conclude with a reconsideration and reframing 

of the contributions of Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543) to these theological, 

material, and artistic debates, namely by reconsidering his Dead Christ in the Tomb 

(1521). Made in Basel within the context and conventions of the transi tomb 

phenomenon for the humanist scholar and Professor of Law Bonifacius Amerbach 

(1496–1562), the transi tomb was transformed into a two-dimensional representation in 

                                                           
16 Little is known about Schilling’s life and background, despite being considered “the preacher who had 
the most dramatic effect in Augsburg in the 1520’s. …We do not know even the dates of birth and death.” 

From Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2006), 

63. 
17 For information related to the changing environment of Augsburg during both his and Luther’s 

time, see B. Ann Tlusty, ed. and trans., Augsburg during the Reformation Era: An Anthology of Sources 

(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2012). 

 



11 
 

the medium of oil paint (figure 1.8). Holbein’s career spans from his native Augsburg to 

his work in Basel, and his eventual relocation in London, bringing together geographical 

and art historical traditions of this study while extending to the new medium and 

demands of oil paint. For example, Joseph Koerner links his own conclusions about 

Holbein’s work to those of Georges Didi-Huberman, who noted that the artist’s 

representation of the sarcophagus is mimicry of a tomb: “The dissemblance of false 

marbles, he argued, displays the painted mark as such, de-familiarizing its process with a 

sacred charge. Representing the unpresentable, painted stone lays the icon bare.”18 The 

implications of this finding, particularly in relation to visuality, materiality, and 

naturalism within the context of the Reformation, will be more fully explored in this 

final chapter. 

The experience of viewing and walking around transi tombs affected the concept of 

the body, death, and resurrection during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Northern 

Europe. Cadaver tombs created a new means to approach and understand temporal 

dimensionality. This analysis is tethered to leading theological discourses of the period, 

while also accentuating my study with modern semiotic, phenomenological, and 

ontological theories about shifting cultural reactions toward death and memory. Modern 

ideas about the vital role of media and personal identity can be cross applied to earlier 

historical periods to draw unique conclusions. Additionally, cadaver tombs represented 

and facilitated innovative ways of crafting social and personal identity, both for the 

deceased person depicted and for the viewers of the monuments. These elements, when 

                                                           
18 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 

2008), 184.    



12 
 

combined with considerations of the theological shifts of this period, will provide for 

new insights and conclusions.  

These debates about artistic geographies, the term ‘northern,’ and the problem of 

modern nationalism divides up these studies too narrowly and not comparatively. Instead, 

the prominence of shared or blurry mentalities that are rooted in various forms of 

reformist thoughts and in the challenges of artistic production in both England and 

German speaking lands are pertinent. Artistic movements and philosophical exigencies 

concerning reformist ideologies in England were reconstituted and reaffirmed in myriad 

locations across Europe. Mark Trowbridge draws upon northern artists’ work to 

substantiate this claim in his support of Sherry C. M. Lindquist’s position, “The profound 

originality of Claus Sluter or Melchior Broederlam has often been presented as a 

statement of artistic individuality, a reflection of a new Renaissance mentality. Lindquist 

instead resituates those works within late-medieval thought.”19 Lindquist is not alone in 

her findings. As Jacques le Goff succinctly summarizes: “The reality is that in the course 

of the Middle Ages there were a number of renaissances, more or less extensive, more or 

less triumphant.”20 Panofsky had proposed a similar contention, focusing primarily on 

Italy and Germany while noting the difficulty of the periodization of art within a milieu 

of locations and historical developments.21 

                                                           
19 See Mark Trowbridge, Agency, Visuality, and Society at the Chartreuse de Champmol 

(Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2008), xviii, 251. 

 
20 Jacques le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods? European Perspectives: A Series in 

Social Thought and Cultural Criticism, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (New York: Columbia University Press, 

2015), 109.  

 
21 See Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper & Row, 

1972), 4–5. 



13 
 

Little art historical research has focused on exploring philosophical currents 

across broad regional and modern national lines, particularly between territories in central 

Europe and England, with few writers suggesting that both locations underwent similar 

artistic experiences or progressions in visual culture, particularly in relation to concepts 

of death. That lacuna will be explored throughout this study, noting that works in 

England often remain removed from the purview of many Northern Renaissance art 

historical researchers. As Larry Silver explains, the art history world has, perhaps based 

upon Panofsky’s pronounced lead, consistently forgotten much of England, the Iberian 

Peninsula, and Eastern Europe.22 Even fewer authors have attempted to synthesize artistic 

developments between England and Germany. The periodization that commonly 

earmarks the emergence of a distinct Northern Renaissance within only a small cadre of 

geographical locations can be deemed problematic. This study aims to correct that pattern 

by looking at English tombs and seeing cross applications with emergent designs 

elsewhere in Europe.   

This analysis will constitute a novel way of viewing the form and function of 

tombs, and their larger art historical impact. I argue further that the reformist thought 

that was affected by and surrounded the creation and perception of cadaver tombs is 

emblematic of a larger epistemological quandary, one that focuses on the unique 

character and art historical experience of the Northern Renaissance and that poses 

intriguing conclusions. My analysis will present new conclusions and conceptualizations 

                                                           
22 See Larry Silver, “The State of Research in Northern European Art of the Renaissance Era,” Art 

Bulletin 68, no. 4 (1986): 518–35. A notable substitution is the work of Thomas DaCosta Kaufman, Court, 

Cloister, and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 1995).  

 



14 
 

about how transi tombs create powerful messages about the experience of viewers and 

how changing theological beliefs underscore their impact. I will illustrate how these 

tombs transformed the trajectory of the Northern Renaissance and altered the 

ideological, visual, and material landscape of the Reformation. This development will 

posit for new conclusions about shifting religious and cultural ideologies and varying 

artistic techniques, shifting to heightened visual impacts in the apotheosis of Holbein’s 

the Dead Christ.  

  



15 
 

CHAPTER 2:  

STRUCTURES AND IMAGES IN THE TRANSI TOMB OF ARCHBISHOP 

HENRY CHICHELE: A REACTION TO A GROWING  

REFORMIST MOVEMENT 

 

Description of the Tomb of Archbishop Chichele  

The painted marble transi tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele is located in 

Canterbury Cathedral between the upper choir and the choir ambulatory, adjacent to the 

north-east transept. It is situated near the gateway leading from the transept into the choir, 

an entrance popularly known as the Chichele Gate (figure 2.1). It was created between 

1424 and 1426 when Chichele was still living, and is viewable from the location of the 

original archbishop’s chair of the cathedral, situated at the front of the nearby altar (figure 

2.2). Chichele would have encountered his completed tomb each time he processed 

toward the altar at the onset of Mass. The positioning of the tomb is a purposeful one, as 

Chichele selected a location that would function as a very public memento mori, and as 

an important element for his officiation of the Mass. Considering the position of 

Chichele’s tomb the visible reminder for his own earthly demise and the hopeful fate of 

his soul would have been in his direct view as he celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus 

Christ. The transi tomb of Henry Chichele offers us a view of some fundamental shared 

qualities of this tomb type—such as their memorializing functions and their depictions of 

death—that are parcel to a transi made at the intersection of key reformist debates in 

fifteenth-century England about the function of death and redemption.  Chichele’s tomb 

exemplifies the positions of Church orthodoxy and yet incorporates popularized 

ideologies about the nature of matter, thereby contributing to ongoing tensions 

surrounding transubstantiation, corporeality, and the Resurrection.   



16 
 

The tomb is a triple-tiered stone sculpture approximately twelve feet tall and 

including an elaborate carved canopy (figure 2.3).1 References to Church orthodoxy are 

replete throughout its iconography. The tomb’s canopy is decorated with heraldic shields 

from other bishoprics, particularly those of Archbishop John Pecham (1279–1292), 

Chichele’s earlier predecessor, as well as niches bearing biblical and local figures of note. 

These shields line the base of the canopy, which is multi-tiered and includes a polished 

exterior. The underside of the upper canopy is painted a dark ebony with inlaid gilded 

lattice work, which together function like a reflective surface, positioned above the effigy 

of Chichele (figure 2.4). The sequence of sculpted figures in niches establish a kind of 

genealogy that asserts an unbroken chain of local and biblical history. One figure shows 

Chichele himself, portrayed as holding a model of All Souls College of Oxford 

University. Other niche figures include Abraham, who holds a small figure representing 

the souls that had departed prior to the birth of Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary (figure 

2.5 and 2.6). Other religious and political figures are depicted throughout the tomb 

structure: Examples of statues also include Saint Anslem, positioned with a holy book, 

Saint Alphege carrying the stones of his martyrdom, and Saint Dunstan, who carries a 

self-illustrated manuscript, commonly known as the Glastonbury Class Book. Additional 

niche statues include Thomas Becket and Edmund Rich, and images of England’s 

prominent kings, including figures that may be King Henry IV, V, or VI, as each had 

reigned during Chichele’s lifetime. King Henry VI (1422-1461) is likely as he played a 

particularly important role in Chichele’s rise to prominence, and the inclusion of a statue 

                                                           
1 Though completed by 1426, the elaborate tomb and canopy were restored twice, first in 1663 and 

then 1897, when additional figures were added to the side columns of the tomb. See Charles Grant 

Robertson, All Souls College (London: F. E. Robinson, 1899), esp. 224–25.   



17 
 

of Thomas Becket is notable for its proximity to the site of his murder and shrine is 

located only a few feet away.2  

The statues and heralds of former monarchs and Church leaders established an 

ongoing dynastic heritage, one that would not be conquered by death but that carries on 

through national policy and liturgical orthodoxy. This position was reflected in the 

writings of Ernst Kantorowicz and his notion of the king’s two bodies in that the natural 

body has physical attributes, suffers, and dies but the non-material body, the enduring, 

public political body, transcends the earthly realm and serves as a symbol of an office.3 

The same sentiment underscores the continuation of papal and monarchial hierarchies.4 

The concept of the king’s two bodies allowed for this continuity of a monarchy even after 

a regent had died, a contention well summarized by the dictum “The king is dead. Long 

live the king.” This continuation of the head of state revolved around three aims: the 

continuation of a dynasty into perpetuity, the corporate character of the Crown, and the 

immortality of the royal post. Chichele’s tomb is comprised of elements of each of these 

facets, lending authority to the monarchs that he served and the Church that he helped 

lead.   

                                                           
2 Chichele would have aspired to mirror the lives of the saints without resorting to the sin of pride, 

as a means of general theology and as a matter of orthodoxy discussed in Carlo Giuseppe Quadrupani, 

Light and Peace, Instructions for Devout Souls to Dispel their Doubts and Allay their Fears, 5th ed. (St. 

Louis: B. Herder, 1907), esp. 41. 

 
3 See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology 

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 

 
4 This same concept is applied to a variety of offices held by magistrates and leaders throughout 

Europe. For example, see Tracey Cooper, “On the Death of Great Men: A Note on Doge Andrea Gritti,” in 

Venice and the Veneto during the Renaissance: The Legacy of Benjamin Kohl, M. Knapton, eds. J. Law, A. 

Smith (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2014), 103–18. 



18 
 

Chichele’s life-size recumbent effigy is sculpted in full liturgical garb, including 

the archbishop’s miter and crosier. Differing from other designs, his staff is topped with a 

simple Teutonic cross, and his miter is surrounded by two angels placed on either side of 

his head. (figure 2.7). Two small mourning angels kneel at his feet, complete with prayer 

books and flowing robes. The columns that flank Chichele’s tomb are separated into four 

horizontal sections, two levels of which are covered with niches for the statues that cover 

two thirds of each column. The top and bottom layers include small, brightly colored but 

empty niches, while the canopy itself is held aloft by five shield-bearing angels on either 

side.  Chichele’s marble effigy is covered with an elaborately carved and heavily 

polychromed burgundy and gold archbishop’s cloak, complete with representations of 

myriad jewels and fine fabrics. The sculpture and coloring accentuate both his lifelike 

features and the details of his effigy. His robust face is presented with his eyes fixed on a 

small statue of the Virgin Mary located overhead in a central niche. Surrounding the 

platform of the effigy lies an epitaph, supposedly written by Chichele himself.  

As Arthur Duck summarizes, Chichele’s involvement in the construction of his 

own tomb was well known: “[H]is Body was laid in the Tomb which he had built himself 

… in the upper part of which is his Statue very handsomely cut in White Marble.” 5 The 

tomb’s design suggests ongoing inclinations toward more individualized methods of 

memorial and remembrance. Chichele’s epitaph suggests a position of prominence within 

                                                           
5 Arthur Duck, The Life of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, Who Lived in the Times of 

Henry the V. and VI. Kings of England: Written in Latin by Arth. Duck, now made English and a table of 

contents annexed (London: R.L. Chiswell, 1699), 175.  

 



19 
 

the Church history and hierarchy, also making mention of and visually including in the 

sculptural assemblage the numerous kings under whom he had served:  

Here lies HENRY CHICHELE Doctor of Laws and sometime Chancellor of 

Salisbury, who in the Seventh Year of King Henry the Fourth, was sent 

Ambassador to Pope Gregory the XIIth. and was consecrated Bishop of S. David's 

by the hands of the Pope in the City of Siena. The said Henry in the Second Year 

of King Henry the Fifth, was demanded for Archbishop in this Holy Church, and 

translated to it by Pope John the Twenty third. He died in the Year of our Lord 

1443 on the 12th of April.6 

There is no mention of Chichele’s creation of a Jubilee Year in 1420 at Canterbury, 

despite the impact that this declaration had on the wider Church as it raised the ire of the 

pope. The inscription does, however, emphasize Chichele’s important role as an 

ambassador to the papacy and his affiliation with the field of law. Despite Chichele’s 

involvement in campaigns against early reformists as we shall see, his epitaph focuses 

primarily on his initial clergy positions and his associations with various popes and 

political leaders.  

The finding that a work of art cannot be wrested from the political, theological, or 

ideological framework in which it was created and viewed bolsters the claims posited by 

Baxandall, who also substantiates the importance of art as a social exchange. By focusing 

on an artist’s local experiences, the creation of their craft, and the importance of local 

guilds, Baxandall suggests that art history is a foray into “alien sensibilities,” asserting 

that seeing the world of the artist through an anthropological lens invites a “historical 

                                                           
6 Hic jacet HEN∣RICUS CHICHELE Legum Doctor, quondam Cancel∣larius Sarum, qui anno 

septimo Hen∣rici IV. Regis ad Gregorium Papam XII. in ambasciata transmissus, in ci∣vitate Senensi per 
manus ejusdem Pa∣pae in Menevensem Episcopum conse∣cratus est: Hic e∣tiam Henricus an∣no secundo 
Hen∣rici quinti Regis in hac sancta Ecclesia in Archiepiscopum postulatus, & à Jo∣anne Papa XXIII. ad 
eandem transla∣tus est, qui obiit anno Domini mil∣lesimo quadringen∣tesimo quadragesi∣mo tertio, mensis 
Aprilis die XII. 

 



20 
 

explanation” moving beyond an individual artist toward an audience-focused 

interpretation.7 The result is a distinct departure from Panofsky’s iconology-based 

analyses and any ensuing connection to an artist’s personal psychology.8 Panofsky’s 

approach typically points to a larger focus on the role of the individual artist as opposed 

to an investigation into the shifting ideological principles that underscored an art 

historical period.9 Ultimately, ongoing narratives emblematized by works of art were 

grounded in dramatic performance, one that coupled theology with artistic creations that 

effectively enhanced the viewer’s experiences and deepened a sense of visual awareness 

and engagement. With the case of death and transi tombs in particular, viewers were able 

to perceive the process while still remaining separate from it. 

Sensing the inevitability of death exemplified by a tomb is certainly a powerful 

memento mori. However, the interpolation of effigy, transi, and burial enacted the 

experience of dying when viewed downward toward the earth and the possibility of 

immortality when the gaze moved upward in the other direction. Memorials such as 

Chichele’s not only construct a kind of shared public memory of an archbishop, but also 

provide an immediate visualization on the intersection between death and redemption that 

prompts emotions and contemplation. In extending the foundation of effigy tombs, transi 

tombs emblematized a particularly effective means of considering not only the 

                                                           
7 See Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors, esp. 9–10, and Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: 

On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), esp. 1-5.  

 
8 For more on the development of iconology and the association with personal effects of the artist, 

see Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (London: Harper Collins, 1971). 

 
9 For an overview of this period and some of the contentions about the role of the individual, see 

Craig Harbison, The Mirror of the Artist: Northern Renaissance Art in its Historical Context (New York: 

Harry N. Abrams Incorporated Publishers, 1995). 

 



21 
 

materiality and matter of the body, but also an anachronic exploration of memory and 

resurrection that existed perhaps unsteadily with official Church doctrine. 

Although viewership and experience were indeed linked, an optical and 

experiential distance between the viewer and object is notable. Vision connected the 

viewer with the object, but also suggested that there was inaccessible distance that could 

only be imagined and not experienced. In the case of death, it is fundamentally 

impossible for the viewer to ascertain the full extent of the experience. Visual cues in the 

form of increasing levels of detail or suggested narrative, such as the plethora of biblical 

figures that surround Chichele’s tomb, however, stimulate the viewer’s imagination to 

contemplate the experience of the deceased person’s soul. Sculpture united both of these 

aspects, combining a life-size figural likeness of the deceased individual with the 

viewer’s ontological assumptions. As Diane Wolfthal has noted about how narrative 

functioned in carved multi-wing altarpieces:  

Over time narrative elements multiplied; more episodes, anecdotal details, and 

figures were added to form complex, multilayered compositions. As [Lynn] 

Jacobs observes [in Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380-1550: 

Medieval Tastes and Mass Marketing] the narrative form was preferred for public 

worship, not private devotion, and was deemed particularly appropriate to the 

space of the altar, since Mass was traditionally interpreted as a dramatic 

narrative.10 

The visual narrative of both the effigy and the surrounding statues of Chichele’s tomb is 

clear, with each level having distinctly different details to catch the viewer’s eye and 

propel it in multiple directions. In that regard, the rendering of Chichele’s outfit, face, and 

hands warrants attention. While the polychrome of Chichele’s robes may be a recent 

                                                           
10 Diane Wolfthal, review of Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380–1550: Medieval 

Tastes and Mass Marketing, by Lynn Jacobs, Speculum 76, no. 3 (2001): 741–43, at 741.  



22 
 

addition, the original effects of his effigy are distinctive for their sculptural details, such 

as the fleshy knuckles of his praying hands or the intricacies of his ear lobes. Each of the 

four angels that surround Chichele’s effigy—the two at his shoulders that flank his miter 

and the two kneeling at his feet—hold prayer books, including suggestions of individual 

pages. The angels at his shoulders appear to be gesturing to his face, while the angels at 

his feet extend one hand upward with another hand gesturing to the interior of a prayer 

book. The smooth tones of the angel’s cheeks and individual feathers on their wings are 

illustrative of the level of detail on the remainder of the statues that surround the tomb. 

This level of detail accentuates the viewer’s imagination, while also strengthening a 

visual connection with objects that serve as important cues into Chichele’s life, public 

legacy, and orthodox beliefs.  

The extreme amount of detail in transi tombs such as Chichele’s operated in 

several visual directions across a variety of strata and tiers. Just as the deceased 

proceeded through the stages of earthly life, decay, and eventual decomposition, so too 

these stages are represented descending vertically through each of the tomb’s tiers in a 

physical and direct manner. Caroline Walker Bynum has asserted that there is a medieval 

fascination with the progressive putrefaction of the body in transi tombs, an intrigue 

grounded more in the process of decay than of death itself: “they were perhaps ‘rotten,’ 

not ‘dead,’ precisely because it was so extraordinarily difficult for people in the later 

Middle Ages to see any matter as truly dead, the sense of inert, rather than rotting or 

fertile.”11 As Bynum notes, the images of transi tombs referenced the constant vitality of 

                                                           
11 Bynum, Christian Materiality, 122. 

 



23 
 

a human corpus. If transi tombs did not represent an interest solely in death, but instead 

constituted a unique reconsideration of the transformative processes of death, of time and 

its effects on matter, the function of death images and decay take on new possibilities, 

theologically and artistically. Viewed this way, transi tombs to fifteenth- and sixteenth-

century viewers are not only suggestions of memorial, but also statements about the non-

ending status of life throughout stages of corporeal decay.   

  This progressive direction of death and mortification was reversed, however, 

during resurrection at the time of Last Judgment. The reconsideration of time as a flexible 

or dual-directional kind of temporality has been noted by scholars in other applications to 

Apocalyptic images As Marcia Hall explains in her study of Michelangelo’s Last 

Judgment (1536–1541), Counter-Reformation notions of death encapsulated new 

outlooks and beliefs on the decayed body and how it was believed to rise again from the 

grave, returning to a corporeal self before the soul’s ascension.12 Tombs also sealed the 

memory of the deceased in a particular moment of their lives and suggest that the 

inclusion of the body in full costuming, such as a prince’s armor and sword or a bishop’s 

robe, crosier, ring and chalice, rendered the tomb a time capsule awaiting opening at the 

Last Judgment.13 By examining transi tombs in relation to ongoing debates in the North 

during the later fifteenth century about the state of the soul and resurrection of the body, 

we might understand how these tombs blended the passage of time and the natural 

                                                           
12 Marcia B. Hall, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: Resurrection of the Body and Predestination,” 

The Art Bulletin 58, no. 1 (1976): 85–92, esp. 87.  
 

13 Elizabeth A. New, “Episcopal Embodiment: The Tombs and Seals of Bishops in Medieval 

England and Wales,” in The Prelate in England and Europe, 1300–1560, ed. Heale Martin (Martlesham, 

UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), 191–214, esp. 214. 

 



24 
 

process of dying with eventual redemption and immortality—beliefs that deserve further 

attention within the northern context where these tombs feature so prominently. This 

conceptual movement echoes what Georges Didi-Huberman would suggest is an 

inherently mobile process, one that incorporates both substitution and contradiction, as 

the viewer imaginatively replaces the effigy with decomposition and resurrection 

simultaneously, with visions of the past and the future at once.14   

One of the many reasons for the visual appeal of Chichele’s tomb is the level of 

detail in both the effigy and the surrounding canopy. It also renders lifeless and 

decomposing matter into an approximation of vitality. In terms of the transi, 

verisimilitude is similarly stressed, accentuating the stark contrast with the vividness of 

his rosy-cheeked effigy (figure 2.8). Each of the bones on the withered rib cage of 

Chichele’s transi is pronounced, as are the hollows of his check and jaw.15 Though 

denuded of all worldly costume befitting an archbishop, his hair, still cut in the style of a 

tonsure, includes indentations of individual strands of dark chestnut hair. The carving of 

the taught skin over Chichele’s features accentuates not only the desiccation of the 

corpse, but also the prominence of his facial bones. His eyes are closed while his mouth 

is set with slight tension suggested at the corners of his jawbone (figure 2.9). The sinews 

in his shoulders, arms, and torso are clearly presented, with his ribs being prominently 

displayed. Unlike the effigy, which features a brilliant array of dazzling colors, the transi 

is in an almost singular hue, with some slight variation in the coloration of the 

                                                           
14 Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par Contact: Archéologie, Anachronisme, et 

Modernité de l’Empreinte (Paris: Editions du Minuit, 2008), 15–20.  

 
15 Differing with other writers, I am opting to continue to refer to transi with personal pronouns, 

instead of a popularized decision to refer to a corpse or its representations by the neutral term of “it.”  



25 
 

accompanying shroud on which the transi lies. More than a mere cloth, the transi’s 

shroud appears as a half opened large sack, the topmost portion tied with the transi lying 

atop it.  Chichele’s transi is noticeably smaller and thinner than the vividly presented 

effigy. While the face of the effigy suggests a great deal of liveliness, complete with a 

pronounced set of fleshy jowls and full cheeks and open eyes, the visage of the transi is 

that of a withering corpse suggesting that the death process and decay had already taken 

hold.  

The shared phenomenological process of death is encapsulated by the popularized 

epitaph often accompanying many tomb structures in some variation: Si quis eris qui 

transieris hoc respice plora/ Sum quod eris quod es ipse fui  pro me precor, that is, 

“Whoever you may be that passes by, stop, read carefully, lament, I am what thou wilt 

be, and I was that thou art, for now I beseech you, pray.”16 The present subjunctive tense 

and pronoun usage of the epitaph is intriguing, as the opening line assumes a 

commonality that suggests not only a viable memento mori, but also a continuation of 

dialogue from the grave, a breaking of physical time and space through prosopopoeia. 

The use of prosopopoeia—of an object given voice to speak to the viewer—is an 

established rhetorical device that was deployed frequently in tomb monuments during the 

late medieval tradition, a mode that also asserts in its immediacy a powerful pictorial 

agency.  This conflation ruptures chronological linearity and is an extension of what 

                                                           
16 Translated in S. Andrews, “Notice of Sepulchral Slabs at Mount Sherborne,” in Papers and 

Proceedings, By Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society, vol. 2, ed.  G. W. Minns 

(Southampton, UK: Hampshire Field Club & Archaeological Society, 1894), 135–39, at 138.  This epitaph 

is assumed to be the origin of the heavily popularized versions of the same phrase that appeared throughout 

the Medieval eras throughout Europe, including in the Italian Renaissance, and appeared even through the 

19th century in America. 

 



26 
 

Wood and Nagel posit as the folding of time in a chain of artifacts leading back to a 

presumed and absent prototype—which, in these cases, are the actual cadavers 

themselves hidden from view within the tomb or beneath the floor.17 This collapsing of 

temporal distancing is particularly important in the construction of tombs by extending a 

theological, if not metaphysical, interpretation to these material substitutions.  

The opulent nature of Chichele’s ornamentation is in strong contrast not only to 

the comparatively skeletal transi, but also to the epitaph message that wraps around the 

top layer of his tomb. It follows an established trope of humility about the unity and 

eventual disintegration of all matter: As cited by Paul Binski in Medieval Death: Ritual 

and Representation, the epitaph reads “I was a pauper born, then to primate here raised, 

now I am cut down and served up for worms—behold my grave. Whoever you may be 

who will pass by, I ask for your remembrance, you who will be like me after you die; 

horrible in all things, dust, worms, vile flesh.”18 Together, the full inscriptions around the 

tomb read as a summary of his life and also as a way of interpreting the ethos of the tomb 

itself. Chichele’s rise within the Church and his eventual death are both suggested in his 

epitaph, which may be viewed as a “corpse poem,” a literary device that Diana Fuss notes 

can serve additional functions beyond being an accentuation to a memorial. In particular, 

“the corpse poem betrays a desire to wed itself eternally to voice, a voice capable of 

surviving death, a voice that conveys not a distant trace but a proximate presence.”19 

Chichele’s epitaph, which combines a mention of his positions within the clergy while 

                                                           
17 See Wood and Nagel, New Model of Renaissance Anachronism, 403–06.  

 
18 Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 

1996), 143.  

 
19 Diana Fuss, “Corpse Poem,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 1 (2003): 1–30, at 2.  



27 
 

also suggesting through an active voice an association with the living, serves this 

function. It also repositions viewers’ concepts of time. A conflation of voice across 

temporal planes accentuates a flattening of time and space, creating a tethering between 

life and death, and fashioning a conduit between the viewer and the deceased person. 

Moreover, the command to “Behold my grave” as a central component of the epitaph is a 

reminder for the casual observer, and for the occupant of the Archbishop’s chair, whose 

line of vision would have included the tomb upon the procession and at the onset of 

Mass. Similarly, visitors to Chichele’s tomb would encounter suggestions of both the 

process of dying and of Resurrection, dramatic themes that were reenacted in the drama 

of the nearby liturgical service.  

Attention to Chichele’s liturgical garb warrants further interest, as the sculpted 

details are some of the most pronounced elements and brightest colors of the tomb. 

Within the miter, overlapping strands of thread lie with an accumulation of jewels and 

gems, whose facets are visible and unique to each stone. The embroidery of the miter is 

crafted with sculpted woven crosses bordered by golden medallions. At the center of the 

headpiece is a Teutonic cross, which is replicated on the top of his nearby crosier. 

Chichele’s cloak is best described as luxurious, with layers of vestments lying along and 

across his effigy. Tassels adorn both ends of the two tiers of pillows that surround his 

head and embellish the end of his cloak and vestment. The shoes show excessive detail, 

with sculpted effects including ridges and platforms along with allusions to embroidery, 

complete with polychrome netting. 

Such a polychromed sculpted tomb would have functioned within the liturgy, as 

Lynn Jacobs suggests, as an appeal to everyday viewers, combining an appreciation for 



28 
 

liturgical drama with monumentality.20 This fondness for visual drama and spectacle, 

evident in altarpieces throughout northern Europe, provided viewers an opportunity to 

view and engage bodily, tactilely with the dominant medium of sculpture, a staple in 

tomb and memorial creation, and the strong impact of polychrome added to the work’s 

verisimilitude. Michael Baxandall advances a connection between the viewing of 

altarpieces and engagement with sculpture, tethering both three-dimensional mediums to 

viewers’ tactile experiences.21 The same reaction is present in regard to tombs, which like 

other monumental sculpted objects occupy real space and bring certain possibilities of 

bodily engagement for the viewer. The impact of sculpture is fundamentally rooted in 

issues of scale, verisimilitude, material presence and demands on viewership, especially 

in relation to the creation of visual drama, a mainstay of both liturgical and memorial art, 

and a link to a larger and potentially codified visual narrative of dying, death, and decay.  

The Rise of Archbishop Henry Chichele and Reformist  

Fissures of the Church in England 

Variations between the desiccated transi and the lifelike effigy parallel late 

medieval discussions on the changing function of inert matter and the vivacity of the 

soul. Transi tombs acted as change agents to address and affect ongoing discussions 

about the function of memorials as theological artifacts of death and as works of art. As 

Paul Binski concludes, death was at the very center of Christian ideology in the medieval 

period.  Indeed, death was both a central ideological artifact of the Middle Ages and 

                                                           
20 Lynn F. Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces 1380–1550 (Cambridge, UK: 

Cambridge University Press, 1998). 

 
21 Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors, 145–52. 

 



29 
 

presented robust implications for religious practices.22 Prayer was assumed to be a viable 

means through which the faithful were able to connect with any form of an “otherworld,” 

a place summarized by Peter De Wilde as connected to the living only through religious 

practice.23 Tombs augmented and solidified this entrée for the viewer and believer, 

serving as a kind of visual portal challenging current and shifting conceptions of death, 

resurrection, and the changing state of matter itself.  

Well before the Reformation period in the third decade of the sixteenth century the 

design of English tombs had become categorized into distinct themes.24 Of vital 

difference between cadaver tombs and scores of already extant effigy memorials was the 

pronounced use of the transi and accompanying figures, such as the statues surrounding 

Chichele’s effigy. These variations became organizational and systematic principles 

throughout the ensuing reformist period in England.25 Specifically, memorials can be 

subdivided into two aspects: the tomb itself and the surrounding structure. The latter 

became an important element of the memorial and also acted as a proscenium for an 

ensuing drama of remembrance and viewer participation. Each portrayal included distinct 

                                                           
22 Binski, Medieval Death, 56–57.  

 
23 Peter De Wilde, “Between Life and Death: The Journey in the Otherworld,” in Death and Dying 

in the Middle Ages, eds. Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara I. Gusick (Bern: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999), 

175–88. 

 
24 The impact of Henry VII’s description of memorials is strong in that it serves as a conflation of 

the numerous trends in memorial design during the late fifteenth century. Beyond serving as a compendium 

of common tomb making practices, it was used as a practical guide to the means of viewing and 

understanding memorials of this era. See Barbara Hochstetler Meyer, “The First Tomb of Henry VII of 

England,” The Art Bulletin 58, no. 3 (Sep., 1976): 358–67. 

 
25 See Thomas Astle, ed., The Will of King Henry VII, by Henry VII, King of England (London: 

1775), 1–72, esp. 4–5.  

 



30 
 

conclusions about the deceased person and public sentiments about death and 

remembrance.  

By the fourteenth century, the prototypical depiction of a tomb’s effigy was as a 

gisant, such as with Chichele, a fully clothed and costumed figure laying atop a flat slab. 

The facial features were consistently relaxed and peaceful, with the gisant’s eyes either 

closed, as if in slumber, or fully opened, often staring outward with a blank expression, 

devoid of pupils or irises. The latter position often made the figure look awestruck, 

perhaps alluding to the viewing of Final Judgment, with the deceased person seemingly 

having been resurrected or perhaps viewing the face of God. This interpretation gains 

credence in light of prayers and depictions that gained in prominence in the late 

fourteenth century. As Robert Scribner describes, the emergence of the “devout gaze” 

stirred the viewer’s emotions while also suggesting that this was an act of “sacramental 

seeing, a kind of ‘seeing through’ the image or object in a way that made present the 

sacred person behind it, so constituting the ‘sacramental gaze’ as a major form of 

religious experience.”26 Such tombs present the viewer with a depiction of the dead as a 

person—often rendered naturalistically and with details of costume and physiognomy—

while also suggesting allusions to the resurrection of the soul and an encounter with the 

face of God. Tombs acted as dual harbingers of an eternal life and physical reminders of 

the former, but now extinguished, vitality of the dead.  

The importance of Chichele’s memorial and its presentation of orthodox 

principles about encountering the face of God are underscored by his association with the 

                                                           
26 Robert W. Scribner, “Ways of Seeing in the Age of Dürer,” in Dürer and his Culture, eds. 

Dagmar Eichberger and Charles Zika (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 93–117, at 109.  

 



31 
 

Church and the early days of reformist thought in England. Henry Chichele was linked to 

Church teachings for much of his life, and he was raised in an era of restructuring the 

political position of the Crown and the clergy. He rose to prominence to become a 

powerful archbishop at a time when the papacy attempted to exert heavy control over 

early English reformists, in the wake of John Wycliffe (1330–1384) and the Lollards.27 

Throughout England, political and religious debates had been increasing from the onset 

of the fourteenth century, ultimately becoming seeds for the formation of the Church of 

England about a century later under King Henry VIII in 1534. Henry Chichele’s familial 

background epitomized this convergence between national politics and ongoing religious 

shifts, movements that permeated Chichele’s career and forged his legacy. As the son of 

Thomas Chicheley (1336–1399), a political candidate for the mayor’s court and a former 

mayor of Higham Ferres, Northamptonshire, Henry Chichele was exposed to politics for 

much of his upbringing, a background that segued into his rise in both secular and 

religious prominence.28  He studied law at New College, Oxford, around 1387, before 

becoming involved with the Church soon thereafter. He was ordained by the early 

1390’s, with administrative posts beginning as early as 1397, when he was made an 

archdeacon by the Bishop of Salisbury. He also became involved in the Court of Arches 

in London, effectively cementing his study of theology with law, creating forays into 

growing theological and political movements throughout England.  

                                                           
27 Much of the information about Henry Chichelle’s life is based upon Joseph Barnes, Vita Henria' 

Chichele, Arclziepiscopi Cantuariensis, sub regibus Henvic: 5/' et Vr; Descripta ab Arthuro Duck, Oxford, 

1681, published as an English translation (London: Richard Chiswell, 1699). 

 
28 Both Henry and his father Thomas Chicheley’s last name are spelled as Chichele and Chicheley 

regularly. I have opted to use only Chichele for the spelling of Henry’s name while retaining Thomas 

spelling as Chicheley.  



32 
 

Historically, the period of the early fifteenth century marked a vital point in 

Church history. Religious institutions continued to divide as the Papal Schism between 

Rome and Avignon reached an apogee in 1406, the year that Chichele became a special 

envoy to the Roman Pope Gregory XII. As the schism persisted, Chichele found himself 

at the core of political intervention, hoping to arrange in 1406 for a lasting peace between 

England and France. By 1408 he had been named to the bishopric of Saint David's in 

Wales, giving him the right to hold all its benefices within his office. In that same year, 

he and Sir John Cheyne were received by Pope Gregory XII as English envoys along 

with Bishop Repingdon of Lincoln, one of many instances of a direct contact between 

Chichele and the papacy. Five years later, he was involved with diplomatic missions 

under the new Roman pope Innocent VII. Upon the recommendation of King Henry V, 

he was ultimately promoted to the archbishopric in March 1414, a position that was 

formalized by the papacy on July 24 of that same year.  

As an ardent supporter of the established Church, Chichele’s opposition to the ideas 

of the reformist John Wycliffe and his followers was pronounced.29 Central to Wycliffe’s 

contentions was the reinstitution of a life of austerity for Church members and a 

reconsideration of the Church’s pronounced overseeing of charitable efforts. 

Theologically, the intricacies of this belief about good works were being reconsidered 

throughout Chichele’s lifetime. Beyond growing concerns over the treatment of the poor, 

Chichele also preached that the Wycliffe movement and the resultant attacks against the 

clergy, which continued unabated well into the mid-fifteenth century, were antithetical to 

                                                           
29 An abundance of the spelling of John Wycliffe’s name exists. I use a popular spelling, but do 

not alter any of the quotations or citations that spell his name in a different manner.  

 



33 
 

the teachings of the Church and inherently against the ideals of the papacy. A growing 

popularization of reformist beliefs had coincided with the emergence of the Black Death 

in 1346, which heightened public views of mortality, the body, and identity throughout 

the following century to Chichele’s own day. Wycliffe’s advocacy about the Church’s 

appeal to laypeople also drove at least a part of his decision to translate the Vulgate into 

English. This decision was popularly considered as an ecclesiastical means to increase 

human potential and interest in the benefits of a personal theology, ideas that Martin 

Luther would later take up anew.30 Additionally, Wycliffe’s writings suggest a 

burgeoning alliance of reformist thought building on the critiques of the Bohemian 

reformer Jan Hus (1369–1415), particularly in relation to other neophyte movements that 

incorporated the vernacular into Church teachings.31   

Wycliffe’s localized focus was underscored by his perception of the monarchy as a 

corrupt conduit for personal success, especially within England, while he noted the 

importance of publishing the Bible in the vernacular to increase the understanding of and 

adherence by the laity to scripture.32 Wycliffe expounded upon this contention as a matter 

of theology, specifically noting in his letters that the link between the vernacular and 

preaching was routed in the original example of Jesus Christ: “Christ and His Apostles 

taught the people in the language best known to them. It is certain that the truth of the 

                                                           
30  See John Stacey, John Wyclif and Reform (London: Westminster Press, 1964). 

 
31 John Wycliffe, Latin Works: Polemic Work 1, no. 168 (London: Publishers for the Wyclif 

Society by Trübner Book, 1883). 

 
32 For more on Wycliffe’s contentions, see Lawrence S. Cunningham and John J. Reich, Culture 

and Values: A Survey of the Humanities, Comprehensive Edition, 7th Edition (Boston: Cengage Learning, 

2009).  

 



34 
 

Christian faith becomes more evident the more faith itself is known.”33 The response 

from the Church to these publications was immediate and scathing. Archbishop Arundel 

condemned Wycliffe and his followers outright, referring to Wycliffe as “that wretched 

and pestilent fellow of demandable memory... the very herald and child of the Anti-

Christ, who crowned his wickedness by translating the Scriptures into the mother 

tongue.”34 The resultant political and theological impasse formed the background of 

Archbishop Chichele’s defense of the papacy within the growing reformist movement.  

The Lollard response of the late fourteenth century, positioned as contrary to the 

ideals of the papacy in both liturgy and operations, accentuated the principles of 

Wycliffe. Overall, the Lollards felt that the ideals of the Church were too ensconced with 

temporal matters, a finding that was only intensified by the focus on the rigid hierarchies 

within Church bureaucracy. This sentiment was particularly acute in regard to prayers by 

the clergy for the dead. Instead, Lollards believed that prayer should be viewed as 

manifestation of equality rather than privileged status, with a stratification of power or 

grace being antithetical to their religious ideals. In addition, the Lollards’ condemned the 

centrality of devotional images as contrary to the Church’s primary mission of salvation 

and grace. Each of these contentions were antithetical to the orthodoxy that Chichele 

                                                           
33 Wycliffe’s reaction is grounded is furthering the importance of the vernacular while suggesting 

the problems with the Latin liturgy, specifically: [T]he doctrine should not only be in Latin but in the 

vulgar tongue and as the faith of the church is contained in the Scriptures, the more these are known in a 

true sense the better. The laity ought to understand the faith and, as doctrines of our faith are in the 

Scriptures, believers should have the Scriptures in a language which they fully understand.” See 

Christopher Lensch, “The Morningstar of the Reformation: John Wycliffe,” WRS Journal 3, no. 2 (August 

1996): 16–22, at 21.  

 
34 Aaron Caldwell, The Contemporary Agnostic Believer (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace 

Independent Publishing Platform, 2012), 8.  

 



35 
 

upheld and to the exigencies that underscore the design and function of his tomb, which 

highlights the pronounced importance and vital role of biblical and political hierarchies.  

Simultaneously, Chichele was working to promote novel alliances amidst growing 

schisms within the Church. Shannon Gayk summarizes this period as advancing reform 

within the Church while simultaneously forcing a reconsideration of the role of images 

within the liturgy.35 Rejecting the contention that Lollardism was completely against the 

concepts of images within liturgical thought, Gayk instead posits that the movement 

originally acknowledged the important pedagogical and liturgical role of images. Even 

more, the early Lollards were apt to educate the public about effective means to question 

supposedly false images, while simultaneously expounding upon a process of how to 

measure the acceptability of other motifs.  

This process of accommodation, which Gayk notes as an early separation of 

reformist reactions prior to full-blown iconoclasm, was grounded in a removal of the 

presence of images within the public life of the church and suggested a novel role for art 

within the liturgy. As Gayk asserts, “Lollard writers proposed ‘alternative’ iconographies 

that were nonetheless ‘surprisingly incarnational.’”36 The beliefs of the later generations 

of Lollards grew increasingly separate from Wycliffe’s beliefs, whose opinions were 

closer to the early founders of the Lollard movement. As W. R. Jones explains, Wycliffe 

was not inclined to address the topic of iconoclasm at great length, and when he did, he 

                                                           
35 See Shannon Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England: 

Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 81. Gayk 

argues for the importance of sacred images, particularly those associated with liturgical texts, shared by the 

Church and the reformist movements of pre-sixteenth century England.  

 
36 See Karen A. Winstead, review of Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century 

England, by Shannon Gayk, Speculum 86, no. 4 (2011): 1071–072, at 1071. 

 



36 
 

based his views on images in the worshiping practices of the ancient Hebrews and early 

Christianity. He noted that images of Christian practice had been gradually introduced 

toward the end of the Apostolic period, when they were justified as books for the 

unlearned and as sources of Christian inspiration.37 The ultimate result of Wycliffe’s 

endeavors, however, was also a rise in English proto-nationalism and the beginning of a 

hardening strain against the papacy.  Indeed, Pope Gregory XI wrote that Wycliffe was 

attempting “to overthrow the status of the whole church.”38 As the umbra of Wycliffe’s 

followers’ teachings grew throughout England and the northwest of Scotland, their 

contentions became associated with the beginning of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, a 

political reformist movement prior to the rise of Luther’s prominence and the ensuing 

Peasant War of 1525.  Ultimately, these socio-theological movements resulted in a 

dramatic reconsideration of the form and function of art, particularly related to 

discussions about redemption and eventual salvation.   

These ideologies also resulted in debates about the execution of the Mass itself. 

For example, some reformers noted that the sacrament of the Eucharist was not clearly 

operationalized in the Bible, and transubstantiation remained undefined. Chichele’s 

                                                           
37 Wycliff’s followers saw a link between the practice of Hebrews and the worship of early images 

as a precursor for Christianity, with images of the Holy Trinity being antithetical to official Church 

doctrine. Notably, “Wyclif’s most extensive discussion of images was presented in his treatise on the Ten 

Commandments-the De mandatis divinis. Commenting on the first and second commandments, he 

observed that the ancient Hebrews had been forbidden to worship gods other than their own and to make 

graven images. This prohibition derived from the fact that the Jews were prone to idolatry, that the 

Incarnation had not yet sanctified human form, and that Christ's birth and life had not created the holy 

family and his disciples. …[H]e was especially offended, as were the Lollards of a later time, by the 

representation of the Trinity in the form of an old man, a youth, and a dove; by the tendency to endow 

images with magical virtues; and by the crass materialism that sometimes surrounded pilgrimage sites.” See 

W. R. Jones, “Lollards and Images: The Defense of Religious Art in Later Medieval England, Journal of 

the History of Ideas 34, no. 1 (Jan.–Mar., 1973): 27–50, at 29. 

 
38 From John Foxe, The Church Historians of England: Reformation Period, vol. 3, part 1 

(London: Forgotten Books, 2016), 20.  

 



37 
 

position was in keeping with the Church orthodoxy that the altar itself became the stage 

for transubstantiation of matter and the veneration of relics as having real presence and 

magical qualities, two principles that were antithetical to the burgeoning Lollard 

movement and to the ideals of Wycliffe who preceded them. As Jones concludes, 

“Lollardy after Wyclif was not a systematic body of belief, but, rather, a loose assortment 

of opinions and attitudes concerning Christianity and its institutions.”39 Chichele’s 

position was one in which the Church dictated principles of the reverence for artistic 

images of the life of Christ. These ideologies ran counter to the findings of the Lollards, 

who instead believed that images of death and torture were contrary to the teachings of 

Christ and to the promise of bodily resurrection. This disparity between images promoted 

through Church teachings and liturgical practices was also promulgated through 

memorials and tombs.   

Chichele’s ongoing responses to early reformists were steadfast in his public role 

as a defender of orthodoxy and as a patron of the arts with images that reference the 

Church and its theological structures, including his tomb where this same ideology is 

given visual form. His Church orthodoxy regularly blended into his exercise of 

jurisprudence. For example, he presided at the trial of John Claydon (d. 1416), a currier 

and citizen of London, who was held on charges of heresy for claims against the Church, 

particularly defamation of the papacy and the promotion of Lollardism. Claydon’s case is 

emblematic of larger ecclesiastical conflicts, as his crimes suggest a growing belief in a 

malevolent clergy, several claims of which were printed in The Lanterne of Light (1400), 

                                                           
39 Jones, Lollards and Images, 27–50. 

 



38 
 

a popular publication that asserted that priests were direct conduits and contacts of the 

Anti-Christ.40 Claydon’s trial segued into an investigation and ongoing inquisition of 

heresy throughout England, with Chichele himself directing an inquisition by 

archdeacons to hunt out Church malfeasance. By 1416, he attempted to rout out 

suspected heretics en masse, an important example of which was the trail and summary 

execution of William Taylor (d. 1423).41 Taylor preached that prayers should only be 

directed at God, completely foregoing and negating the role of saints and of priests, and 

one must assume, of mediating images in accessing the divine. Considering Chichele’s 

lifelong and pronounced belief in the role of saints within the Church’s liturgy and even 

in the design of his tomb, and his defense of the Church hierarchy as mediators, Taylor’s 

lessons were tantamount to blasphemy. His efforts became waged against early reformers 

who focused not only on the conduct of priests, but also on the function of prayer, and the 

nature of divinity itself.  

By 1417, however, Chichele himself also had become increasingly involved in 

critiques against the new Roman papacy even as his orthodoxy became entrenched. In 

particular, he expressed local opposition with the Roman papacy when he had announced 

a Jubilee to be held at Canterbury in 1420, an event that would divert profits from Rome 

to England. The Church’s reaction to Chichele’s declaration was firm and forthright, 

                                                           
40 See Presbyterian Board of Publication, Writings and Examinations of Brute, Thorpe, Cobham, 

Hilton, Pecock, Bilney, and Others: With the Lantern of Light (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of 

Publication, 1842). 

 
41 Little is known of Taylor’s life. He appears twice before Henry Chichele, once as an 

excommunicant who had subsequently and absolved and then released. He was ultimately executed by 

burning in Smithfield under Henry’s sentencing. Only one of his sermons survives. See Anne Hudson, Two 

Wycliffite Texts: The Sermon of William Taylor 1406, the Testimony of William Thorpe 1407, Issue 301 

(Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1998).  

 



39 
 

including a terse response from the pope, who in 1423 noted that his teachings could 

“ensnare simple souls and extort … and to pivot themselves against the Apostolic See 

and the Roman pontiff.”42 Despite such provocations, Chichele’s influence within 

Canterbury through papal orthodoxy only grew. 

The tomb of Henry Chichele suggests several implications of these developments 

and for the viewing of death vis à vis altering contentions of theology—reformist and 

orthodox—in England. It also offers a potential baseline for consideration of additional 

tombs. The character of Death is fundamentally culturally bound, while personal 

reactions to death may be linked to greater theological beliefs, but the experience of 

representing a corpse and what it suggested permits distinctly different conclusions 

among Christian viewers, nonetheless.43 The medieval period was underscored by a 

combined fear and fascination with death that was exemplified and compounded in 

changes in theology. Questions concerning the condition of death were raised about the 

representation and constitution of the body and the subsequent transmigration of the soul. 

Transi Tombs and Late Medieval Piety in Relation to Death 

Chichele’s tomb affords us multiple ways to interpret the ongoing transi 

phenomenon and late medieval theologies surrounding images, death, and the dead. 

Transi appear to exist between two realms simultaneously, the plane of the living, 

                                                           
42 Catholic Church, Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and 

Ireland: 1342–1362 (Neuilly sur Seine, France: Ulan Press, 2012), 12.  
 

43 For some considerations of the ongoing cultural and theological shifts concerning the 

representation of Death, see Nigel Llewellyn, Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual 

c.1500–c.1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1987). Llewellyn places images of death and the character of 

Death itself into a long historical trajectory, with cultures adopting and disposing images of death at 

numerous historical intervals.  

 



40 
 

executed with attention to period attire, and the expectation of corporeal reanimation 

during Final Judgment. Through this viewing, observers encountered the deceased person 

as both a reposing and animated effigy, an allusion of resurrection that simultaneously 

also recognized the physical demise of the body. This conflation of time, of synthesized 

past and future, is accentuated through a consideration of the unique role of the transi, 

notably in the decaying portion of the tomb group as the wholly dead counterpart to the 

effigy in full flesh.  

Specific prototypes of the transi emerged throughout the medieval era. The transi 

represents a relation to the viewer as part of a universal state of mortality, stripped of the 

ornamentation of the effigy and removed from the worldly grandeur of decorative 

accouterments. Eyes of the corpse figures were consistently closed, with facial features 

gaunt and desiccated. The transi had already started to show the inevitable mortal effects 

on the body. Hair, if present at all, laid flaccid around the face. Gestures had often moved 

from a position of prayer to hanging limply alongside the corpse. With few exceptions, 

transi are sculpted as partially clothed, with attire usually being only a scant and plainly 

decorated cloth. Visually, the impacts of death are clearly suggested by the transi, as 

details include shriveled or shredded skin, or further examples of decomposition like 

pronounced bones and amplified sinews.44 

                                                           
44Additional figures suggest visual substitutions and references to societal roles and theological 

beliefs. For example, in comparison with funerary effigies and transi that are typically portrayed in a prone 

position, seated or assis figures were representative of civic and liturgical positions. Assis figures allowed 

the deceased to be memorialized in light of their social station, usually in conjunction with an image of 

worldly power or position. These figures were suggested by carvings on Roman sarcophagi and 

occasionally incorporated into medieval tomb designs. The interpretive comparison with the transi is stark, 

as assis figures are emblematic of status, while transi are stripped of any suggestion of public rank or even 

individual identity. 

 



41 
 

Transi tombs activated the viewers’ experience of death by erasing a sense of 

temporal and spatial differences. Dual directionality of meaning and motion generates 

novel interpretations for memorials, tombs, and images of religious practice. By 

suggesting that along with temporality being conflated or collapsed—with time as 

complex and non-linear in nature—assumptions concerning the process of living and 

dying are put into question. Transi tombs did not merely reflect contemporary notions 

about dying and resurrection, but instead actively shaped conversations about death and 

memorial within Christian ideology. Conclusions about these issues are not resolved 

through transi tombs. Instead, they initiate contemplation about these matters, acting as 

agents for viewers’ individualized reactions. Even more, tombs acted as agents to address 

and affect ongoing discussions about the function of memorials as theological artifacts 

and as works of art.  

During the earlier medieval era transi can be seen to have distinct stylistic 

differences partially based upon geographical preferences. Corpses were portrayed as 

hosts for worms, along with frogs or serpents in numerous Germanic depictions.45 

Kathleen Cohen investigated this association, noting that within Germanic literature 

serpents were often used in lieu of Death, and that some folktales even assumed that the 

deceased would transform into reptilian form following corporal decay. Further, frogs 

were considered to be both Death’s byproduct and favored pet. This trend extended to 

other animal and reptilian artistic motifs. For example, some depictions of the dead 

included salamanders and newts, associated with an ability to withstand fire as 

                                                           
45 See Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol, 78.  

 



42 
 

representations of death and martyrdom and resurrection.46 These accompanying details 

act as veritable symbols in and maintaining the viewer’s attention, while also conveying 

messages about the state of death itself as mere matter devolving in a continuous natural 

process of decay, as part of the natural world. 

Despite these variations in presentation in details, transi were ultimately studies in 

putrefaction. Unlike the effigies, which lay in repose above the transi, the figure on the 

lower tier had lost all sense of vitality. Similarly, costuming changed course; instead of 

period attire, transi were wrapped in a mere shroud, or were portrayed practically nude, 

stripped of worldly and individualized identity. The decay of fabrics and skin is linked 

visually and conceptually in the transi, an image of a symbiotic relationship in which the 

fibers parallel that of human flesh and viscera. As part of the process of desiccation, 

transi were shown with accentuated lifelessness, as the vigor of perpetual youth that was 

evident in the effigy above it had been replaced by the jarring effects of bodily demise. 

While the effigy suggested not only corporeality, but also the possibility of resurrection 

and ascension toward eternity, the utter mortality of the transi was a demonstration of the 

disintegration of matter.  

The transi further intersected with dominant ideologies, art historical meanings, and 

social inferences through signs and semiotics.47 The position of the body and the relation 

                                                           
46 The use of several reptiles and amphibians as emblems for death pre-dates the medieval period 

by centuries. As only one popular and historical example, toads have been utilized to symbolize and 

suggest death since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. For more information, see Nora C. Flores, ed., 

Animals in the Middle Ages (New York, Routledge, 2016). As symbols pertaining to alchemy and the 

generative possibilities of manipulating the elements and transforming matter, see Pamela H. Smith, “Art, 

Science, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe,” Isis 97, no. 1 (2006): 83-100. 

 
47 As suggested by Umberto Eco, a sign can be defined as any object that refers to something else, 

with semiotic implications suggesting how this result conjoins with previously established social 



43 
 

to the signs that surround it manifests the paradigms that underscored and were affected 

by the tomb’s creation.48 Tombs are not only an idea of death but also guide the viewer to 

visualize and contemplate the intricacies and processes of dying, as memorials created a 

complex system that illustrated dominant themes of ontology. These images are unique in 

tombs in that the work is indicative of the larger complex nature of death, an abstract 

notion or state of being that can never be fully understood by the viewer. By focusing on 

the figures within a tomb, the viewer is able to consider how an image is both 

representative of a specific moment—that is, the moment a person dies and the moment 

of the work’s creation as a work of art—and also transverses that moment—with death as 

a perpetual state until the Last Judgment and decay-and-renewal as an ongoing process.   

In the case of transi tomb, however, the presentation of the body takes on deeper 

meaning through the incorporation of a cadaver sculpture. In this case, the artist 

effectively seals a moment of the human body’s natural decomposition into unchanging 

physical material while alluding to that process of decay and changeability as a stage en 

route to dust. Decaying flesh is presented as unalterable stone, symbolically unable to 

metamorphose into a new being until the Last Judgment. Moreover, in association with 

the Mass and in particular with the concept of the Resurrection, tombs suggest a coda to 

the termination of life. The decay following death is overcome through Christ. The tomb 

                                                           
convention. See Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976), 

16. 

 
48 The resultant creation of art is unique in its function as both a sign and semiotic cue. This shared 

relationship underscores what semiotics theorist Charles Peirce suggested as he noted that “a sign, or 

representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It 

addresses somebody, that is, it creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign. That sign which it 

creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object not in all respects, 

but in reference to a sort of idea.” See Charles Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Pierce, ed. J. Bachler 

(New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 99.  

 



44 
 

and its relationship with prevalent religious beliefs at the time of its creation suggests 

theological conflicts that underscored and were affected by its viewing, resulting in a host 

of ontological conclusions, as the viewer incorporates the representation of the dead 

within their own life. 

Through skillful carving, the artist can convey a sense of verisimilitude of flesh—

the softness and suppleness of a face, for example—as well as its decay, staged in the 

transi. The materiality of stone simultaneously evokes permanence in a notoriously 

difficult medium.  Historian of science Pamela H. Smith underscores the importance of 

materiality by proposing an “artisanal epistemology,” positing that artisans experienced 

and understood nature through the manipulation of natural materials and processes of 

transformation, transmutation, and decay.49 Primary knowledge could only occur with a 

“bodily encounter” with material. The natural matter not only of artisanal materials, but 

also of the human body itself—both the memorialized deceased body and that of the 

viewer—are simultaneously evoked in transi tombs and represent a form of knowledge 

conveyed in the making and viewing of a stone corpse.   

Images of a corpse initiate thoughts not only about the process of death, but also 

about the lineage of mortality. Noting that the first recorded death within the Judeo-

Christian tradition is that of Abel, Saint John Chrysostom, (c. 349–407), Archbishop of 

Constantinople, asserted that any depiction of death harkens back to the events and 

impacts of that first murder. Abel’s death appeared in illustrated manuscripts for 

centuries, including Byzantine works that introduce Abel’s soul as a resuscitated corpse 

                                                           
49 Smith, “Art, Science, and Visual Culture,” 95–96. 

 



45 
 

that speaks directly to God.50 The extensive importance of Abel’s murder suggests an 

ongoing struggle to confront and understand the profundity of death. As Joseph Koerner 

summarizes:  

For Chrysostom, the vision of Abel's cadaver makes of death a spectacle that 

occupies all the senses. Everything about the corpse is significant or emblematic: 

God showed what death is, how heavy, bitter, and hostile. Adam learned this not 

only through the first sight of death, but also through all that happened after: 

through the foul smell of the corpse, through the pus which oozed from it, through 

the ashes into which it was transformed, and through all the circumstances which 

followed the burial.51  

The importance of involving the senses in depictions of death is underscored through 

tomb sculpture, which appeals to tactile, visual, and in recognition of the density of stone, 

weight or pressure sense, as well as scale. In addition, Eve’s reaction to the viewing of 

Abel’s corpse became associated typologically with the response of the Mary to the 

presentation of Christ’s crucified body. Beyond the shared grief of both mothers, the 

commonalities between Christ and Abel as victims of murderous plots shared an 

additional motif of both men as innocent sufferers and shepherds.  

Reactions to Abel’s corpse as a representation of the collective death of 

humankind was echoed by the sentiments of modern-day theorists.  Forms of linguistic or 

verbal associations act as bridges to bygone eras, complete with a realization of ongoing 

emotions, fears, and beliefs. This process, which Mikhail Bakhtin referred to a cross-link 

among “speech acts,” links verbal language and visual cues, the result of which positions 

                                                           
50 For more information on early images of Abel’s corpse and Cain’s murderous act, see Maria 

Evangelatou, “Word and Image in the ‘Sacra Parallela’: Codex Parisinus Graecus 923” (Washington, DC: 

Dumbarton Oaks Papers 62, 2008), 147–50. 

 
51 See Joseph Leo Koerner, “The Mortification of the Image: Death as a Hermeneutic in Hans 

Baldung Grien,” Representations, no. 10 (Spring, 1985): 52–101, esp. 53. 

 



46 
 

the artist as a creator or sender of an ongoing communicative act, one that transverses 

time.52 Niklas Luhmann advanced this claim by noting the experience of life itself is a 

shared autopoietic system of social cognition, in which human beings’ responses are 

grounded in former communicative messages.53 Additionally, Bakhtin asserted that 

individual images do not exist on their own visual merits, but are instead imbued with 

meaning only through their association with earlier creations and dialogues.54 Similarly, 

it can be surmised that a viewer is engaged in both outright and inner dialogue with a 

particular utterance, be that of a work of art or speech: 

Dialogism in contrast recognises the multiplicity of perspectives and voices. It is 

also referred to as ‘double-voiced’ or ‘multi-voiced’. It is a ‘principle’ which can 

become the main referent of a particular aesthetic field. … Discourse does not 

logically unfold (as in analytical philosophy), but rather, interacts. A dialogical 

work constantly engages with and is informed by other works and voices, and 

seeks to alter or inform it. The dialogical word is always in an intense relationship 

with another’s word, being addressed to a listener and anticipating a response.55  

This relationship, originally applied to texts and literary analysis, can be cross-applied to 

art historical research, particularly to the application of images with robust typologies and 

recognition, such as the death of Abel and the theological implications of his corpse and 

its burial. Through Abel’s murder and burial, humankind was tethered to the experiences 

of Adam and to the inherent nature of death as an ontological mainstay, which Bakhtin 

                                                           
52 See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 2nd ed., eds. Caryl Emerson and 

Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin, TX,: University of Texas Press, 1986). 

 
53 See David Seidl, “Luhmann’s Theory of Autopoietic Social Systems,” Munich Business 

Research 2004-2 (Munich: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 2004), 1–28, esp. 7. 

 
54 Linda M. Park-Fuller, “VOICES: Bakhtin’s Heteroglossia and Polyphony, and the Performance 

of Narrative Literature,” Literature in Performance 7 (1986): 1–12.  

 
55 See Andrew Robinson, “In Theory: Bakhtin: Dialogism, Polyphony and Heteroglossia,” 

accessed September 4, 2018,  http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakhtin-1/. 

 



47 
 

identified as being an example of a shared societal consciousness. The same commonality 

with images and actions is present in the positioning of transi as the inevitable and mutual 

destiny of humankind.  

Bakhtin observed similarly that “consciousness is in fact that commentary which 

every adult human being brings to bear on every instance of his behavior, and achieves its 

final realization in a work of art.”56 This image of the artist as a contributor to an ongoing 

formation of consciousness and as an arbiter for human behavior was captured in 

Bakhtin’s essay Art and Answerability, in which he posits that “[a]rt and life are not one 

but they must become united in myself—in the unit of my answerability.”57 This act of 

answerability is for Bakhtin a nexus of thought between art and the viewer, in which a 

viewer does not see art as an extension of the self, but instead as an invitation to grapple 

with larger meanings, ongoing dialogues, and a lineage of interpretations. This process 

ultimately holds the viewer as responsible with the ongoing guilt or associations that are 

exemplified by a piece of art’s larger claims.58 Those claims, particularly in reference to 

death, connect the viewer to earlier experiences of dying. As Joseph Koerner 

summarizes: “Everything about the corpse is significant or emblematic… In the 

gruesome corruption of the body, the living can read their fate. The corpse is there to 

mirror the living and to mediate a message applicable to all: ‘Hodie mihi cras tibi’ 

                                                           
56 Kurt Eisen, “Novelization and the Drama of Consciousness in ‘Strange Interlude,’” The Eugene 

O'Neill Review 14, no. 1 (1990): 39–46. 

 
57 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, eds.  Michael Holquist 

and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom (Austin, TX: University of Texas 

Press, 1990), 2. 

 
58 For additional explanations of the vital role of the viewer and how consciousness emerges as 

both a byproduct of and inspiration for art, see the Bahktin, Art and Answerability, 1990, particularly 

“Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity (ca. 1920–1923),” 4-256, especially pages 5-9.  

 



48 
 

(Today me, tomorrow you),” a message similarly summarized in the Chichele’s epitaph.59 

In this way, the presence of a corpse was a memento mori as well as an inspiration for a 

change of earthly behavior, ultimately serving as a reminder of mortality and immortality 

simultaneously. This finding was only intensified in relation to transi sculptures, in which 

a corpse is presented through sculpture in lurid detail and often to scale in three 

dimensions, occupying the same space as the viewer.  

This association allows the viewer to see Abel’s death as the origin for 

humankind’s mortality and Cain’s consternation about a corpse as the prelude to the 

emergent quagmire of how viewers can envision their own eventual death. Even more, 

images of death may force a consideration of the position of the body and soul at the end 

of time, what Koerner refers to as the “second death” in again invoking Saint John 

Chyrsostom: “In order for the distinction between illusion and reality to be erased, human 

history (which began with the Fall) must end, so that all souls and all works can be 

judged as a self-contained and readable whole, divorced from the shifting disguises of the 

temporal world.”60 This shift in the temporal world substantiates a suggestion that images 

of death and body are layered with historical meaning, including a flattening of time and 

erasure of hardened temporal boundaries. 

The very nature and meaning of death and resurrection were under constant 

debate and scrutiny throughout the late Medieval era, in which a corpse was assumed to 

be neither fully living nor fully dead. As Eamon Duffy summarizes, the emphasis on the 

                                                           
59 See Joseph Leo Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 1993), at 275.  

 
60 Koerner, Mortification of the Image, 52. 

 



49 
 

corruption of the flesh was not perceived as being in any sense “opposed to the salvation 

of the soul. … Its function was spiritual, to bring home to the spectator the reality of his 

own mortality, and thereby to bring him to a sense of the urgency of his need for 

conversion.”61 The image of Christ as a fully resurrected person not only suggested a 

repudiation of sin, but also a complete reversal of death as opposed to a soul being in a 

state of perpetual limbo. To this point, Nancy Caciola posits an intriguing view of death, 

one that focuses on the constant transitory and fluid nature of death and a corpse: 

“Medieval conceptions of death were fluid. … In doctrinal terms, the body awaited 

resurrection even as it decayed, while the soul entered one realm tripartite afterlife.”62 A 

corpse was therefore in ambiguous liminal territory, placed on a spectrum that was 

somewhere between a world of an afterlife and an earthly plane. Even more, a corpse 

represented a conduit between life and a non-terrestrial dimension, a world that was 

connected to both the land of the living and the dead.  

The representation of a corpse, particularly one that was in such an advanced state 

of decomposition as a transi figure, was easily interpreted as straddling different worlds, 

uncertain as to its eventual destination. The transi harkened back to the collective death 

of humankind, an ongoing re-appropriation of Abel’s corpse.  Conversely, images of 

                                                           
61 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, 2nd ed. 

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 307. 

 
62 Caciola continues by noting that “A person could die a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ death; one could 

undergo a temporary or a more permanent death; and one could die a partial that is, a death of the 

personality without a death of the or vice versa Patrick Geary has defined the dead in the [Medieval] Ages 

as an ‘age class’ this neatly encapsulates the social procity between the living and the dead, and the 

continued influence that the latter exerted over the former throughout society. Intimacy between the living 

and the dead was because death was not envisaged as a full extinguishing of body or spirit.” See Nancy 

Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture,” Past & Present 152, no. 1 (1996): 3–45, at 

7.  

 



50 
 

effigies like Chichele’s portrayed the dead as still caught in the exuberance of life, often 

as youthful and full of earthly vitality, usually donning the recognizable costume 

indicative of social status and comfort. The link between the corpse and the image of an 

apparently living person, peculiar to transi tombs, suggests a tethering of the two entities 

that remain supposedly distinct and differentiated. Chichele’s defense of orthodoxy in a 

moment when certain aspects of it matter and its meaning are under siege are 

repositioned in his transi, a visual reminder of the shifting consubstantiation of decaying 

and living flesh, a motif reaffirmed in the celebration of the transubstantiated host.  It 

would only be through the resurrection of the body that these bodies could hope to be 

fully and completely integrated into a greater whole, while simultaneously becoming part 

of the larger body of a collective Resurrected Christ.  

Koerner provides some concluding points for this discussion by noting how the 

presentation of a corpse itself—or in the case of transi and effigy tombs, a representation 

of the dead body—suggests unique and psychological reactions to dying:  

When we turn now to the representation of the corpse in art, death transforms the 

body into a sign that is directed toward the gaze of the living; and this spectacle, 

the cadaver, mediates certain fundamental knowledge about the nature of our 

postlapsarian existence that would otherwise be inaccessible. It is the sight of the 

corpse that enables us to regard life in its proper relation to death.63 

In the case of some transi tombs, designs were completed, and tombs were constructed 

prior to a person’s death, as was the case with Chichele’s tomb. In this way, the 

memorialized were forced to consider their own mortality, and in the case of transi 

tombs, would have to contemplate an image of their own rotting corpse. It can be 

contended, however, that it is through an encounter with a corpse that the living begin to 

                                                           
63 Koerner, Mortification of the Image, 53. 



51 
 

understand the complexities of the dying process, along with hopes for eventual Christian 

immortality. In the case of Henry Chichele, this resurrection would hopefully entail a 

personal conflation with the hierarchal strata of saints and angelic orders—carefully 

rendered in stone around his tomb—that he might eventually encounter. 

  



52 
 

CHAPTER 3: 

A GENDERED RESPONSE TO TRANSI TOMBS THROUGH  

A CONSIDERATION OF ALICE DE LA POLE  

 

An Overview of the Tomb of Alice de la Pole 

  Alice de la Pole (née, Chaucer) was buried in 1475 in Ewelme where she had 

been born in 1404, the site of a small village in the rolling hills of south Oxfordshire. 

This location would scarcely be considered as a site for visiting pilgrims, verifiably 

different than Canterbury Cathedral where her grandfather, the famed poet and author of 

the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400), was buried in the same nave 

occupied by the tomb of Henry Chichele. Although Geoffrey Chaucer had died four years 

before Alice was born, his literary legacy was well established by the time of her birth. 

As the only child of Thomas Chaucer (1367–1434) and Matilda Burghersh (1382–1436) 

Alice was raised within a period of everchanging political conflicts, events which only 

intensified as her father became Speaker of the House of Commons on three different 

occasions from 1411 to 1426.1 This position placed Alice under immediate public 

scrutiny, a situation that intensified throughout her subsequent marriages.2 Her position 

within England was not only tied to her family’s political prowess, but also to her 

family’s emerging role within the Church before the emergence of reformists such as 

John Wycliffe. Despite the possible political opportunities afforded by later 

developments, including her son John becoming brother-in-law of two kings, Edward IV 

(1442–1483) and Richard III (1452–1485). Alice would not remarry after her third 

                                                           
1 See Rowena E. Archer, “Alice Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk (c.1404–1475),” Oxford Dictionary 

of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 

 
2 Marjorie Anderson, “Alice Chaucer and her Husbands,” PMLA 60, no. 1 (1945): 24–47, esp. 24–

25. 



53 
 

husband’s murder, possibly taking a vow of chastity until her death. Aged about seventy-

one, she died in May or June of 1475, opting to be buried at Saint Mary’s away from her 

last husband and declaring her own self-fashioning, where she asserted her achievements 

and faith, reversing the trajectory of paternal familial allegiance, reposition herself and 

her marital relations outside of the standard role of the male figures in her life aside from 

her father buried nearby.3  

  Alice’s transi tomb is an opportunity to consider the formation of a gendered 

approach to death and memorial within the reformist period of the late fifteenth century. 

Much of Alice’s initial formal identity was defined by the status of the male figures in her 

family—a series of conventions that she would make efforts to disrupt with her tomb as a 

culminating statement about her own agency as a formidable female political figure. 

Realizing that the figure of Death has consistently been gendered as male,4 the 

implications of Alice’s relation to mortality are fundamentally different from what we 

presume in the tomb of a man, and therefore pose unique implications for interpreting art 

from the medieval era, including popularized responses to corporeality and emerging 

beliefs about the postmortem experience of the soul. 

Alice’s life was a succession of situations that were made more unique as a 

woman ever-poised to navigate the changing socio-political structures in England. 

                                                           
3 Ibid., 37–41. 
 
4 With a lack of facial or anatomical references, the gendered nature of Death is difficult to 

determine, despite the consistent references, particularly in English and German art of this period, to a male 

identity. See Karl Siegfried Guthke, The Gender of Death: A Cultural History in Art and Literature 

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7–14. Outside of gendered attire, there appears to be little 

reason to assume a male identity for the character of Death. Also, although the dark cloak often associated 

with Death is not a gendered piece of clothing, the hefty scythe that Death carries was often associated with 

male field workers.  

 



54 
 

Eventually titled as the Countess of Suffolk and later the Duchess of Suffolk, she was 

married in 1415 to Sir John Phelip (1380–1415), who died after they had been married 

for only one month; Alice had just reached the age of maturity of eleven years at the 

onset of their marriage.  Political arrangements would continue with her marriage in 1421 

to her second husband, Thomas Montague (1388–1428). Montague was already a 

widower by the time that he married Alice and had been entitled as the Fourth Earl of 

Salisbury. He had become known as an experienced military commander in France, but 

on October 27, 1428, he was struck with flying debris from a cannonball following an 

attack at Orléans. Suffering a mortal wound to the face, he died a week later.5 Upon his 

death, Alice became a nobleman's widow and the Countess of Salisbury. She was 

subsequently made the supervisor of her husband’s will, being the executrix of half of his 

material goods, including gold, jewelry, metal plate, and the net-revenues of his 

properties in Normandy, leaving Alice in a uniquely powerful societal and economic 

position.6 Along with her inheritance, she was becoming increasingly involved with 

England’s military efforts in France. In fact, it was through military connections of her 

former husband that Alice would meet her third and final husband, William de la Pole, 

                                                           
5 For more information on the political campaigns and life of Thomas Montague, particularly in 

relation to his military campaigns, see John A. Wagner, Encyclopedia of the Hundred Years War 

(Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006). 

 
6 Understanding the societal position of women and the uniqueness of Alice’s case in the Medieval 

period is a complex undertaking but references can be better understood by consulting Carol M. Meale, 

“Reading Women’s Culture in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Alice Chaucer,” in Mediaevalitas: 

Reading the Middle Ages, eds. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Woodridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 81–

101.  

 



55 
 

the First Duke of Suffolk (1396–1450), who became the commander of Montague’s 

troops in France at the point of his death.7  

 Ultimately, William would have the greatest impact on Alice’s presence in 

English political circles, rivaled only by the paternal influence that had accompanied her 

rise to prominence.  The couple’s only child John was born on September 27, 1442, but 

by this time Alice had achieved social standing outside of her familial relations due to 

her own growing political and social accomplishments. She remained active in 

governmental affairs throughout her life, becoming involved in events with both the 

Houses of York and Lancaster during the War of the Roses, ultimately establishing her 

position with the winning side of Lancaster.8 She was granted Garter robes in 1432 and 

then again in the years 1434–1436 and 1448–1449, one of the earliest women ever to be 

so honored.9 She had also been made a Marchioness of Suffolk as her husband was 

made a marquis on September 14, 1444. Later when sailing across the English Channel 

in 1450, the ship of William de la Pole was overtaken by rebellious English troops 

aboard the vessel Nicholas of the Tower, and after a mock trial he was executed by 

beheading; his remains were rowed to the cliffs of Dover and left on the shore. 10 

                                                           
7 For more information on William de la Pole and his family, see Edgar Trevor Williams and 

Christine Stephanie Nicholls, eds., The Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University 

Press, 1981), 261–62.  

 
8 Both William and Alice de la Pole served significant roles during the War of the Roses, an 

overview of their allegiances and positions is recorded and set into historical context in Mathew Lewis, The 

Wars of the Roses: The Key Players in the Struggle for Supremacy (Strand, UK: Amberly Publishing, 

2015). It is worthwhile to note that Lewis refers to William de la Pole in the chapter about him as “The 

Most Despised Man in England.”  

 
9 See Simon Harrison, Alice Chaucer: A Survivor in Hard Times (Windsor, UK: Archives of the 

College of Saint George of Windsor Castle, 2014). 

 
10 See Roger Virgoe, “The Death of William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk,” Bulletin of the John 

Rylands Library 47 (1965): 489–502. 

 



56 
 

Subsequent funerary efforts were overseen by Alice, who moved his body from 

Wingfield, its original burial spot, to the Charterhouse at Hull, as had been requested in 

his will. 11 Alice de la Pole’s tomb presents very different characteristics than the tomb 

of Henry Chichele—if not the tombs of most men— before it. Saint Mary’s Church, a 

small building where Alice would have her tomb erected, was founded in Ewelme 

alongside other educational and philanthropic institutions (figure 3.1).12 The original 

medieval plan of the grounds included three principle components: the church and 

chantry chapel, the almshouse quadrangle and surrounding gardens, and a series of 

academic buildings, including the grammar school. Saint Mary’s Church is comprised of 

one central nave, as well as a north and south aisle. The church’s cloister is surrounded 

by thirteen cottages that were built as residences for poor men, with additional 

residences surrounding the hospital as well as an open court. The most dominant part of 

the compound, however, is the church with its chantry chapel, situated at the highest 

point overlooking the remainder of grounds.  

 Alice’s tomb is often noted as the central highlight of Saint Mary’s Church, if not 

of the village of Ewelme itself.13 It is constructed of alabaster, a rarity for large-scale 

construction in England during this period that was used primarily for small devotional 

objects.14 The visual impact of the alabaster is also qualitatively different than marble, 

                                                           
11 See Karen Karen Stöber “The Burial Preferences of Monastic Patrons in the Later Middle 

Ages.” In Late Medieval Monasteries and their Patrons: England and Wales, c. 1300-1540 (Martlesham, 

UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), 112–46 esp. 135; 153n.  

 
12 Ibid., 118.  

 
13 M. Prister-Crutwell, “Ewelme: A Romantic Village, Its Past and Present, its People and its 

History,” accessed December 21, 2015, http://www.fordsfarm.co.uk/History-of-Ewelme.html.  

 
14 Paul Williamson, Object of Devotion: Medieval English Alabaster Sculpture from the Victoria 

and Albert Museum (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 2011).  



57 
 

with “the translucence of the alabaster conveying a smoother, more delicate and, 

consequently, less tortuously macabre spirit.”15 Alice’s tomb is located in the Chapel of 

Saint John, an addition to the main nave of the church that was built sometime after 

1437.16 The tomb is accessible from both the back and side of the chapel and is situated 

at the corner of the chapel’s main altar (figure 3.2). It had been built in conjunction with 

the creation of the nearby hospital, likely related to the medical needs of patients 

residing at the almshouse. The chapel is located under an open timber ceiling, a 

substantially molded construction of wooden beams with a series of shield-bearing 

angels carved into each intersection.  

 The nearby walls are lavishly covered in over one hundred repetitions of IHS, a 

Greek variation of the Holy Name of Jesus, an oft-used Gothic monogram.17 The pattern 

is repeated consistently throughout the entirety of the chapel in gold, red, and black 

letters against a white background (figure 3.3).  On the tomb canopy, small carved 

angels bear shields with each corner section inter-spliced with the same monogram, 

which appears along the walls and the overhead beams and as part of each ceiling panel. 

More than mere decoration, the intoning and repeated referencing of Christ’s name was 

assumed to serve a mystical function, with immediate and eschatological implications. 

                                                           
 

15 Pamela Margaret King, “Contexts of the Cadaver Tomb in Fifteenth Century England,” (PhD 

diss., University of York, 1987), 74. For additional information on the uses of alabaster, see Kim Woods, 

Cut in Alabaster: A Material of Sculpture and Its European Traditions 1330-1530 (London: Harvey Miller 

Publishers, 2018). 

 
16 See John A. A. Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme: Life, Devotion, and Architecture in a 

Fifteenth-century Almshouse (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 49. 

  
17 For more on the monogram of Christ, see Alva William Steffler, Symbols of the Christian Faith 

(Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002). 

 



58 
 

The monogram reflects perceptions of the theological meaning and role of Christ’s 

name. Its origin may be based on biblical verses, primarily Philippians 2:9, “A name 

which is above all names: That in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those 

that are in heaven, on earth and under earth,” and Acts 4:12, “For there is no other name 

under heaven given to men whereby we may be saved, everyone that shall call upon the 

name of the Lord shall be saved.”18 The monograms were seen in the Medieval period as 

visual extensions of the Mass and the Eucharist in particular,19 and act as visual 

backdrops of both the liturgy and Alice’s tomb.   

The importance of accessibility and the relationship between the viewer and these 

objects forms a central part of this investigation. As David Areford explains, accessibility 

to images and the viewers’ reactions to them change not only the perception of a work, 

but also its very function.20 Granted, Areford was originally noting these facets in the 

context of print culture in both northern and southern Europe. However, that same 

questions of accessibility, and of a simultaneously private and shared public experience, 

are of vital importance in consideration of transi tombs, as the overwhelming majority of 

tombs assume viewership as an inherently important aspect of their design as objects 

occupying space to be engaged with and experienced. Alina Payne summarizes this state 

                                                           
18 Biblical references from King James Bible (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1996). 

19 See John O'Brien, A History of the Mass and its Ceremonies in the Eastern and Western Church 

(New York: Catholic Publication Society, 1879), 156; Laurent Adamowicz, “Religious Symbols: ‘IHS’ Son 

of ‘IOS’ the Carpenter,” The Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association, Inc. 60, 2 (2007):77–

83, esp. 79. 

20 David Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe (New York: 

Ashgate, 2010). For additional explanation as to how images and their place within the public sphere 

changed course throughout the late Medieval period, see David S. Areford, Nina Rowe, and Sandra 

Hindman. eds., Excavating the Medieval Image: Manuscripts, Artists, Audiences, Essays in Honor of 

Sandra Hindman (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Pub. Limited, 2004). 

 



59 
 

as a half-way point between the experience of objects with architecture, what is called 

Kleinarchitektur (small architecture).21 The public accessibility of a memorial precipitate 

inevitable applications to mortality as a central theme. Christine M. Boeckl notes this 

conclusion by illustrating a difference between twenty-first century versus Early Modern 

depictions of death. Primarily, variations between the eras emerge, she argues, based on 

the public nature of the earlier artistic works.22 Boeckl’s work, originally focusing on 

images of the Black Death, can be expanded to other examples of the public nature of 

images of mass death and the important social role of memorials.  

Accordingly, these tomb memorials, like that of Alice de la Pole (figure 3.4) and 

Henry Chichele—both focal points in their respective churches—were not meant to be 

viewed in private for personal reflection alone, but as the public performance of mortality 

and the liturgy. Epitaphs seemingly being uttered by the dead are spoken directly to the 

living in this public and liturgical setting. Similar to the case with other images, this 

discourse establishes “a unique longstanding devotional impulse to interact with the 

image.”23 This association among viewership, dialogue, and meaning underscores what 

Areford referred to as a work’s unique quality, in this case, one that is singularly situated 

to the public function of memorials. With this finding in mind, it is worth considering 

how Alice’s tomb problematizes these images of death and remembrance. Images in 

Alice de la Pole’s tomb, particularly the paintings of the Annunciation and Mary 

                                                           
21 Alina Payne, “Materiality, Crafting, and Scale in Renaissance Architecture,” Oxford Art Journal 

32, no. 1 (2009): 365–86. 

 
22 Christine M. Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology (Kirksville, 

MO: Truman State University Press, 2000). 

 
23 Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image, 92.  

 



60 
 

Magdalen above her transi, appear to her as if in a vision, reenacting and reaffirming the 

tradition of mysticism among holy laywomen, a hallmark of the late medieval period that 

reified the importance of vision as vital to religious experiences.24  

The setting of Alice’s tomb further enhances this experience by alluding to a 

longitudinal experience of death, one grounded in a familial legacy linked to numerous 

local and national events and developments.  The coffins of Alice’s parents are located 

in the same chapel in a shallower relief sarcophagus, complete with two brass memorial 

plaques featuring their likenesses (figure 3.5).25 Thomas’ family’s crest of a unicorn is at 

his feet, with his wife’s family represented by the stylized Burghersh lion. While the 

representation of Thomas is wearing a full suit of armor, including a helmet, sword and 

scabbard, his wife’s image is adorned in a simple mantle, veil, and wimple.26 The slab 

and tomb are made of marble, and includes a coat of arms in each of the four corners. 

The sides of the tomb are covered with a series of eleven Gothic arches, two engraved 

shields placed below the apogee of each arch, with the exception of a blank arch at the 

head of the sarcophagus (figure 3.6). The heraldic symbols trace the lineage of the 

                                                           
24 See Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay, Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary 

Perspectives on Sight (New York: Routledge, 2013), 38–40; also, Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and 

Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California 

Press: 1988). 

 
25 The Chaucer family tomb and heraldic shields are discussed in E. A. Greening Lamborn, “The 

Arms on the Chaucer Tomb at Ewelme with a Note on the Early Manorial History of the Parish,” 

Oxoniensia 1 (1940): 78–93.  

 
26 An original description of the tomb from the accompanying church record reads: “Thomas 

Chaucer, the last heire male of the Chaucers, and owner of Ewhelme and Donnington Castle, the 

inheritance of the Chaucers, lieth buried in a black marble tombe in a faire Chappell in the parish church of 

Ewhelme, in the south side of the Quier,” with a small epitaph bearing the names of both Thomas and 

Matilda Chaucer, as well as their respective death dates. See William Thynne, The Workes of Geffray 

Chaucer Newly Printed, with Dyuers Workes Which were Neuer in Print Before, and etc., ed. Brian Tukem 

(London: Thomas Godfray, 1532), ff. xiii–ccclxxxiii. 

 



61 
 

Chaucer family across multiple centuries, including relations among four generations.27 

The Chaucer tomb and engravings were likely completed as part of the chapel in 1438, 

coinciding with the licensing of the Church’s hospital wing. 28 

As with Henry Chichele’s tomb, this inclusion of a political dynasty extends the 

reach and impact of the memorial across the space it occupies. Alice’s heritage was 

linked to the political aspirations and position of her father. Beyond serving as the 

Speaker of the House, Thomas Chaucer represented the county as a Member of 

Parliament for years and was privy to royal circles of influence.29 In particular, he was a 

relation of John of Gaunt (1340–1399), a leading church reformist and figure within the 

House of Plantagenet, a position which facilitated Chaucer’s rise to prominence, but 

which also created a political and public persona for Alice. Ultimately, Chaucer 

positioned his daughter as a likely recipient of his political status, securing her place 

within civic and religious circles, eventually resulting in the purchase of Donnington 

Castle in Berkshire for her and her progeny.30 Alice soon became an important figure 

throughout the south of England, clearly associated with her family’s ever-growing 

                                                           
27 The authenticity of the familial distinctions has been debated, with Greening Lamborn noting 

that the tomb is “representing one of the largest and most interesting collections of mediaeval coats to be 

found on any tomb in England, the arms on the Chaucer tomb at Ewelme have never been competently 

examined, so that the persons represented by them have been only partially, and sometimes incorrectly, 

identified. The most recent account of them, in the otherwise admirable notes on the church compiled by a 

late rector, is of little genealogical or heraldic value; and the account in the first volume of the Oxford 

Journal of Monumental Brasses is of no value at all: ‘Others to some faint meaning make pretence But 

Shadwell never deviates into sense.’” Lamborn, Arms on the Chaucer Tomb, 1.  

 
28 Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme, 49.  

 
29 See William Hunt, “Thomas Chaucer,” in Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 10, ed. 

Stephen Leslie (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1887), 167–68. 

 
30 The lineage and accession of Donnington Castle during and after Alice’s lifetime is fully 

described in Henry Godwin, “On Donnington Castle, Berkshire,” Archaeologia 44, no. 2 (1874): 459–79. 

 



62 
 

network and emergent wealth. This status resulted in her becoming well-sought after by 

suitors, eventually leading to three marriages and four betrothals.31  

Completed around 1475, soon after her death, it is likely that Alice’s alabaster tomb 

was repositioned within the chantry chapel, evidenced by the shortening of the tomb’s 

sides closest to the base of the lower canopy.32 The canopy of the tomb is constructed of a 

series of sculpted layers, which is then trifurcated into additional overlapping sections. 

Similar to Henry Chichele’s tomb, Alice’s tomb is comprised of three distinct sculpted 

strata: an elaborate sculpted canopy, effigy, and the transi, with a series of frescoes 

placed above the transi’s body at the feet and closed eyes. The paintings are difficult to 

ascertain by the standing viewer, being placed behind a complex latticework of columns, 

as they are designed instead as if to represent a simulated vision for the corpse or Alice’s 

ascending soul as its primary viewer.33 The tomb’s canopy includes a top stratum of 

geometric shapes of interlocking acanthus leaves above a series of quatrefoils. Finally, a 

trio of crown-wearing angels comprise each of the sections of the final, bottom layer. The 

top layers of the sculpted canopy include various heraldic and religious symbols, 

including gothic quatrefoils below a top layer of Tudor roses. This final image is 

particularly relevant to the lifetime of the duchess, as she was involved with the ongoing 

events of the War of the Roses, and her son had become a part of the Tudor dynasty.   

                                                           
31 Anderson, Alice Chaucer and her Husbands, 27–29.  
32 Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme, 192.  

 
33 Elizabeth Fowler posits that the placement of the columns is central for the viewer’s experience 

of the transi, requiring a position of kneeling, approaching the tomb as if in prayer. See Elizabeth Fowler, 

“The Duchess and the Cadaver: Doubling and Microarchitecture in Late Medieval Art, with Alice Chaucer 

and John Lydgate,” in Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion, eds. Walter Melion and Bart 

Ramakers (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 573–600.  

 



63 
 

Alice’s political ascendency and philanthropic dedication is underscored by 

ongoing changes in religious beliefs as reformists’ teachings took hold in England. Her 

tomb and achievements within Saint Mary’s Church and Ewelme are testament to these 

tenuous shifts. The duchess’ attire is complex and textured. The detail in her tomb invites 

contemplation of her social status and explicates the experience of women in the late 

medieval era by suggesting differences in self-fashioning and presentation compared to 

prominent men. She is wearing a coronet and robes commonly associated with women 

who had taken vows with the Church. Her adorned head rests on a pillow, carved with 

attention to the gaping of fabric at her neck and even to the tassels at the pillow’s edge. 

Above her head is elaborate tracery featuring ogee arches and lines of flowering plants 

and leaves, vines, and trefoil arches. She wears a wimple and veil under her headpiece, 

and a rosary is twisted around her belt, partly concealed by her robes at the right hand, 

hip pocket. Her feet lie atop a crouching lion, a possible heraldic reference to her 

matrilineal crest or to England itself,34 whose head rests on the right side of the effigy 

with the tail slightly wrapped around the left side. Despite her involvement in political 

and potentially military operations, no references are made to her associations and 

accomplishments during the War of the Roses or within the House of York. Conversely, a 

rose, decorated with red polychrome to resemble the emblem of the House of Lancaster, 

is placed at the opposing side of the effigy. 

Surrounding the tomb is a brass inscription, a nineteenth-century recreation of the 

original text, which had read: “Pray for the soul of the most serene princess Alice, 

                                                           
34 For information on the heraldic connection of lions with England, see Andrew Stewart 

Jamieson, Coats of Arms (Stroud, UK: Pitkin,1998), esp. 14–15.  

 



64 
 

Duchess of Suffolk, patron of this church and first founder of this almshouse, who died 

on 20th day of May in the year of Our Lord 1475, [Dominical letter A.]”35 Her husband is 

not mentioned here as a co-founder of the almshouse, and the meaning of the Dominical 

letter and its significance are unclear. The inscription does not include typical references 

to popularized late medieval epitaphs, such as that of Henry Chichele’s corpse poem, for 

example.  Like that of her parents, the duchess’ tomb incorporates an extensive 

presentation of familial heraldic heritage. These include references to the de la Pole, 

Chaucer, Burghersh, and Montague families, effectively representing all of Alice’s 

familial and spousal relations, with the exception of her first, short-lived marriage.36 As is 

a typical practice with most effigies of females, in comparison with popularized images 

of men, Alice’s tomb does not include allusions to soldiery, weaponry, or armor.37 

In seeking to understand how Alice’s tomb exceeds its function of memorializing 

her singular life, it is helpful to consider its various components as material 

performances, and as an object enmeshed in social relations and activating a socio-

                                                           
35 “Orate pro anima Serenissimae Principessae Aliciae Ducissae Suffolchiae, huius ecclesiae 

patronae, & prmae fundatricis huijus elemosynariae quae obtiit 20 die mensis Maij; anno Di. 1475, litera 

Dominicali A.” See Eleanor Prescott Hammon, Chaucer; A Bibliographical Manual (New York: The 

Macmillan Co, 1908), 25. 

 
36 In addition, eight heraldic symbols are presented on the side of the tomb, and include, at the 

south, four references to the de la Pole family. The heraldry of the Roet family, Alice’s uncle and aunt, are 

included. The shields are subdivided into one for the Montague, Monthermer, and Burghersh families, two 

for the Chaucers, and one referencing France and England.  The north side features four references to the 

de la Pole family, two combinations of the Roet and Chaucer families, one for the Burghersh family, and 

one recognizing the Montague, Monthermer and Mohun families. 

 
37 See Rachel Dressler, “Gender as Spectacle and Construct: The Gyvernay Effigies at St. Mary’s 

Church, Limington,” Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 1 (2008): 1–24, 

esp. 4–6.  

 



65 
 

communicative function. This importance of seeing works as extensions of their initial 

purpose is asserted by Arjun Appadurai, who noted that:  

Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that 

things have no meanings apart from those human transactions, attributions, and 

motivations endow them with, the anthropological problem is that this formal 

truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things.  For that, we 

have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their 

forms, their uses, their trajectories.  It is only through the analysis of these 

trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that 

enliven things.38 

By investigating the meaning of the social life of the object, viewers become active 

participants in both viewing and establishing ongoing and evolving meanings, as artifacts 

establish what Appadurai refers to as “the flow of social relations.”39 Malcolm Baker 

claims that an investigation into materiality itself is an inquiry into how materials 

substantiated and promoted ways of knowing, augmenting what Chris Gosden and 

Yvonne Marshall refer to as “the cultural biography of objects.”40  Social theorist Niklas 

Luhmann has explained how viewers become emmeshed in a social artistic experience—

like walking around a vivid transi tomb or reading a corpse poem by “exist[ing] within its 

environment, whether as artists who make artworks, or as recipients who observe them 

and perhaps produce communications about them.”41 This interaction of the image of the 

                                                           
38 Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge 

Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5. 

 
39 Ibid., 11.  

 
40 See Chris Gosden and Marshall Yvonne, “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” World 

Archaeology 31, no. 2 (1999): 169–78.  

 
41  Hans Van Maanen, “Niklas Luhmann’s System of Artistic Communications,” in How to Study 

Art Worlds: On the Societal Functioning of Aesthetic Values (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 

2009), 105–23; esp. 107. The foundation of communication and the explanation of art as being dialogic is 

specifically noted in Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 

2000), 10–12. 

 



66 
 

effigy with the viewer is a further exemplification of what Rachel Dressler posits as the 

sharing of vision and participation.42 In particular, she suggests that the viewer forms an 

inherently important link with the effigy through the memorial of the dead:  

For beholders, tomb effigies provided the occasion for the good work of prayers 

on another's behalf and for the contemplation of one's own death and the need for 

preparation. All who participated in devotional practices surrounding the 

medieval tomb forged a link between heaven and earth, and between the past, the 

lifetime of the deceased and her or his ancestors, and the future through the 

viewer's contemplation and prayer.43  

The effigy of Alice as the Duchess of Suffolk at the middle layer of the tomb, situated 

below approximately five feet of open air beneath the canopy (figure 3.7), invites such 

contemplation about how materiality and the durable presence of stone illustrates the 

permanent nature of the soul and the solidity of Alice’s ongoing public memorial.44 

Similar to the connection between materiality and its socio-communicative force, it is 

difficult to remove the emotional and psychological element of mourning and 

commemorating from the performative nature of memorials. That same process of 

reflection is part of what Baker referred to in his conclusions on the phenomenon of 

viewership, when he explained that the viewer considers the transformation of matter into 

art, contemplating how natural elements were fashioned into an image.45  

                                                           
42 Visions are tethered to the experiences of the senses throughout the medieval era. For more 

information on the sensory connection of images, see Jacqueline Jung, “The Tactile and the Visionary: 

Notes on the Place of Sculpture in the Medieval Religious Imagination,” in Looking Beyond: Visions, 

Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art and History, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Index of Christian 

Art, 2010), 203–40. 

 
43 Dressler, Gender as Spectacle and Construct, 1.  

 
44 For a consideration of the permanence of stone as emblematic of the nature of the soul and the 

function of effigies as public memorial see Catherine Maxwell, “Michael Field, Death, and the 

Effigy,” Word & Image 34, no. 1(2018): 31–39, esp. 31.  

 
45 For more information on the shared linked between materiality and viewership, see Malcolm 

Baker, “Epilogue: Making and Knowing, Then and Now,” in Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material 



67 
 

 Beyond theological or political aims and assertions of self-fashioning, tombs 

function within distinct confines of funerary objectives, charged with the possibility of 

creating reactions in the viewer. This process of viewing and engaging with tombs like 

Alice de la Pole’s and Henry Chichele’s is tethered to what Sigmund Freud alluded to as 

the connection between memory and grief, or Melancholie, the important function of 

mourning as parcel to understanding mortality.46 Ultimately, however, the past emerges 

like Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” whose gaze is affixed on historical ruin.47 

Memorials are a reconstitution of this path and of the notion of ruins, with tombs 

providing a sense of potential closure to destruction. David Eng and David Kazanjian 

summarize this process as “figuring the past as an object of melancholic longing which, 

unlike the object of mourning, will not assume a kind of fixity that enables its dis-

attachment from the ego. … [M]elancholia becomes a mechanism for maintaining a 

productive engagement with the past that weds the personal with the cultural.”48 Beyond 

this connection to grief rites and rituals of memorializing, tombs also facilitate a 

connection across time with the expectation of renewed life. In this way Alice de la 

                                                           
Culture of Empirical Knowledge, eds. Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook (Ann 

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 405–13. Although Baker’s work is primarily situated in the 

later eighteenth century, his explanation of the connection between materials and experiences is applicable 

to this analysis, as well as to the other aspects of the late Medieval period.  

 
46 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete 

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14 (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic 

Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works, eds. James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: 

The Hogarth Press, 1957), 237–58.  

 
47 See Andrew Benjamin, Walter Benjamin and History: Walter Benjamin Studies (London: 

Continuum International Publishing, 2005). For a summary of the role of history in understanding the role 

of art, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art 

(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).   

 
48 David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University 

of California Press, 2003), 448. 

 



68 
 

Pole’s tomb is both a memorial to her accomplished life and corporeal decay, as well as a 

reminder of her soul’s—and the viewer’s—aspirations for renewal and immortality. 

  



69 
 

Visions and Interactions: Materiality and Womanhood in Alice’s Tomb 

Alice and William de la Pole had together founded “God’s House,” Saint Mary’s 

almshouse in 1437, adjacent to the church.49 It was originally given its license under 

Henry VI, but did not start operation until twenty years after its licensure. The public role 

of almshouses was under revision during Alice’s lifetime, a situation affected by John 

Wycliffe’s writings about the mission of the Church in its instruction of belief toward the 

poor and the role of charitable giving. Almshouses had served the needs of the poor in 

England since at least 1054.50 The function of late medieval English almshouses had been 

tethered to a spirit of labor and devotion, in that they specifically were “to provide 

accommodations for poor men who had outlived their working life and were willing to 

submit to a cloistered, rigorous, devotional life.”51 The number of almshouses in England 

was slowly increasing during the period of its founding, as a rising amount of private 

donations and investments reflected a shift in public sentiment and philanthropic 

interest.52  

The Ewelme church, nearby hospital, and almshouse were initially built to house 

and care for the clergy and the poor.53 Primarily, the original intent of almshouses was to 

                                                           
49 Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme, 27–29.  

 
50 Eric Midwinter, The Development of Social Welfare in Britain (Buckingham, UK: Open 

University Press, 1994). 

 
51 Thomas Barrie, review of God’s House at Ewelme: Life, Devotion and Architecture in a 

Fifteenth-century Almshouse, by John Goodall, ed. Ian Hayward, APT Bulletin 33, no. 2 (2002): 77. 

  
52 John Goodall’s analysis of God’s House at Ewelme is one of the strongest studies of the site, 

including a rich amount of description on the physical details of the church. See John A. A. Goodall, God’s 

House at Ewelme: Life, Devotion, and Architecture in a Fifteenth-century Almshouse (Farnham, UK: 

Ashgate, 2001). 

 
53 Now after nearly six hundred years of operation, both almsmen and almswomen continue to 

administer the almshouse, with five people permanently residing in the almshouse cloister. For current 



70 
 

provide for the poor while decreasing the patron-devotee’s time in Purgatory through the 

performance of good works and prayer.54 God’s House was founded by Alice as a part of 

Church teachings concerning spiritual salvation and, fulfilling the chantry mission of 

almshouse, residents performed daily devotions as part of the requirements for their 

residency. This mission and function were “typical of hundreds of perpetual chantry 

foundations established in fifteenth-century England,” an operation that continued 

throughout subsequent decades.55  

Despite her pronounced philanthropic and political presence, the differences 

between Alice de la Pole’s memorial and that of renowned men in England are vast and 

significant as markers of political representations and self-fashionings. An examination 

of Alice’s tomb presents unique ways to understand the body as a confluence of gendered 

discourse, a suggestion of “body history,” well presented by Kathleen Canning who 

noted:  

[A]ll of those processes that mark the body through specific rituals and practices – 

punishment, torture, medicalised observations, sexuality and pleasure – denote 

bodies that represent ‘an uncontrollable, unpredictable threat to a regular, 

systematic mode of social organisation’. Positing a place for agency in the 

discursively constituted subject, … the body is not only marked by coercive 

forces, but is ‘internally lived, experienced and acted upon by the subject and the 

social collectivity.’56   

                                                           
information on the status of the church, almshouse and school, see “History of St. Mary’s Church, Ewelme: 

A Brief Introduction,” Friends of Ewelme Church, accessed on October 31, 2018, 

http://www.friendsofewelmechurch.co.uk/history/caring-for-the-village-people-from-the-cradle-to-the-

grave/.  

 
54 Barrie, Review of God’s House, 77. 

 
55 Goodall, God’s House, 2.  

 
56 Kathleen Canning, “The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender 

History,” Gender & History 11, no. 3 (2002): 499–513.  

 



71 
 

Alice de la Pole’s tomb represents a novel construction of gender that is atypical of the 

social organizational tropes and the representations of a gendered body that were 

popularized prior to its creation.  

Despite her extensive experience in political and civic matters, the duchess’ tomb 

is atypical of the glorification of a nationalistic and militaristic state that were common 

with representations of men, particularly with governmental or religious leaders such as 

Archbishop Henry Chichele. This combination of religious object and architecture 

emblematizes Kleinarchitektur, in which the sculpted facets of Alice’s tomb advance 

principles of memorialization, while underscoring a distinctly gendered approach to tomb 

construction. Her tomb can instead be tethered to the physicality of death and the 

association of womanhood with the sensual experiences of the divine. Beyond the shared 

focus on a detailed effigy and a complex canopy in both Alice’s and Henry’s tombs, as 

well as their reliance on stratifications and layers, insights can be gleaned by discussing 

differences between these two tombs, particularly in relation to gender. In order to better 

understand the social constructions of gender and gender difference, or at least the 

performance thereof, these constructs must be dismantled and examined through a larger 

consideration of dominant cultural, theological, and political ideologies. Feminist art 

historians Norma Broude and Mary Garrard suggest that current theorists should consider 

the impact of the exclusion of men in depictions of women.57 In most effigies of women, 

a reference to a spouse or the inclusion of a spousal effigy is common practice as a key 

                                                           
57 Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, eds., The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History 

(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); Geraldine A. Johnson, “Pictures Fit for a Queen: Peter Paul Reubens 

and the Marie de’ Medici Cycle,” in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After 

Postmodernism, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 

101–20, esp. 103–05. 



72 
 

aspect of identity construction. Notably, Alice’s tomb does not feature any references to 

her husbands’ military or wartime successes, nor are there allusions to her growing civic 

accomplishments. Her political achievements are posited as an extension of her 

religiosity, which is combined with occasional references to militaristic motifs. Her 

alabaster multi-tiered coronet and outfit, complete with emblems of Christianity and 

armor, denote a position of social, theological, and soldierly capital.  

Instead of the assortment of political leaders and heavenly strata of saints and 

archangels featured in Henry Chichele’s tomb, Alice’s tomb features myriad angels on a 

variety of plateaus and serving myriad functions, extending above her canopy and then 

unto the ceiling of the chancery chapel.  Near the top of the tomb, angels are presented 

in a position of prayer with their robes alternating in design across the lintel. Four 

wooden figures stand atop pinnacles that rise above the canopy on each side of the tomb, 

positioned in a conventional stance of praise or prayer (figure 3.8). Each figure is 

uniquely attired, with outfits ranging from feathers to cloth vestments to combinations of 

the two. Their hands are held in gestures that may indicate the holding of actual 

devotional objects. The position of their faces suggests that they are placed so that the 

remainder of the chapel would be within their line of vision. Atop the tomb, a series of 

wooden angels with shields line the interior of the chapel. These angels have fully 

enlarged wings, distinct facial features, flowing hair, robes covered with feathers, and 

gauntlets across their arms. Along the lintels, the angels are shown from the waist 

upward, with the lower half of the torso covered by a pronounced shield. Overhead, the 

angels are crowned and some are adorned with additional wings below their torsos, a 



73 
 

slight suggestion that the angels may be grouped into orders such as denominations, 

seraphim, or cherubim.58  

At the base of the plinths of the wooden angelic figures are a number of angels 

whose gestures appear to be undulating, as the position of each angel includes hand and 

arm gestures that are non-symmetrical or patterned. The costuming of each angel varies, 

including some angels wearing armor and others clerical vestments such as a monk’s 

robe, although the specific order is difficult to determine. These nine angels form the 

border of the canopy, with eyes looking downward toward the viewer and Alice de la 

Pole’s effigy. A complex series of angels are placed on the bottom tier of the tomb that 

surround her transi. A total of eight angels are positioned on either side of the tomb, their 

eyes looking forward, while holding heraldic shields and wearing liturgical gowns or 

armor, with some angels being crowned with simple tiaras. Their wings are some of the 

most detailed on the tomb, with individual feathers and mesh armor carved in relief. 

Beyond the costuming of the angels, bellicose overtones are not included in the 

remainder of the tomb, effectively synthesizing religious and militaristic depictions as a 

fundamental aspect of Alice’s memorial.  

The final set of angels are on the pillow of the effigy and surround the transi of 

the tomb. Unlike the angels on other strata, these angels are positioned with their limbs 

and torsos placed in active positions, even intersecting the pillow tassels and fabric. They 

wear full body amour, complete with individually gilded scales. Their wings, fully 

                                                           
58 Each of these varying ranks of angels, their physical descriptions, and the relegations of orders 

are described in Steven Chase, Angelic Spirituality: Medieval Perspectives on the Ways of Angels (Costa 

Mesa, CA: Paulist Press, 2002). For additional aspects the differing orders of angels, see Amy Gillette, 

“The Music of Angels in Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art,” Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and 

Architecture 6, no. 4 (2018): 26–78, esp. 32–39. 



74 
 

outstretched and surrounding their bodies, are positioned at the edges of the pillows, with 

their eyes turned toward Alice’s face, positioned to be holding Alice’s pillow aloft and 

seemingly communicating with her (figure 3.9).  Unlike the angels that surround Alice’s 

tomb, these figures appear to be accompanying and interacting with her at the point of 

death and beyond. They lean toward her face, support her pillow, and gesture upward. 

This same visual device is included in Henry’s Chichele’s tomb, which also features a 

grouping of angels at his feet who gesture toward a prayerbook as other angels kneel 

nearby.  

The iconography and distinctions of angelic orders had been well-advanced by the 

fifth century through the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in De Coelesti 

Hierarchia and continued to be a point of interest in the widespread writings of Saint 

Thomas Aquinas,59 whose public awareness became pronounced in the Early Modern 

period. Beyond a ranking of angels, this repeated grouping of angels suggests a re-

enactment of the Ars Moriendi.60 Written and popularized by 1450, artists and viewers 

throughout Europe would have been familiar with its details disseminated in illustrated 

pamphlets, especially during the social and religious upheavals of the late fifteenth 

century (figure 3.10). Contrary to the depictions of the Ars Moriendi, with demons 

grappling with angels over the ensuing journey of the deceased person’s soul, the angels 

of Alice’s tomb have already started on the spiritual journey as they chaperone her soul to 

                                                           
59 The role of angels and the variety of strata of angelic orders are well summarized in Chase, 

Angelic Spirituality, 26–29. For information on Aquinas, see Ralph M. McInerny, Selected Writings of 

Thomas Aquinas (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 841. 

 
60 For more information on the role of the Ars Moriendi in the Medieval period, see John 

Raymond Shinners, Medieval Popular Religion, 1000–1500: A Reader (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview 

Press, 1997), esp. 525– 35. 



75 
 

the afterlife. The host of demons has been replaced by a phalanx of angels who guide the 

spirit that has been released from the decaying flesh of the transi to the realm of a 

celestial and heavenly plane. Accompanying angels, themselves small in stature and 

slight in build, effortlessly lift the soul and the reconstituted corpus of the deceased, a 

reimagination of the physicality of the matter and weight of the newly unified soul and 

body.  The suggestion of mobility, well-presented through the sculpted fluttering wings 

of angels and garments of angels, depicts the upward and heavenly trajectory of the soul 

through a kinetic revitalization of the effigy.  

The inclusion of angels throughout the chapel and on Alice’s tomb is notable. 

Ranging from the relatively minute angels near her effigy to the sentinel angels at the top 

of her tomb to the sizable angels that hover overhead holding the monogram of Jesus 

Christ, there is a pervasive presence of angelic orders. Each figure seems to be associated 

with a specific tier or layer, as the design of angels on one level is not replicated in any 

other. Beyond the strata that are associated with transi tombs, the angels occupy disparate 

and unique echelons, resembling an ascendance that Alice’s soul might encounter at the 

Last Judgment. The use of angels as carriers for the soul is an ancient motif, but a 

variation in this depiction departs from earlier representations. In referencing popularized 

woodcuts from Ars Moriendi, Moshe Barash explains, “the saved soul's ascension, is 

usually portrayed as an angel holding a soul in the shape of a new born babe in his hand 

and carrying it to heaven.”61 In this case, Alice’s adult effigy is conflated with a newborn 

soul, being ushered to heaven through ranks of attending angels, reminding the viewer of 

                                                           
61 Moshe Barasch, “The Departing Soul: The Long Life of a Medieval Creation,” Artibus et 

Historiae 26, no. 52 (2005): 13–28, at 23.  



76 
 

a good death as afforded by the Ars Moriendi, while also suggesting the eventuality of 

salvation.  

Unlike the revitalization suggested by Alice’s effigy, her transi on the lowest level 

of the tomb is stripped of individualized references. The transi is almost completely nude, 

with one hand placed at her side and at the base of her waist (figure 3.11). No personal 

indicators of gender are included, with the exception of the noticeable presence of her 

breasts.  Her corpse is partly encased in a shroud that is tied at the head and feet. Alice's 

shriveled and desiccated transi is shown with slightly opened eyes staring upward at the 

ceiling of her sepulcher on which two murals appear. Above her half open eyes is a mural 

showing an image of the Annunciation (figure 3.12) and over her feet, John the Baptist 

and Mary Magdalene hover (figure 3.13). The hues of the murals are primarily gold, 

green, and red, with pronounced black outlines. Suitably for Alice’s tomb as an assertion 

of her importance and piety, both images feature prominent women in the holy story. 

They are singled out visually for the viewer and for the corpse itself in the repeated 

gesture of the finger-point: Gabriel interrupts the Virgin Mary from her prayerbook at the 

inception of Christ, and Saint John the Baptist points to the sacrificial lamb and in Mary 

Magdalen’s direction, signaling her privileged role in Christ’s sacrifice and then 

Resurrection. The transi’s eyes are positioned directly below the image of the Virgin 

Mary (figure 3.14), as if the first image made visible to Alice upon her soul’s ascension.  

The combination of both images of women suggests a trajectory that unites Alice 

and her Christian foremothers as agents in the foundation of the Church and the collective 

body of Christ, a gendered presentation of women awaiting the point of Resurrection. 

This association between women across time periods extends beyond a typological 



77 
 

interpretation to form a visual counter-action against dominant male focused discourse, 

presenting a shared gendered experience of marginalization alongside images of 

empowerment and societal recognition.62 Alice’s tomb itself acts as a visual counter-

action to dominant male paradigms, while also suggesting the unique path toward agency 

and power that was part of Alice’s social biography. For the viewer, Alice’s tomb is both 

a statement to the changing concepts of the soul and to the emergent possibilities of 

powerful women in the Early Modern period.  

Viewership of Alice’s Tomb in the Practice of Death: A Consideration of Gender 

 

During the late medieval era, the corpse was conceived as being only partially 

gendered, a state of ontological imbalance that was to be rectified during resurrection. 

This fragmentation is noted by Peter Diehl, who advocates conceiving of resurrection 

through the analogy of “beasts regurgitating their prey so that they can be made whole 

again at Last Judgment.”63 Transi tombs function in this same manner, with the decaying 

body associating with the vitality of the deceased through their memorial effigy. Bynum 

asserts that this belief was underscored by societal fears of biological processes, 

particularly in consideration of corporeal decomposition.64 The shifting ideologies 

concerning the presence of the body and function of the soul take on novel meanings in 

                                                           
62 For a discussion of images being used as references to longitudinal struggles for female 

empowerment, see Sonja. K. Foss, “Judy Chicago’s ‘The Dinner Party’: Empowering of Women’s Voice in 

Visual Art,” in Women Communicating: Studies of Women's Talk, eds. Barbara Bate and Anita Taylor 

(Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Pub. Corp., 1988), 9–26, esp. 18–20. 

 
63 See Peter D. Diehl, review of Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the 

Human Body in Medieval Religion, by Carolyne Walker Bynum. Comitatus: A Journal of Renaissance 

Studies 22, no. 1 (1991): 107–08. 

 
64 For more information on the gendered concept of the soul and the importance of corporal return, 

see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: 

Columbia University Press, 1995). 

 



78 
 

this era, especially in relation to gender distinctions made visible in art. The experience of 

death during this period was assumed to be potentially colored by gender difference, with 

religious experiences among women characterized in terms of bodily and metaphysical 

encounters and visions.65 These tensions are apparent in the construction of both effigies 

and transi tomb, with variations between men and women showcasing disparate meanings 

for the representation of death and remembrance.  

Bynum has noted that the position of women’s experiences in the late medieval 

period was one of heightened sensuality associated with corporeality. Her observations 

were linked to the experience of food and bodily fluids, particularly in relation to the 

Eucharist and to Mary’s milk, as well as to the shared sacrifice of blood, but the 

sensuality of the female body—as being both a source of and susceptible to temptation—

is also parcel to the same explanation. She argues that women had been associated with 

food and holy images, and assumed to understand “the opportunity of physicality” and 

union with God.66 The function of female genitalia, assumed to link only to reproduction 

or temptation, are offset by the presentation of Alice’s breasts. In the case of Alice’s 

transi, her breasts are viewable and pronounced, but her genitals are completely obscured 

by both hands and a shroud. Contrary to the transi of men, where similar poses of 

concealing the genitals—only partially covered with one hand, in the case of Henry 

Chichele— were typical throughout the medieval period, women’s breasts were 

                                                           
65 See additional information about the role of the body and senses in the Medieval Period in 

Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 31–47.  

 
66 Ibid., 6.   

 



79 
 

illustrative of a nurturing and nonsexual female.67 This depiction is reified in the case of 

the Virgin Mary with her milk being offered as a counterpart to Christ’s redeeming 

blood.68 Both genders were depicted in tomb sculpture as reenacting the great shame of 

original sin, but only women featured pronounced withering breasts, and women’s 

genitals were associated with Eve and temptation. Cultural historian Gail Hawkes has 

posited that the medieval view of female genitalia was to see it as an outward sign of 

anatomical and social incompleteness among females, substantiating claims that women 

were morally suspect, passive, and needy of spiritual guidance.69  

This demonstrative gesture of female shame was based on the Christian guilt 

associated with the Fall, as women were cast as temptresses who possessed a sexuality 

that was perceived as “a direct threat to the inherent moral supremacy of men.”70 Death 

itself was assumed to quell these inadequacies by removing the sexualized nature of 

females that were inherited from the legacy of Eve, and also by showing, as in Alice’s 

transi, female ‘wetness’ becoming dried out and asexualized with age.71 Death—that is, 

mortality—is also a consequence of the legacy of Eve in the first place, too. Further, as 

Bynum concludes, though flesh could be seen as male or female, there is medieval 

                                                           
67 See Elizabeth Bolman, “The Enigmatic Coptic Galaktotrophousa and the Cult of the Virgin 

Mary in Egypt,” in Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, ed. Maria 

Vassilaki (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 13–22. 

 
68 Willy Jansen and Grietje Dresen, “Fluid Matters: Gendering Holy Blood and Holy Milk,” in 

Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality, eds. Dick Houtman and Meyer Birgit (New York: 

Fordham University Press, 2012), 215–31.  

 
69 See Gail Hawkes, A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 

1996), 12. 

 
70 Ibid., 7; 14.  

 
71 Sander L. Gilman, Sexuality: An Illustrated History (New York: Wiley, 1989). 

 



80 
 

variation as to the nature of the soul, at times in line with ancient Greek thought, in which 

higher spirit is assumed to be male, while earthly body is female, while some 

conceptualization of the soul as a distinctly feminine entity can be found in both liturgy 

and literature by the middle of the twelfth century.72  Alice’s transi furthers these 

tensions, while also suggesting that the experience of death and resurrection might 

continue to be gendered, with variations of a shadow memory of the time of the Fall lying 

dormant, if not for Alice in resurrection then for viewers of the tomb from the time of the 

Fall continuing to affect women even after death until the Last Judgment.  

In Alice de la Pole’s sculpted tomb, as opposed to the painted murals above her 

corpse, there is also a sense of the visionary as leading the deceased in a transmigration 

of the soul—and the viewer to imagine that—in movement across the strata of the tomb 

suggested by the multiple tiers of angelic orders that adorn the canopy. Upon the 

resuscitation of the soul and its movement vertically up through the strata of transi, a 

resurrected Alice would first encounter images of the Annunciation. A painting of 

Gabriel and Mary hovering above her transi’s eyes, partially obscured from the viewer 

and acting as a vision awaiting her acknowledgment, would only be fully seen by Alice 

as her soul reversed the trajectory of her body’s entombment. The layers of her transi 

tomb suggest a literal progression, moving from the early confines of a grave upward 

toward levels of attentive angelic hosts. The four sentinel angels placed atop Alice’s tomb 

would serve two functions: both as guides for her soul’s aspirant resurrection and as 

                                                           
72 See Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo 

Steinberg,” Renaissance Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1986): 399–439. Bynum also suggests that the 

conceptualization of the female nature of the soul may simply be due to the linguistic classification of the 

feminized Latin term anima as an indicator for a human soul, regardless of the gender of the deceased 

person. 

 



81 
 

guardians for the soul itself, waiting in slumber until that final day. The addition of the 

monogram of Jesus Christ completes the trajectory of the soul progressing through layers 

toward immortality, returning from the grave with its decaying corporeality before being 

revived with human flesh to ultimately proceed toward the Divine. As also explored in 

the tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele, the layers appear to suggest transitory 

movement, with upward mobility across strata of heavenly presences. In both instances, 

the visual experience of the viewer and his or her ability to engage bodily with, and 

imagine entering into, the complex states and spheres presented in the tomb structures is 

intensified through the features of sculpture. The dimensionality and materiality of the 

unpainted alabaster—increasing in abstraction that way if without color—intensifies this 

effect of moving to the divine sphere where neither time nor color hold sway.   

The inability for a living person to fully experience or portray the act of dying or 

migration of the soul deepens the visual and visceral impact of encountering transi tombs 

in their full staging as Kleinarchitektur. Emergent beliefs about the presence of the Anti-

Christ, an upcoming Apocalypse preceding Final Judgment, and the near constant 

presence of plague and sporadic natural events paved the way for universal conclusions 

about the meaning of bodily death and its omnipresence folded into life, and vice versa, 

regardless of gender.73 Signs and symbols of the imminence of decay proliferated in the 

late medieval period, with artists attempting to showcase through tombs a suggestion of 

life through an effigy and its inevitable negation through the transi. In the case of transi 

tombs, Binski suggests that “the effigy functioned as ‘a simulacrum,’ a substitute, but one 

                                                           
73 See Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman, Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the 

Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 

 



82 
 

which not only replaced but powerfully erased the thing, the natural body, whose form it 

suggests in perpetuity, even as the natural body engaged in a process of decay below.”74 

Viewing an effigy would have prompted an imaginative association with the corpse.75 

The tomb was only a temporary and illusory container. Complicating this contention, the 

visual presence of a transi with the effigy allowed for a suggestion of decay and 

resurrection to occur simultaneously. We might say, then, that tomb is both simulacrum 

and temporal fulcrum in that respect.  

Ultimately, the question must be posed whether Death-as-corpse functions with 

any gender associated with it at all. Indeed, as Joseph Koerner has summarized:  

The dead body comes to haunt the living not only as an inert object of 

contemplation… but also as an animated being who installs himself in the midst 

of earthly society and mingles in [daily] affairs. The message of the Dance of 

Death, Mors monia aequat (Death makes everything equal), expresses itself in the 

featureless corpse.76  

Although Koerner was writing about the art of Hans Baldung Grien (1484–1545) during 

the Reformation in Germany, which feature a personified specter of Death, similar 

conclusions can be reached about memorial sculptures throughout much of Europe. Death 

became not only present in the unidentifiable visage of the transi, stripped of worldly 

accouterments and individualized achievements, but in the final sojourn across corporeal 

                                                           
74 Binski, Medieval Death, 149.  
 
75 Jessica Barker, “Stone and Bone: The Corpse, the Effigy, and the Viewer in Late-Medieval 

Tomb Sculpture,” in Revisiting the Monument: Fifty Years since Panofsky’s ‘Tomb Sculpture,’ eds. Ann 

Adams and Jessica Barker (London: The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2016), 113–36. 

 
76 Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, 258. 

 



83 
 

effigies, a journey that ends in the celestial visions suggested and incorporated in the 

memorial canopies of Henry Chichele and Alice de la Pole. 

Beyond allusions to presumed dialogue with viewers, the materiality of Alice’s tomb 

presents distinct impressions and the possibility of multiple conclusions. Transi were 

primarily constructed of stone, with accompanying elements such as funeral 

achievements made of wood, metal, leather, or fibers. Variations with effigies were also 

common, including differences in metal, stone, and occasionally jewels. Viewership was 

also affected by the presentation of innovative materials, particularly in regard to 

sculpture. As Christopher Wood explains, in the case of sculpture and winged altarpieces 

the viewer responds in a more experiential, tactile manner than when confronted by two-

dimensional painting.77 Unlike painting or a variety of other mediums, sculpture is 

materially and experientially exclusive in its demands, with the viewer able to engage a 

work visually but also in a tactile and kinetic manner. 78 The phenomenological reaction 

to sculpture is unusual in that it is fulfilling multiple functions, especially when linked to 

the presentation of verisimilitude, grounded in forms that link to dimensionality, 

physicality, and sensuality.. 

                                                           
77 See Christopher Wood, “Germany's Blind Renaissance,” in Infinite Boundaries: Order, 

Disorder, and Reorder in Early Modern German Culture, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 40, 

ed. Max Reinhart (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1998), 225–44. 

 
78 Both authors suggest that the experience of sculpture is grounded not only in its 

multidimensional qualities but in the iconography and cultural milieu that underscore the materials of its 

creation. See Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors, 27–49, and Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture,40–46. This 

point is extended by Baker, “Some Object Histories,” 119–34, esp. 120–22. See also Peter Dent, ed., 

Sculpture and Touch (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2014). 

 



84 
 

Moreover, temporality and visuality combine in sculpture. As Wood and Nagel note 

about artists working in the fifteenth century:  

An artist was now conceived for the first time as an author, an actor or founder, a 

legitimate point of origin for a painting or sculpture, or even a building. These 

artifacts were understood in the pre-modern period to have a double historicity: one 

might know that they were fabricated in the present or in the recent past but at the 

same time value them and use them as if they were very old things.79  

These findings from Wood and Nagel suggest that if we extrapolate to the case of transi 

tombs, the artists who made Henry or Alice’s tomb created a work of art whose point of 

origin was rooted in the date of its making with ancient and potentially non-extant 

prototypes, evoking the ancient past as ‘origin’ as well as present. These stone tombs 

might therefore reference the tomb of Abel, the sepulcher of Jesus itself, or both. This 

development suggests that history progressed not as a singular temporal construction, but 

instead as a fluid conceptual stream, one in which temporality was a constantly shifting 

entity that could be manipulated by the artist and invoked variously by viewers.80  

  This process also resulted in a reconsideration of the sharp division of time and 

instead included an interpretation of time as a much more malleable, if not potentially 

fabricated, thing. The past was reconstituted into a new character, incorporating elements 

of bygone instances into current day applications, while also suggesting possible 

applications for the future. This bridge across and through time extends in implications to 

the depictions of death, particularly with conflation of the dying with the living. This 

                                                           
79 Wood and Nagel, “Interventions,” 403–32; Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, & Culture in the 

Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), esp. 225–27, 236. 

 
80 Wood and Nagel reference Warburg in this discussion, ultimately suggesting that time is not 

only a social construct that varies in the response of the viewer, but also that time can be perceived in a 

non-linear manner without clear methods of regulation or operation.  

 



85 
 

conclusion echoes what Bynum would suggest is a reconsideration of the material body 

and spiritual resurrection, reflecting her contention that “dead is not only incorruptible 

but also alive.”81 Bynum asserts that the late medieval period was rife with alterations of 

dominant thoughts about the role of the resurrected body and revulsion over corporeal 

decay. Transi tombs emblematize this juxtaposition and duality, which is only intensified 

through the lens of societal responses to gender.  

 The tombs of Alice de la Pole and Henry Chichele established the longevity and 

linearity of memory. Unlike later images and works about entombment, such as the 

Fuggers’ relief epitaphs in Augsburg and Holbein’s painted Dead Christ in Basel, both to 

be discussed in the following chapters, transi tombs like that of Henry Chichele and Alice 

de la Pole were more literal, constructing images-as-simulacra of stages of the deceased 

person in distinct and clear reenactment of corporeal decay. Transi tombs disassembled 

and reconfigured these temporal distances not only in terms of life and death, but also 

regarding notions of resurrection and bodily, or material, reconstitution. The connection 

of transi tombs with the viewer suggested a rendering of death, while simultaneously 

ushering in a hopeful expectation for new life. This folding of time is apparent in both the 

tomb itself and through the act of seeing, allowing the viewer to bridge a chasm with the 

deceased person and to share a collective hope for resurrection. The shared experience of 

death provokes a sense of universality among multiple viewers. Yet in the same way that 

the tomb’s design lessened the temporal distance between life, death, and resurrection, 

                                                           
81 Bynum, Christian Materiality, 181.  



86 
 

the viewer was placed in a position to ponder the memory of the deceased, as well as her 

or his own eventual corporal demise. 



87 
 

CHAPTER 4: 

THE FUGGER CHAPEL AS A NEW CONCEPTUALIZATION OF TRANSI 

TOMBS 

 

Examination of Memorial Stones: The Fugger Epitaphs 

The transi tombs discussed in the previous chapters were composed of three-

dimensional, multi-tier forms carved fully in the round. In this chapter, we will consider 

instead tombs of transi carved only in relief on upright stone slabs, a pictorial means of 

depiction that required additional imagination to complete the visual message. In Saint 

Anna’s Church in Augsburg, Germany, four memorial stones or epitaphs commemorate 

one of the city’s (and indeed, Europe’s) most prominent banking families of the fifteenth 

and early sixteenth centuries, the Fuggers: namely, Jakob (1459–1525), Ulrich (1441–

1510), and Georg (1453–1506). Carved with reliefs showing transi corpses and biblical 

narratives we can understand these memorials as innovative variations developed from 

the transi tomb conventions, replacing the usual vertical structure of fully carved effigies, 

transi, and heavenly apparatus. The four identically shaped marble stones are set upright 

and curved at the top, situated around a niche in the apse behind the main altar of the 

church (figure 4.1). The two stone relief memorials to Ulrich and Georg are in the center 

of the wall and depict scenes of tombs in their lower halves—carved transi figures atop 

images of sarcophagi—with Ulrich’s featuring the Resurrection of Christ above the tomb 

and Georg’s showing Samson striding forcefully across the upper half in a battle against 

the Philistines. These are flanked on the left by the stone epitaph for Jakob, which depicts 

a collection of Italianate armor and soldiers, heraldic symbols, and putti, and on the right 

by a stone with the family coats of arms. This area of the church, known as the Fugger 

Chapel, was constructed between 1511 to 1518 and is one of the earliest Renaissance-



88 
 

style spaces north of the Alps, a style that would be important both as a marker of cultural 

prestige and wealth, and one appropriate for the growing ideologies of the Reformation.1 

The Fugger epitaphs and their placement in Saint Anna’s extend the analysis of 

earlier examples of monumental transi tombs into a different artistic geography, one that 

was equally a key focal point of shifting religious debates and concerns, a number of 

them in common. The rationale of studying tombs in England in conjunction with 

developments in Germany and the Swiss Republic in these ensuing chapters is thereby 

based on shared theological and philosophical landscapes, if differing in political 

structures. These regions also share a long cultural and intellectual heritage, with links 

among Europe’s leading humanists, and a deep connection through trade.2 Although 

ultimately culminating in a widespread socio-theological change, the growing reformist 

movement across continental Europe was at first heavily substantiated by the work of 

earlier proponents who had reached prominence in England. The reformists whose work 

had taken hold in England and Scotland during the fifteenth-century later had their 

theological critiques resurface to be echoed by like-minded critics in Bohemia and 

German-speaking lands, with figures such as Jan Hus and Martin Luther during the 

fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and with even more radical voices such as those of 

                                                           
1 See Bruno Bushart, Die Fuggerkapelle bei St. Anna in Augsburg (Munich: Kunstver, 1994) and 

Andrew Morrall, “The Deutsch and the Welsch. Jörg Breu the Elder’s Sketch for the Story of Lucretia and 

the Uses of Classicism in Sixteenth Century Germany,” in Drawing 1400–1600: Invention and Innovation, 

ed. Stuart Currie (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 1998), 109–31. 

 
2 The links between England the Germany stem to at least the period of Saxon migration, roughly 

from the sixth to the twelfth centuries. For an overview of the cultural and social impacts of this migration, 

see John Hines, ed., The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: An Ethnographic 

Perspective (London: Woodbridge Boydell Press, 2003). Additional arguments have been raised as to when 

and how England became uniquely separated from this Anglo-Saxon heritage. See Bryan Ward-Perkins, 

“Why Did the Anglo-Saxons Not Become more British?” The English Historical Review 115, no. 462 

(2000): 513–33. 

 



89 
 

the Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) from Switzerland.3 Additionally, growing responses to 

the Lollards’ popularized reformist beliefs in England and Germany were mirrored in 

both countries, suggesting additional commonalities and outlooks on issues of the 

transformation of matter, death, salvation, and the role of images and impacted 

conceptions of tombs. By looking at later reformists’ writings and sermons in Germany 

and Switzerland, elements of these earlier English foundations become evident.   

By the early sixteenth century in German-speaking lands, changes in the concept 

of the soul and discourses surrounding the existence of Purgatory segued into a 

reconsideration of the function of prayers, incantations, and masses for the dead.4 These 

developments were in part an extension of efforts at reform in England dating from the 

centuries prior. Both locations also saw artistic changes that were tethered to larger 

theological shifts about the status of the soul after death, debates that were only amplified 

by the Reformation. Although Augsburg declared itself as a Protestant city in 1537, when 

all Catholic rituals were forbidden, Saint Anna’s recognized itself as Lutheran only in 

1545.5 Conflicting beliefs remained part of life in Augsburg even after the death and 

entombment of multiple Fugger family members, as several had remained Catholic 

during these tumultuous times when Catholicism and multiple Protestant sects vied for 

                                                           
3 See Heiko Augustinus Oberman and Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart, Luther: Man Between God 

and the Devil (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 53–57. The authors assert that the precursors 

both to Marin Luther’s rise to prominence and to the consolidation of religious movements in Germany can 

be linked to earlier debates in England.  

 
4 Craig Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany 

(Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999), 19–39. 

 
5 See Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and 

Catholic Piety, 1500-1648 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 120–21. 



90 
 

visibility and control in Augsburg. We can view the memorials of the Fuggers as 

participants in these ongoing theological debates. 

The execution of the Fugger epitaph stones, attributed to Sebastian Loscher 

(1482/1483–1551), are based upon designs by Albrecht Dürer, who created charcoal 

chiaroscuro drawings in 1510 (figures 4.2 and 4.3) as works done specifically for the 

Fugger chapel.6 These were not study drawings for a larger painting, nor were they the 

basis for an engraving or etching, and have not gained as much scholarly prominence as 

many of Dürer’s other drawings. Jeffrey Chipps Smith has commented that although the 

carvings are based upon Dürer’s work, the “shallow reliefs lack the sketches’ emotional 

intensity of the grieving figures or the raw power of Samson, the Old Testament hero, 

who strides across the memorial to Georg Fugger” (figure 4.4).7 The same lack of 

emotional volatility and force could be noted in the depiction of the Resurrection, in 

which the characters seem more restrained than in the prepatory drawing, and the 

undulation of forms, particularly around Christ’s grave, is less apparent (figure 4.5). 

However, even while emotional verve and Dürer’s calligraphic flourishes are diminished 

or even absent in the translation from chalk to carved stone, what is gained is a necessary 

hard-edged clarity that is better for viewing stone reliefs from a distance behind the altar 

                                                           
6 For more on the association of the reliefs with Sebastian Loscher and emergent associations with 

Dürer, see Bushart, Die Fuggerkapelle bei St. Anna, 174–98. Dürer’s Christ Resurrected, Design for the 

Epitath for Ulrich Fugger is now lost. Samson Battling the Philistines, Design for the Epitaph of Georg 

Fugger is located at the Berlin Kupferstichkabinet, Prints and Drawings Collection. For suggestions on 

additional extant designs related to these renderings, see Kayo Hirakawa, The Pictorialization of Dürer's 

Drawings in Northern Europe in the Sixteenth Century (Bern: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der 

Wissenschaften, 2000), 43.  

 
7 Larry Silver and Jeffrey Chips Smith, eds., The Essential Dürer (Philadelphia: University of 

Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 86.  



91 
 

and for keeping the memorializing function central over the individual artistic 

performance of the maker.  

The visual clarity of the relief carvings, as opposed to Dürer’s evocative drawings, 

also accentuates the linear thrusts of Samson’s spear and Christ’s staff, reminding the 

viewer perhaps of typological links between the Old Testament figure of Samson and 

Christ the Redeemer. These narrative actions as backdrop for the marble altar are reified 

with the foregrounding of the liturgical setting, both for the performative gestures of the 

priest, arms outstretched while elevating the consecrated host, and for the altar’s tawny 

colors shared also by the reliefs. The result is a visual and conceptual tethering of the 

two locations—epitaph stones and altar—bridging the celebration of the material 

changes of the transubstantiated Eucharist with images of the Resurrected and altered 

corporeal matter portrayed behind it. The memorial epitaphs in their content and spatial 

logic, situated behind the altar of Saint Anna’s as a kind of backdrop screen, visually 

reaffirmed a connection between material changes of the Eucharist and the Resurrection. 

The marble altar in the Fugger Chapel, by Hans Daucher (1486–1538), is itself a 

substantial monument, dated 1522, with materials originating from over 250 miles 

away in the Ore Mountains of Bohemia. It works well with the Fugger epitaph reliefs to 

activate the overall visual experience around themes of death, redemption, and the 

transformation of matter in ways related to imagery that were achieved in the vertical 

structure of Henry Chichele and Alice de la Pole’s transi tombs. The altar includes three 

inset geometric carved panels of scenes from Christ’s Passion and a fully in-the-round 

sculptural group of the Lamentation of Christ also by Daucher on top of the altar itself. 

The altar ensemble should be considered as integral to the viewing and understanding of 



92 
 

the epitaphs, as they collectively form the foreground lens for viewing the memorial 

stones.  

The epitaphs of Ulrich and Georg are unique as variations in relief of transi 

conventions, for they lack the portrait-likeness of a full effigy of their patrons—usually 

the part of a tomb most closely related to the worldly construction of identity—and are 

instead comprised of the biblical narratives overlooking images of Ulrich and Georg’s 

transi corpses. The transi figures, then, are all there is to fulfill that function as personal 

qualifiers for the Fugger brothers, seemingly establishing a commonality in the shared 

anonymity of death. However, what is notable in the Fugger memorials is the trace of a 

profile in the corpses, as the faces seem to suggest an outline of each deceased person, a 

subtle but recognizable individual likeness.8  

Some clear variations are notable across each epitaph, particularly as Jakob’s 

memorial stone is heraldic and Italianate in design (figure 4.6). Instead of biblical scenes 

from the Old and New Testaments, details include portions of the Fugger family coat of 

arms and heraldic standards, including two attendants in Jakob’s epitaph and in the 

memorial stone for the collective Fugger family (figure 4.7).  Similar to the artistic 

suggestions of familial, political, or religious hierarchies and dynasties that we saw in 

previously discussed tombs in-the-round, the Fugger family legacy is presented as an 

ongoing history that obfuscates the finitude of death. Unlike these earlier motifs, 

however, popularized references to death are displayed, including an assortment of skulls 

and snakes. These motifs cobble together a series of visual traditions, including emerging 

                                                           
8 On the ‘data’ of the facial features signaled in the linearity of profile, see Maria H. Loh, 

“Renaissance Faciality,” Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 3 (2009): 341–63. 

 



93 
 

Italianate details that were being incorporated into artistic developments north of the 

Alps.  

The epitaph of Ulrich Fugger is a novel variation of a transi tomb, complete with 

a focus on the importance of base-relief for portraiture in sixteenth century tombs.9 

Visible from near the Fuggers’ crypt at the front of the altar and at the edge of the church 

pews, some important observations about Ulrich Fugger’s memorial are worth 

considering, especially how it incorporates a transi into a larger narrative scene. Often, as 

with the monumental transi tombs of Henry Chichele and Alice de la Pole, the 

resurrection of the deceased is assumed through the vertical structure of the memorials, 

which permits a kind of visual ascension or reanimation and restorative wholeness of the 

body, as much as it dramatizes death and decay viewed in the other direction. Instead of 

the usual effigy being ‘stacked’ on top of the transi and scaled to life, as is a common 

format elsewhere, however, the Ulrich Fugger relief attributed to Loscher directly 

showcases a scene of the Resurrection of Christ hovering above the figure of the transi. 

Additionally, the transi figure is shrouded with few facial or physical identifiers, 

potentially representing the entombed body of Christ himself, or of Ulrich Fugger’s 

decayed body, stripped to a kind of abstract or universal abjection. The visual linking of 

the transi with the resurrected Christ also alludes to the Last Judgment (Rev. 20:11–15),10 

                                                           
9 See Daniel Gallo, “Small Portraits for Great Men: The Miniature Portrait Bust in the Sixteenth 

Century,” The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 58, no. 1 (2010): 56–73. Gallo focuses on the rise of gargantuan 

sculptures in Italy but also cross references important bust sculptures, including a pear wood miniature of 

Jacob Fugger by Conrat Meit (c. 1510–1515).  

 
10 11 And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the 

heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.12 And I saw the dead, small and great, stand 

before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the 

dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. 13 And the 

sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and 

they were judged every man according to their works. 14 And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. 



94 
 

with Christ presiding over the dead, who will rise from their graves and become whole 

again and united in ultimate salvation (Matthew 25:31–36).11 The conflation of Christ’s 

corpse with that of Ulrich Fugger has theological implications affirming the concept that 

all dead Christians sleep in Christ.12 

The epitaphs and their relation to the altar also intersect with additional 

theological and liturgical debates about how one should honor the dead—debates that 

were heated and unresolved in the city of Augsburg at this time.13 As both Martin Luther 

and Augsburg’s own fiery and more radical preacher, Johannes Schilling, had argued, 

masses for the dead were anathema to the growing concepts of the Reformation, because 

of the intercession of priests for masses of the dead and a belief in salvation by faith, not 

in good works or in prayers for the soul by others. Despite the theological and liturgical 

Catholic underpinnings that are suggested in Ulrich Fugger’s epitaph, his memorial 

appears to serve an additional artistic and devotional function, primarily to force the 

viewer into experiencing the image in a more conceptual sense in which the dead are part 

                                                           
This is the second death. 15 And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake 

of fire.  

 
11 31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he 

sit upon the throne of his glory: 32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them 

one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: 33 And he shall set the sheep on his 

right hand, but the goats on the left. 34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye 

blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: 35 For I was 

an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: 

36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. 

 
12 The contention that all Christian dead are part of the larger motif of Christ’s death and eventual 

resurrection was posited in 1 Thessalonians 4:14, “For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even 

so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.” Although the concept of a 

sleeping soul was not part of the Catholic lexicon, Luther directly addressed the principle of a shared 

respite for Christians awaiting resurrection, a concept that was paralleled within the Lutheran church 

teaching.  

 
13 Hanson Zelinsky, Religious Identity in an Early Reformation Community: Augsburg, 1517 to 

1555 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 107–38.  

 



95 
 

of visions of immersive sacred experiences. Christopher Wood explains how German 

masters of this period, such as Albrecht Altdorfer (c.1480–1538), heightened the 

experiential sense of immediacy for the viewer with certain structural and formal 

conceits, some of which we see in the Loscher reliefs after Dürer, as well:   

… dramatic foreshortenings, rotations, zooms, reverse angles, low horizons, and 

Rückenfiguren, … refractions and revisions of compositional convention, were all 

designed to intensify the religious experience of the beholder. Altdorfer placed his 

beholders in direct, almost visionary confrontation with the sacred stories.…[T]he 

unexpected framings and croppings, the overlapping of figure and frame, call 

attention to the frontier between fiction and reality.14 

 

Wood concludes by noting experiences with Altdorfer’s widely-distributed prints that 

experimented with these kinds of structures, which in unexpected ways resonate closely 

with the pictorial effects and embodied experiences stimulated by the Fugger relief 

memorial in its sharp linearity, tactility and dimensionality, as niches extending the wall: 

“They re-create the beholder as a contemporary of Christ …and at the same time stage 

persuasive fictions of possible worlds as if glimpsed through windows.”15 These portals 

allow objects to appear in fuller dimensions through relief carving, while systematically 

acting as virtual windows into the past, facilitating images that become fully experienced 

through the viewer’s imagination.  

                                                           
14 See Christopher S. Wood, review of Albrecht Altdorfer in seiner Zeit: Religiöse und profane 

Themen in der Kunst um 1500, by Thomas Noll; Sehen und Erkennen: Albrecht Altdorfers religiöse Bilder, 

by Magdalena Bushart; Der Wald in der Malerei und der Graphik des Donaustils, by Margit Stadlober, The 

Art Bulletin 89, no. 4 (2007): 818–21. Christopher Wood primarily contends that the works that Noll visits 

are part of a larger art historical lineage, dating at least to Albrecht Altdorfer if not to earlier artists, 

including Rogier van der Weden. For more information on Altdorfer’s use of the image and the conflation 

that Wood summarizes, see Thomas Nol, Albrecht Altdorfer in seiner Zeit: Religiöse und profane Themen 

in der Kunst um 1500 (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2005). 

 
15 Wood, “Review of Albrecht Altdorfer,” 819. 

 



96 
 

The foreshortening of figures in these panels, complete with the framing of the 

visual narratives into a multipart progression, provides vignettes for the viewer to behold 

the image of Christ and the Passion. The viewer is also drawn into the frame as the 

foreground is shortened. In the Fugger epitaphs, we see Loscher and Dürer similarly 

incorporating visual strategies that create in the viewer a means to achieve a self-

awareness about the enfolding liturgical narrative. The images of the Passion present the 

end of Christ’s life, ultimately demonstrating a motif of tragedy in combination with 

images of memorial for the Fuggers, displaying the trajectory of the end of life and the 

greater collective whole of the Church and Christian redemption. This function places the 

viewer as an engaged participant with the persuasive messages of artwork, while 

simultaneously suggesting participation in the unfolding dramatic narrative and shared 

function of death and redemption.  

These visual strategies and blatantly artistic novelties suggest a growing 

importance during the Reformation period of the image as an agent intensifying a 

personal religious as well as aesthetic experience.16 The creation of an image as a 

continuation of a larger visual narrative was suggested by David Freedberg as one 

strategy an artist might use during this period to convey a new visual concept, one that 

challenged the boundaries between historical narrative and contemporary experience.17 In 

particular, Freedberg harkens to Plato’s explanation of oratory, with artistic images 

serving in much the same function, as creating “dreams for those who are awake.”18 This 

                                                           
16 See Carl C. Christensen, Art and the Reformation in Germany, vol. 2 (Columbus, OH: Ohio 

University Press, 1979).  

 
17 David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 

 
18 Ibid., 162– 92; 475.  



97 
 

recreation of a religious vision in the mind of the viewer straddles the line between icon 

and conceptualization. While this pivot toward conceptual visuality seems antithetical to 

the experiences of Catholic orthodoxy that would have been celebrated by the Fugger 

family, Augsburg itself was a longstanding contested territory between Catholic and 

Protestant theologies, as the different confessions coexisted uneasily, more than with 

many cities of the Holy Roman Empire.19 A resultant shift during the Reformation from 

the literality suggested in the verisimilitude and corporeal presence of sculpture to a 

conceptualization of religious images is suggested in the Fugger epitaphs, which as relief 

carvings hover between the sculptural and pictorial. Such a shift was part of a 

development that would continue throughout the early sixteenth century and culminate in 

another transition of the concept to a new medium, as we shall see in the ensuing chapter 

in Hans Holbein’s rendering of the Dead Christ in oil paint, representing changes in 

public perceptions of memorials. 

Such shifts in the concept of memory were driven by a reconsideration of how the 

dead are recalled and how to best characterize, define, or perform memory, a growing 

conundrum across both the European continent and in England.20 In addition, the 

Reformation took on these debates about death-related practices in liturgy. Depictions of 

a deceased person as a visual prompt for the prayers of the living surfaced in the Fugger 

memorials, as “the dead were not praying to or for anything, a change from earlier tombs 

                                                           
 

19 Robert Kress, “The Roman Catholic Reception of the Augsburg Confession,” The Sixteenth 

Century Journal 11, no. 3 (1980); 115–28, esp. 116–17.  

 
20 Ibid., 47–51. 

 



98 
 

where they made supplication to God, the saints, and the visitors.”21 Among those faithful 

to the papacy, the growing reformist concept that masses and prayers were ineffective in 

securing a promise of a heavenly afterlife was against the core principles of Church 

orthodoxy, beliefs ardently upheld by the Fuggers and incorporated into their collective 

memorials. As Jonathan Finch effectively summarized, within the late medieval period 

“the living were not encouraged to remember the dead, but to remember to pray for the 

dead.”22 Within reformist thought, however, the rituals and injunctions that were offered 

for the dead by the gracious prayers of the living were under as much attack in Luther’s 

sermons as indulgences were.23 This shift in the public performance of memory was not 

unique to Reformation and Counter-Reformation movements. Peter Sherlock concludes 

that:  

Every society reconstructs the past in the present. In early modern Europe, these 

reconstructions were directed toward the future and the afterlife as much as 

toward the past. The reformation of memory was most pronounced in the 

changing relationship of the living and the dead. …This late medieval vision of 

the afterlife was very much a memory-theater, arranged to aid the penitent 

Christian in his or her devotions on behalf of the dead and in the preparation for 

death itself. … Early modern Europe was replete with deliberately created 

memories and invented commemorations, designed as responses to the 

Reformation with its attendant loss of an established narrative for the past and to 

the beginnings of the disenchantment of the world.24 

                                                           
21 Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 

2002).  

 
22  Jonathan Finch, “A Reformation of Meaning: Commemoration and Remembering the Dead in 

the Parish Church, 1450–1640” in The Archaeology of Reformation 1480–1580, eds. David Gaimster and 

Roberta Gilchrist (Leeds:  Maney, 2003), 437–49, at 442. 

 
23 Koslofsky, Reformation of the Dead, 81–114. 

 
24 Peter Sherlock, “The Reformation of Memory in Early Modern Europe,” in Memory: Histories, 

Theories, Debates, eds. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New York: Fordham University Press, 

2010), 30–40. 



99 
 

The memorials at the Fugger Chapel operated as mechanisms within this trajectory. They 

posited both the devout and orthodox theological beliefs of the Fugger family, 

particularly in relation to the changing physicality of the soul and the vital importance of 

the Eucharist, and sealed their public and ideological legacy in an increasingly reformist 

location.  

The Fugger Chapel represents these ongoing theological and liturgical debates in 

a unique fashion, combining the ongoing religious debates with the visual drama of the 

memorials and prominently displayed altar in the foreground. The near life-size statues 

on the altar in the forefront of the chapel feature the Lamentation of Christ with the 

body of Christ held aloft by an angel and flanked by his mother and Saint John the 

Baptist (figure 4.8). Along with the impressive rendering of Christ and hi s attendants, 

Hans Daucher also sculpted a series of playful putti, possibly designed by Hans 

Burgkmair (1473–1531), that decorate the nearby altar bannisters. Christ’s arms lie in a 

relaxed position, his head, slack jaw, and body seeming to be lithe with sleep or newly 

dead, still in the process of being deposed from the Cross, instead of an outright depiction 

of a rigid corpse. He remains crowned with his head aloft. Christ’s foot advances beyond 

the edge of the altar, seemingly breaking the fourth wall while also slightly hovering 

above the space where the Eucharist—and within Catholic doctrine, transubstantiation— 

will occur. Christ’s blood would conceptually appear to be flowing from his open wounds 

directly into the priest’s upraised chalice. A cross is not included in the sculptural group, 

but Christ’s pose, with his upright but slacked body and limp arms stretched across his 

three attendants, echoes the form of the Cross as a reminder for the viewer. Similar to the 



100 
 

completion of negative space that is possible in base-relief, the lack of a cross prompts 

the viewer to complete the image in his or her own imagination.  

The panels on the front of the altar include three base-relief designs (figure 4.8), 

depicting three episodes from the Passion.25 In the first relief panel, Christ carries the 

Cross, and looks outward toward the veil-donning Veronica as four soldiers beat and 

taunt him. Nearby, crowds have gathered, with Mary standing in the background, held up 

under her arms as if she is about to swoon, suffering pain at Jesus Christ’s Crucifixion 

instead of at his birth, 26 itself a miraculous and mystical occurrence, similar to the 

transubstantiation of the Eucharist enacted upon the accompanying altar. The second 

relief depicts Christ’s descent from the Cross. Here, Christ is shown as crucified, 

complete with a crowd of onlookers and the two thieves writhing still in pain on their 

crosses. The foreground includes the now dead Christ, being taken from the Cross by 

Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Mary is placed in the bottom right side of the relief, 

overcome with grief. The third panel shows the Harrowing of Hell, a concept that was of 

considerable debate during the Reformation, especially considering its notable absence in 

the Bible.27 In this panel, Christ appears in Hell as the personified souls of the soon-to-

be-redeemed dead stand near him. Christ stands alongside his cross-topped staff, his leg 

bent at the knee as he approaches a river of entangled human bodies to elevate a newly 

redeemed soul. Overhead, outlines of arches and buildings are suggested in carved relief, 

                                                           
25 The panels were renovated in 1921 to 1922. See Bushart, Die Fuggerkapelle, 52.  

 
26 See Mary E. Fissell, “The Politics of Reproduction in the English Reformation,” 

Representations no. 87 (Summer, 2004): 43–81, esp. 53; 55.   

 
27 Tarald Rasmussen, “Hell Disarmed? The Function of Hell in Reformation Spirituality,” Numen 

56, no. 2 (2009): 366–84. 



101 
 

their façades covered with a commingling of half-nude human forms and occasional 

demons with ragged wings and tortured faces. The three panels are part of a tripartite 

narrative, a continuous loop or circle that is formed visually with the liturgical function of 

the altar, creating a performative act that synthesized the life, Passion, and Resurrection 

of Jesus Christ with the Fugger family and the larger Church community.  

Memorials in base-relief like the Fugger epitaphs and the altar panels that 

incorporate aspects of negative space extend a trajectory that began with sculpted 

effigies. Through base-relief, the sculptors Loscher and Daucher created works that 

facilitated a visual arc in the mind of viewer, synthesizing images with active 

interpretation and conceptual participation. Relief sculpture invites the viewer to envision 

a predominantly flat object as a fully developed, three-dimensional image. Functioning 

on the border between sculpture and painting, base-relief incorporates aspects of both 

mediums, while also recasting the role of the viewer and the image into a new 

perspective. Different than the tombs of Henry Chichele and Alice de la Pole, the 

epitaphs are conceptualizations forcing the viewer to imagine the unfolding scenes and 

any reality-enhancing features like paint or gilding. Shades and hues are accentuated by 

the variations in the natural material and lighting. Michael Baxandall referenced this 

phenomenon in describing a limewood altarpiece by Tilman Riemenschneider (c. 1460–

1531), explaining that variations in light and perception of the different depths of carving 

changed the function of the work and the viewer’s involvement with it, moving from 



102 
 

brightness to shadows.28 This same process is displayed on the Fugger memorial and 

Daucher’s altar panel carvings.  

We gain a better understanding of how the Fugger epitaphs functioned as tomb 

memorials and dynamic revisioning of transi tombs if we take into consideration the 

spatial logic of the memorial stones within the chapel, as well as the context of Saint 

Anna’s Church within sixteenth-century Augsburg. The Bavarian city of Augsburg owed 

its rising prominence to its status as the Holy Roman Emperor’s favored city, as well as 

to its mercantilism, with the Fugger family at the center of those civic identities as one of 

its most eminent patrician families. Theological debates revolving around various 

reformist beliefs divided Augsburg and were particularly complex as they played out in 

the city during the first decades of the sixteenth century.29 These debates and tensions 

were persistent as religious spaces in Augsburg were contested for longer than in many 

other cities, such as Nuremberg and Basel.  

The function of religious art was similarly disputed. Luther’s theses had been 

posted in the year prior to his arrival in Augsburg in 1518 and his initial stance toward 

religious images was relatively benign, with him and his followers viewing religious 

images as secondary to the Word but as still having a useful place within Christian 

teaching, if circumscribed.  Luther’s later response to images emerged in a pronounced 

way, as “first and foremost came indulgences, then the cult of relics, and only later the 

                                                           
28 See Michael Ann Holly, “Patterns in the Shadows,” in The Melancholy Art (Princeton: 

Princeton University Press, 2013), 73–94, esp. 86. 

 
29 See Wandel, Eucharist in the Reformation, 46–93.  

 



103 
 

misuse of works of art.”30 However, he recognized that the problem was not in the 

existence of images themselves, but rather in the viewer who misunderstood or 

misperceived real presence in matter—in the paint or wood or carved stone. As Jeffrey 

Chipps Smith explains “reform rhetoric begat iconoclasm” as sculptures and religious 

images were destroyed starting in 1522, with both horrific and psychologically 

complicated results: “Religious images were so engrained in the lives and rituals of pre-

Reformation society, so linked with one's relationship with the Catholic church, that for 

many iconoclasm meant liberation.”31 Despite Luther’s more moderate preaching against 

the practice, Andreas Karlstadt (c.1480–1541), Gabriel Zwilling (c. 1487–1558), and 

Ulrich Zwingli led the charge of iconoclasm with growing factions adopting their 

beliefs.32 Subsequently, locations such as Zurich were emptied and destroyed of religious 

art, and Basel, the eventual residence of Hans Holbein the Younger, incurred occasional 

attacks.33 

The economic prowess and influence of the Fuggers exemplified these ongoing 

disputes, through their efforts to curtail reformist ideology and safeguard Catholic 

orthodoxy. To that avail, three independent foundations were established in Augsburg 

through the beneficence of the Fugger family in a 1521 deed: the memorial chapel in 

                                                           
30 Sergiusz Michalski, Christianity and Society in the Modern World: Reformation and the Visual 

Arts, The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 2013), 2.  

 
31 Jeffrey Chipps Smith, German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance c. 1520–I580 (Princeton: 

Princeton University Press, 1994), 171–72.  

 
32 See Michael P. Carroll, Madonnas that Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the Fifteenth 

Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).  

 
33 Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin 

(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 

 



104 
 

Saint Anna’s Church, the Fuggerei housing complex, and a sermon endowment at Saint 

Moritz.34 Three particular chapels are often associated with the Fugger family patronage. 

The first is a small chapel dedicated to Saint Mark located inside the entrance to the 

Fuggerei, founded in 1516 as a place of worship within one of the oldest faith-based (i.e., 

Catholic) residential communities in Europe still in existence.35 This small chapel was 

likely used only by the residents of the Fuggerei and includes a vertical stone slab 

featuring an enshrouded transi of Ulrich Fugger (figure 4.9). Additionally, an epitaph was 

installed for Georg Fugger near Saint George’s Chapel on the south aisle of the Basilica 

of Saints Afra and Ulrich, with the final chapel being in the most pronounced location the 

Fugger Chapel in Saint Anna’s Church, where they dedicated their memorial stones.   

Saint Anna’s Church (figure 4.10) occupies a much smaller urban space than the 

other more prominent buildings that dominate the city skyline, such as the Perlach Tower 

and the spires of the Augsburg Cathedral. It is not only smaller, but also relatively 

removed from the major thoroughfares of Augsburg. Artistically, it emblematized the 

impact of the Fuggers through emerging Renaissance styles north of the Alps, 

particularly as it became credited as the first architectural construction of the German 

Renaissance.36 Mixing local design with the ‘new’ Italianate, or ‘welsch,’ style, it was 

                                                           
34 See Fürstlich und Gräflich Fuggersche Stiftungs-Administration, “The Fugger Chapel at St. 

Anna: Representation to Honor the Deceased,” accessed September 4, 2018, 

http://www.fugger.de/en/singleview/article/representation-to-honour-the-deceased/1.html 

 
35 A historical overview of the Fuggerei and its function is provided in Marien Tietz-Strödel, Die 

Fuggerei in Augsburg: Studien zur Entwicklung des sozialen Stiftungsbaus im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert 

(Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 1982). 

 
36 For a review of the increasing role of the Fuggers and the chapels that were created as part of 

their growing societal impact, see Wolfram Koeppe, “An Early Meissen Discovery: A ‘Shield Bearer’ 

Designed by Hans Daucher for the Ducal Chapel in the Cathedral of Meissen,” Metropolitan Museum 

Journal 37 (2002): 41–62. 

 



105 
 

originally created as an extension of a nearby monastery, whose Carmelite friars in 1518 

had played an active role in housing Luther following the Diet of Augsburg, but whose 

ideals as a monastic order mirrored the beliefs of the steadfastly Catholic Jakob Fugger. 

As art historian Andrew Morrall explains, the Italian Renaissance style become 

increasingly identified with the societal rise of the Fugger family, associating welsch 

style with economic and social distinction, compared to the localized deutsch or 

Germanic artistic traditions.37 Baxandall suggests that some of the difficulty in 

ascertaining the identity of the artists responsible for the creation and decoration of the 

Fugger chapel is rooted in the confluence of myriad cultural styles, ranging from an 

extension of a German and Italian motifs into a particular composite of Ulm’ish and 

Venetian traditions.38 This complex integration and unsteady synthesis of styles 

continued in the artwork within the chapel and in its overall architectural design, 

particularly in relation to the tension between the building’s late Gothic vaulting and 

overall Italianate forms. The Renaissance style also has implications for the Reformation, 

too, as an artistic element that further distinguishes Saint Anna’s Church from other 

church spaces that signals allegory or artifice.39 Different from the city’s eleventh-century 

cathedral built near Byzantine-era remnants, Saint Anna’s Church associated at various 

                                                           
37 For information on the role of the Fuggers and these emergent styles, see Andrew Morrall, Jörg 

Breu the Elder: Art, Culture, and Belief in Reformation Augsburg, Histories of Vision (Burlington, VT: 

Ashgate, 2001). Both styles are further explained in Morrall, “The Deutsch and the Welsch,” 109–31. 

 
38 Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors, 133. In particular, Baxandall suggests that figures suggest an 

Ulmish tradition in the crafting of their heads, to an overall German tradition in the positioning of Christ, 

and a distinctly Lombardi inspiration in the drapery of Saint John and with the angel situated directly 

behind Christ. He also suggests that Venetian experience in the crafting of drapery and in the cutting of the 

limestone altar reliefs. 

 
39 Morrall, Jörg Breu the Elder, 220–26. For additional information, see Ashley West, Review of 

“Jorg Breu the Elder: Art, Culture, and Belief in Reformation Augsburg,” CAA Reviews (December 9, 

2002): 1–3. 

 



106 
 

times with different sides of this religious divide, resulting in variations in artistic style 

and in a decorative scheme that would come to sustain different audiences and 

expectations for images.   

The entrance to the church is near the doorway into the South Chapel, with 

visitors first encountering a series of monastic cloisters and various memorial plaques. 

The interior of the church is primarily white, having been plastered during the rise of the 

Lutheran movement, with the notable exception of the Goldsmith’s Chapel, founded in 

1420.40 The South Chapel—later to become the Fugger Chapel— is the oldest part of the 

church. It dates to the early fourteenth century and was originally attached to the 

Carmelite monastery itself. The pronounced nave is flanked by two aisles, with a side 

corridor that runs along the western side of the church. The Fugger Chapel occupies a 

substantial open space in what is often considered to be the central focus point of the 

church. The chapel “was originally intended as a funeral chapel to commemorate through 

daily masses members of the Fugger family buried in the crypt beneath the altar.”41 Jakob 

Fugger’s name is the most pronounced on the memorial stone above the crypt at the base 

of the altar (figure 4.11), which also houses the remains of his brothers Georg and Ulrich, 

as well as his nephews Raymund (1489–1535) and Hieronymus (1499–1523). The 

original design of the chapel was contested, and the construction of the altar itself was 

hotly debated: “the chapel’s Carmelite setting has, however, not been sufficiently 

acknowledged because the intense negotiations between the friars and the powerful 

                                                           
40 Sankt Anna Augsburg (Augsburg: Wiβner-Verlag: 2013), 36.  

 
41 Norbert Jopek, “Die Fuggerkapelle bei St. Anna in Augsburg,” The Burlington Magazine 136, 

no. 1101 (1994): 846–47, at 846.  

 



107 
 

merchants have been consistently underestimated.”42 Complicating the scenario even 

more are the original plans for the altar, whose designs have been lost.43  

The church is a locus of innovative designs in Northern Renaissance art, and 

featured works after Dürer and Augsburg’s own leading artists, painters Hans Burgkmair 

and Jörg Breu the Elder and the sculptors Hans Daucher and Sebastian Loscher.44 Later 

additions by Lucas Cranach and his workshop may have been included, likely as a part of 

the Fugger’s massive collection of Northern art.45 The visual impact and sense of novelty 

around the Fugger Chapel was substantial, as “original opulence shaped posterity's image 

of its patron, Jakob Fugger, the international banker and the Holy Roman Empire's 

wealthiest patrician [with] the first truly Renaissance-style funerary chapel in 

Germany.”46 Michael Baxandall summarized that:  

In 1509 Ulrich and Jakob Fugger had made an agreement with the Prior of the 

Carmelite house of St. Anne in Augsburg to build in his church a large sepulchral 

chapel for themselves and their dead brother Georg, quite exceptionally it is not a 

side chapel but a grandiose extension of the whole west end of the church… In 

retrospect it is clear that Fugger Chapel marks the moment when the Augsburg 

sculptor was directed into a new line of development, carving usually in stone and 

usually in a positive relation to what was known of Italian Renaissance art. But 

something had happened also which went beyond simple importation of a few 

Italian patterns, tastes, and pretensions.47  

                                                           
42 Christa Gardner Von Teuffel, “The Carmelite Altarpiece (circa 1290–1550): The Self-

Identification of an Order,” Mitteilungen Des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 57  no. 1 (2015): 2–

41. 

 
43 Bruno Bushart, Die Fuggerkapelle, 18–20; note 55. 

 
44 Ibid., 12. 

 
45 Michael North and David Ormrod, Markets for Art, 1400–1800 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 

90.  

 
46 Smith, German Sculpture, 35. 

 
47 Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors, 132; 134–35.  

 



108 
 

The Fugger Chapel ostensibly represents an amalgamation of international Renaissance 

and local styles, combining motifs associated with Northern artists with a 

reconceptualization of popularized Italian works as an expression of artistic collaboration 

across media. 48  

The Growing Position of Augsburg and the Fuggers within the Reformation 

By the time of the chapel’s creation, the Fuggers had established themselves as 

one of the most powerful economic forces in Europe.49 They were prominent financiers 

for far-ranging economic initiatives, bankrolled Emperor Maximilian I with their copper 

mines in Central Europe, and used their wealth, too, for commissioning art, architecture, 

growing a collection, and building even a menagerie.50 Pierre Cositl provides an 

appropriate historical overview of their wide influence throughout Europe: “They had 

known unprecedented prosperity, the luxury of a merchant who benefited artists, 

                                                           
48 For more on how the Fugger Chapel straddles the line between Italian Renaissance and German 

Gothic, see Norbert Nussbaum, German Gothic Church Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University 

Press, 2000), 122–23. 

 
49 They have been credited as the inspiration for modern day capitalism; see Edmund Laskine, 

Revue d'Histoire Économique et Sociale 20, no. 3 (1932): 423–24. Also, for example, see Conrad 

Peutinger’s own contemporary defense of their methods in his 1506 Sermones convivales. The Fuggers’ 

economic prowess was so immense that Jakob Fugger has been described as “the richest man who ever 

lived,” a title only barely beyond hyperbole. See Greg Steinmetz, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The 

Life and Times of Jacob Fugger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015). For a consideration of the 

appropriateness of Steinmetz’ nomenclature for Jacob Fugger, see Jonathan Knee. 2015. “Jacob Fugger and 

the Renaissance Superrich,” The New York Times, July 31, 2015. The pronounced position of the Fuggers 

in creating economic changes throughout Europe has been noted extensively. Beyond suggestions that the 

Fuggers spearheaded modern capitalism, other authors assert that their efforts came to emblematize the 

Protest work ethic for centuries. See Sam Whimster, “Max Weber and the Spirit of Modern Capitalism - 

100 Years On,” Max Weber Studies 5.2, no. 6.1 (July 2005/January 2006): 177–83. 

 
50 See Mark Häberlein, The Fuggers of Augsburg, Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance 

Germany (Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press, 2012). Häberlein’s work traces the rise of 

the Fuggers to a growing presence of networks and advancements in social systems. In terms of artistic 

impacts, he effectively asserts that although the Fuggers may not have been as prominent art patrons as the 

Medici family with whom they are regularly compared, their cultural and artistic influence was still quite 

vast.  

 



109 
 

scientists, and humanists, and access to privileges of nobility, including titles, lands, and 

alliances.”51 Their memorials reflected both their economic success and substantial 

presence throughout the Holy Roman Empire.  But the Fuggers and their wealth cannot 

be divested from the changing religious and cultural maelstrom that was happening 

throughout Europe in the early sixteenth century. Rightly assumed to have played a major 

role in the investment and banking infrastructure of Europe’s top markets, the Fuggers 

were also active in both the Reformation and Counter Reformation in Augsburg. For 

example, it was on the Fuggers’ estate that Luther had initially refused in October 1518 to 

recant his theses, and was ordered to submit to the pope after his stay with the Carmelite 

friars who administered Saint Anna’s Church. The Fugger family itself was comprised of 

both Protestant and Catholic followers, and funding for both movements was part of their 

banking industry, one that only grew as Augsburg continued to flourish and prosper. 

Despite Augsburg passing a decree against iconoclasm in 1524, social and 

religious tensions were high, and the city had its own occasional iconoclastic outbursts 

and rioting .52 Augsburg emerged, however, as a theological nexus for scores of preachers 

of reformist confessions who frequented the city to sermonize. The ensuing sermons, 

combined with a series of attacks against the papacy, took as their subjects a number of 

ongoing and even contradictory reformist proposals, including those of Ulrich Zwingli, 

who made particularly radical critiques of Marian veneration and avidly preached against 

                                                           
51 See Pierre Cositl, “Le Mecenat Humanistes des Fugger,” Humanisme et Renaissance 6, no. 1 

(1939): 20–40. 

 
52 See Tlusty, Augsburg During the Reformation, 7.  

 



110 
 

the use of religious images.53 In addition, lesser-known preachers such as Johannes 

Schilling rose to prominence in Augsburg, especially during the early 1520s.54 Schilling 

was a follower of Zwingli in his radical denial of the place of images in religious practice 

and played a complex and fierce role in Augsburg, having been banished by Augsburg 

magistrates, an act resulting in an uprising of over 1,800 residents, many of them lower or 

working class, the collective social and economic antithesis of the Fugger family.55  

The Eucharist and its ecumenical functions were contested as part of Schilling’s 

legacy. The eventual severing of the Eucharist with memorial masses fortified a growing 

wall within reformist ideology between the living and the dead through the 

denouncement of commemoration practices. As these attacks continued to increase 

throughout the Reformation, “the Requiem Mass, so long a hinge between the earthly 

world and beyond, became an autocracy in the eyes of the new theology.”56 Assumed to 

be a connective and communicative tool between Christians and the Divine, and a 

mainstay of the Fugger family, the Requiem Mass became identified as a misguided 

belief, according to Schilling and his followers. Owing to the pronounced focus that 

Luther had on the Eucharist as a central tenet retained in the Reformation (albeit 

understood as a symbolic enactment), sacraments for the dead became understood as 

                                                           
53 Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic 

Piety, 1500–1648, Past and Present Publications (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 

See also James M. Stayer, Anabaptists and the Sword (New York: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1976).  

 
55 Thomas A. Brady, German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650 (Cambridge, UK: 

Cambridge University Press, 2009), 163. 

 
56 Volker Leppin, “Preparing for Death: The Late Medieval Ars Moriendi to the Lutheran Funeral 

Sermon,” in Preparing for Death, Remembering the Dead, eds. Jon Oygarden Flaeten and Tarald 

Rasmussen (Gottingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 9–24, esp. 13.  

 



111 
 

against the mission of the reformist movement. 57 Peter Marshall addressed this shift and 

noted the profound impacts that the Reformation posed to the laity and clergy alike: 

“Wherever it took hold, the Reformation changed the meaning and experience of 

death.”58 As the Reformation moved throughout the communicative social fabric of 

Augsburg, theologians advocated for varying positions about the Eucharist, death, and 

ostentatious public displays of images from a number of locations throughout the city. 

Shifting mentalities about public life, heavy ornamentation and display, and personal 

aggrandizement became parcel to theological debate. As Ulinka Rublack writes: 

Renaissance cultural arguments explored and sometimes challenged ways in 

which appearances articulated boundaries between an inner and outer self, 

appearance and reality, nature and artifice, the sacred and profane, the rich and the 

ragged. What emerges is a world of colours and laws that sought to curtail too 

many extravagances, but also of changes of perception and values, for example in 

the course of the Reformation when ‘old luxury’ came to symbolize the excesses 

of the Catholic church.59 

Against this tense backdrop, Saint Anna’s Church, with its expressive Italianate style, 

became a showplace for changes within the Reformation and the enduring role of the 

Fugger family.  

Similarly, the growing presence of Schilling and his sermons left an undeniable 

impact on his audiences at Saint Anna’s. A favored reference for much of his sermons 

came from the Gospel of Luke, especially the first three chapters, which focus on the 

                                                           
57 Robert C. Croken, Luther’s First Front: The Eucharist as Sacrifice (Ottawa: University of 

Ottawa Press, 1990). 

 
58 Peter Marshall, “After Purgatory: Death and Remembrance in the Reformation World,” in 

Preparing for Death, Remembering the Dead, eds. Jon Oygarden Flaeten and Tarald Rasmussen 

(Gottingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 25–45, esp. 25.  

 
59 Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 2010), 260.  

 



112 
 

humanity of Jesus Christ. Beyond actively arguing with the Augsburg City Council, 

Schilling also preached sermons up to three times a week and during all holy days. He 

emphasized not only the comity that Christ had established with the poor (Luke 1: 51–

53), but also noted his poverty-laden background and humility (Luke 2:22–24). Each of 

these points were cornerstones of the emerging Reformation and positioned Schilling in 

direct contrast with the life and ideology of prosperity that had been promoted by the 

Fuggers for their public identities, as displayed not only in expensive patronage of spaces 

like the Fugger Chapel, but also in its use of an ornamented Italianate, or ‘foreign,’ style. 

Moreover, Schilling based his retorts against the City Council heavily on Luke’s 

depiction of John the Baptist’s reaction to charlatans seeking refuge in religion without 

altering their self-serving behaviors. Assistance for the poor was one of the vital 

components of this expectation, a point stressed through John the Baptist’s castigations 

that became a basis for Schilling’s sermons—charity not as good works but for their own 

sake of service.60 Ultimately, however, Schilling’s preaching was thwarted as he was 

accused of creating social unrest, leading to his expulsion from Augsburg in 1524.61 The 

Fugger family and other patricians of Augsburg were likely to have been pleased to see 

him go. 

Schilling’s liturgical impact was pronounced, especially in relation to the 

Eucharist. Beyond being known for maligning the sacrament in his sermons as a kind of 

idolatry, he was also apt to enrage clergy members by engaging in behavior that they 

                                                           
60 For more information on Schlling’s impact on Augsburg and his emergent role within the 

Reformation, see Joel Van Amberg, A Real Presence: Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 

(Leiden: Brill, 2011), 59–60. 

 
61 Häberlein, The Fuggers of Augsburg, 182.  
 



113 
 

believed blasphemous. In particular, Schilling held a ceremony upon a balcony as a 

makeshift altar in which he held a cut radish aloft and suggested that it could well be 

believed to be a consecrated host.62 For all of his blistering pronouncements, Schilling’s 

message became most associated with a reconsideration of the importance of the poor 

within an ecumenical ministry, a message that was compounded by the establishment of 

institutions, such as almshouses and, in the case of the Fuggers, the Fuggerei, an early 

example of faith-based public housing and service facility.63 Although his questioning of 

the nature of the Eucharist was the foundation of his vision, and a fundamental aspect of 

the Reformation, his denouncement of the wealthy and their habits of paying for 

charitable good works for their salvation and personal glorification may have underlain 

his acrimony with the Fugger family.    

Subsequently, events surrounding the uprising of 1524 over the expulsion of 

Schilling affected the Fuggers and their involvements with ecclesiastical affairs. Seeing 

how the revolt had affected daily life in Augsburg, Jakob Fugger briefly left the city soon 

after the start of the uprising for his mayoral estate in Biberbach in the northern part of 

the District of Augsburg. The emerging rift between Jakob Fugger and reformist 

movements in Augsburg continued, however, and enveloped the Fugger family for 

decades and across family lines. Fearing for his family’s and his own safety, Jakob 

Fugger asserted that Luther himself had been responsible for social unrest, writing that 

Luther was “the initiator and primary cause of this uprising, rebellion, and bloodshed in 

                                                           
62 Wilhelm Vogt, “Johann Schilling der Barfusser-Monch und der Aufstand in Augsburg 

im Jahre 1524,” Zeitschrift des historischen Vereins fur Schwaben und Neuburs 6 (1879): 1–32, esp. 30–31.  

 
63 See Tietz-Strödel, Die Fuggerei in Augsburg, 1982. 

 



114 
 

the German nation.”64 Ultimately, the Fuggers realized that their family would be 

embroiled within the controversies of the Reformation, and Jakob Fugger saw to it that 

the family chapel that he helped create in Saint Anna’s would not become associated with 

the reformist movement during his lifetime.  

Although a great amount of the Fugger family’s network remained faithful to the 

Catholic Church, a significant portion of Augsburg became supporters of the growing 

Reformation.65 The position of Saint Anna’s Church and the Fugger memorial chapel 

became entangled in public discussion and, ultimately, the design of the chapel itself was 

not fully realized, as the city of Augsburg became entrenched in the blossoming reformist 

movement. The acrimonious relationship between the emerging evangelical movement 

and allegiances to the papacy surrounded not only the publishing of the Augsburg 

Confession in 1530,66 but also the public position and reach of Augsburg’s religious 

institutions, Catholic and reformist alike, before 1537 when the city council made an 

official decision on the matter by banning all Catholic rites and practices.67 It was not 

until 1555 with the adoption of The Peace of Augsburg that a more cogent and controlled 

solution would be found for the designation of both faith traditions across the Holy 

                                                           
64 Steinmetz, Richest Man, 204.  

 
65 Sean F. Dunwoody, “Civic and Confessional Memory in Conflict: Augsburg in the Sixteenth 

Century,” in Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe, eds. Kuijpers 

Erika, Pollmann Judith, Müller Johannes, and Van Der Steen Jasper (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 77–92, esp. 80–

81.  

  
66 Charles P. Arand, James A. Nestingen, and Robert Kolb, “The Augsburg Confession,” in The 

Lutheran Confessions: History and Theology of The Book of Concord, 87–106 (Minneapolis: Augsburg 

Fortress, Publishers, 2012), 91.  

 
67 Häberlein, The Fuggers of Augsburg, 187–88. 

 



115 
 

Roman Empire, according the faith of each territory’s local ruler.68 In some ways the 

liturgical and ecclesiastical role of Saint Anna’s Church embodied the oscillation of 

steady or shifting coexistence between Catholic and Protestant beliefs. Although the 

church would vacillate between Catholic and reformist control to ultimately fall under the 

auspices of the burgeoning Protestant movement, it became a complex site for the 

Reformation as well as the public memory and social history of the Catholic Fugger 

family.69 

A Reconceptualization of Death and the Implications of the Fugger Chapel within 

the Reformation 

 

Changes in memorial design present innovative ways of picturing death and 

remembrance, an opportunity aptly presented in the memorial to the Fugger family. By 

seeing the contributions of the Fuggers through their relief epitaphs, we explore the 

intersection between liturgical functions in shifting late medieval to reformist mentalities 

and the resultant art associated with the commemoration of the dead. Koerner argues that 

much of the art that emerged during the Reformation showcases negative, or at least 

intangible, space as important features of changing theologies.70 Art that includes 

negative space forces the viewer to consider images that are not readily viewable but only 

conceivable, what Koerner notes succinctly as “ideas about the thing, not the thing 

                                                           
68 Steven Ozment, “Society and Politics in the German Reformation,” The Age of Reform, 1250-

1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe, 245-89 (New 

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980) 259–60. 
 
69 A short overview of the longitudinal impact of the Fuggers and the political and cultural 

landscape of Europe is provided in Richard Olivier, review of Memoria an der Zeitenwende: Die Stiftungen 

Jakob Fuggers des Reichen vor und während der Reformation (ca. 1505–1555) by Benjamin Scheller,  

Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63, no. 2 (2008): 415–16. 

 
70 Koerner, Reformation of the Image, 172–75.   

 



116 
 

itself.”71 Tombs function as visceral images of negative space.72 Negative space invites 

visions of completion, as space is crafted as being neither concrete nor finite.73 Instead, 

connections with the viewer across negative space exist in a conceptual manner, an 

experience paralleled with religious visual encounters and with demands on the viewer’s 

imagination to fill in that void.  This filling of space is exacerbated in the carved reliefs of 

the Fugger memorials, in which the viewer must mentally complete the paucity of forms 

that are only partially suggested in the panels.  

Theological discussions about the illusory nature of death and the fate of the soul 

reach a poignant and powerful interconnection in these memorials, especially when 

considering images of the Dead and Resurrected Christ. Prominent sermons of the time, 

particularly those of Schilling, Luther, and Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–1531), 

shaped pervasive mentalities on death and memorial, as well as on the relative value of 

physical and holy matter. Luther and his contemporaries mentioned death and the process 

of resurrection directly. For example, Justus Jonas (1493–1555) eulogized Luther in 

terms that parallel the performative nature of transi tombs: “But after this, at the last day, 

flesh and blood, notwithstanding, they that had been eaten by worms had rotten and 

decayed in the ground shall again come forth and rise in great glory.”74 This eulogy 

                                                           
71 Ibid., 19.  

 
72 For information on the function of negative space and its association with the collective memory 

of the dead, see James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New 
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 43–48.  

 
73 Ibid., 44–46.  

 
74 As quoted in Justus Jonas and Michael Caelius, Two Funeral Sermons on the Death of Dr. 

Martin Luther: Delivered at Eisleben, February 19th and 20th, 1546, by Justus Jonas and Michael Celius 

(Lancaster, PA.: Junior Missionary Society of the Church of the Holy Trinity, 1883), 17. See Martin 

Luther, “Des D. Justus Jonas Leichenpredigt Luthers zu Eisleben. 19. Febr. 1546,” in Dr. Martin Luther 



117 
 

suggests that a connection to the corporeal world was only predicated on a realization of 

the impending inevitability of the reconstituted self in the moment of salvation at Last 

Judgment.  Reactions toward corpses are grounded in similar theological principles of 

mortality and with notions of materiality and a viewer’s association with it. As Susan 

Zimmerman adroitly summarizes, “[T]he Reformation’s attack on the anthropomorphism 

of idolatry was symptomatic of its preoccupation with the dangers implicit in materiality 

and its properties: the materiality of the image or idol, the materiality of the body, and – 

at the most profound and ordinary level – the materiality of the corpse.”75 Part of this 

contention is connected to changing concepts of matter, complete with altering 

perceptions of the Eucharist and corporeality.  

Theological shifts concerning the changing nature of matter were promulgated in 

the ongoing debates about transubstantiation, exacerbated by depictions of matter 

undergoing dramatic transformations, as in images in the Fugger epitaphs of decaying 

corpses and resurrected souls. These conclusions were popularized alongside Luther’s 

considerations of the Eucharist—itself a fundamentally integral aspect of the experience 

of the Fugger epitaphs— seeing differences between a spiritual, or symbolic, instead of a 

corporeal presence of Christ in the holy Host.76 Luther posited that the soul does not alter 

in matter, or progress to Purgatory or to an immediate afterlife, one filled with the 

                                                           
Sämmtliche Schriften. Neue rev. stereotypausg, zweite Thiel, ed. Johan Georg Walch (St. Louis: Concordia 

Publishing House, 1904), 435–50.  
 

75 Susan Zimmerman, “Body Imaging and Religious Reform: The Corpse as Idol,” in The Early 

Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 24–89, esp. 24. 

 
76 Amy Nelson Burnett, Karlstadt and the Origins of the Eucharistic Controversy: A Study in the 

Circulation of Ideas, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21–

22. 

 



118 
 

potential hierarchies of saints or angelic orders of Church beliefs, as we saw pictured in 

the tomb canopies of Henry Chichele and Alice de la Pole. Instead he perceived the soul 

as relegated to a series of post-mortal visions awaiting final Judgment. As Luther 

summarized, “A man tired with his daily labour...sleeps. But his soul does not sleep but is 

awake. It experiences visions and the discourses of the angels and of God.”77 He further 

suggested this variation from orthodox Church teachings by noting that “Salomon 

judgeth that the dead are asleep, and feel nothing at all. For the dead lie there accepting 

neither days nor years, but when are awaked, they shall seem to have slept scarce one 

minute.”78 Similarly, thoughts concerning the thinness of temporal boundaries were 

suggested by other prominent theologians, including Jan Hus whose example as a 

forerunner of reformist ecclesiastical thought had an impact on leading theologians 

throughout Europe a century later, including Martin Luther.79 This concept of a “sleeping 

soul” that operates outside of chronological order and did not proceed through an 

                                                           
77 As quoted in Dave Armstrong, Martin Luther: Catholic Critical Analysis and Praise (Raleigh, 

NC: Lulu.com Books/Barnes and Noble, 2008), 110. See Martin Luther, “Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 

21-25” in Luther's Works, vol. 4, eds. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, and Walter A. Hansen, trans. George Victor 

Schick (Saint-Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1964), 313. 

 
78 See Martin Luther, An Exposition of Salomon’s Booke, called Ecclesiastes or the Preacher, 

1553, folio 151v. 

 
79 Hus’ death was noted extensively in Luther’s funerary sermon by Johann Bugenhagen (1485–

1558), including references to chronological anachronisms: “But in this sorrow we should also rightly 

recognize God’s grace and mercy to us and thank God that he has awakened for us through his Spirit this 

dear Dr. Martin Luther … only one hundred years after the death of the holy John Hus (who was killed for 

the sake of the truth in the year 1415), just as John Hus himself prophesied before his death about a future 

swan. Hus means "goose" in the Bohemian language. ‘You are now roasting a goose,’ (says John Hus), ‘but 

God will awaken a swan whom you will not burn or roast.’ And as they shouted much against him, which 

he could not answer, he supposedly said: ‘After one hundred years I will answer you. He has done that 

uprightly through our dear father, Dr. Luther, and has begun it precisely in the one-hundred-and-first year. 

Bugenhagen’s sermon is entitled “A Christian sermon over the body and at the funeral of the venerable Dr. 

Martin Luther, preached by Mr. Johann Bugenhagen Pomeranus, doctor and pastor of the churches in 

Wittenberg.” See Kurt K. Hendel, Johannes Bugenhagen: Selected Writings, vols. 1 and 2 (Augsburg: 

Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2015), 111. See also Hans-Martin Barth, The Theology of Martin Luther: A 

Critical Assessment (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), esp. 277–78. 

 



119 
 

immediate realm of an afterlife was anathema to widespread Church beliefs, resulting in 

condemnation of Luther’s teachings.80  

 Relating to images and other aspects of death, it was not until decades after 

posting his theses at Wittenberg that Luther would broach the topic in his sermons and 

letters, only then detailing his thoughts on the process of dying and immortality. This 

exploration became heavily pronounced in the later years of his ministry, including after 

the death of his second daughter Magdalena (1529–1542),81 followed soon by the death 

of his close friend George Spalatin (1484–1545).82 These events dovetailed with Luther’s 

changing attitudes toward death as he reconsidered the casting off of the material body, 

the propriety of masses for the dead, and the ethos of the soul on its eternal journey.83 A 

pronounced amount of Luther’s contentions about mortality, the soul, and an afterlife 

were written as he was grieving his daughter’s death:  

Then, [Luther] address[ed] her: “My little Magdalena, my little girl, soon you will 

not be with me, will you be happy without your father?” The tired child tenderly 

and softly answered: “Yes, dear father, as God wants.” Soon, we put her in the 

coffin. … “Ah! Sweet Lenchen,” he says, “you will rise again and you will shine 

like a star, yes, like the sun! I am happy in the spirit, but my earthly form is very 

sad.” …[H]e wrote to Justus Jonas: “I believe the report has reached you that my 

dearest daughter Magdalena has been reborn into Christ's eternal kingdom. …. the 

                                                           
80 Armstrong, Martin Luther, 105.  

 
81 Magdalena was pre-deceased by her sister Elizabeth (1527–1528), who did not survive infancy.  

 
82 Georg(e) Spalatin was the pseudo name of Georg Burkhardt. He emerged as a leading leader of 

the Reformation and was heavily involved with associations and conversations with churches and 

educational institutions throughout Saxony.  His pseudo name is a Latinized variation of Spalt-Spalatimer, 

his birthplace near Nuremberg. See Henry Eyster Jacobs, “Spalatin, George,” in Lutheran Cyclopedia (New 

York: Scribner, 1899), 450. 

 
83 See David V. N. Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists, 1518–1525 

(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009). 

 



120 
 

force of our natural love is so great that we are unable to do this without crying 

and grieving in our hearts, or even without experiencing death ourselves.” 84 

The effect of Magdalena’s death overwhelmed both parents, with Luther mournfully 

writing the epitaph for his child, whom he refers to as a “daughter of death”: “I, 

Magdalena, Luther’s dear child/Sleep softly with all the saints,/And lie in my quiet and 

rest./Now I am our God’s guest./I was a child of death,/Borne by my mother of mortal 

seed./Now I live and am rich in God,/Thanks to Christ’s blood and death.”85 The use of 

an epitaph in which the deceased person speaks directly to the living, a trope also 

incorporated in the tomb of Henry Chichele, was a well-established literary device by the 

sixteenth century.86 Luther also referenced reactions to death in starkly visual terms, 

suggesting the conflicting responses to images that arose throughout the Reformation. In 

his sermons, he specifically notes the importance of considering images (Bilder) of dying, 

sin, and hell as in his sermon On Preparing to Die (1519):  

Death looms so large and is terrifying because our foolish and fainthearted nature 

has etched its image too vividly within itself and constantly fixes its gaze on it. 

Moreover, the devil presses man to look closely at the gruesome mien and image 

of death to add to his worry, timidity, and despair. Indeed, he conjures up before 

man’s eyes all the kinds of sudden and terrible death ever seen, heard, or read by 

man. You must look at death while you are alive and see sin in the light of grace 

and hell in the light of heaven, permitting nothing to divert you from that view. 87 

                                                           
84 See Scott H. Hendrix, Martin Luther: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University 

Press, 2010), 76.  

 
85 Dormio cum sanctis hic Magdalena, Lutheri/Filia et hoc strato tecta quiesco meo./Filia mortis 

eram, peccati semine nata,/ Sanguine sed vivo, Christe, redempta tuo. See Carl P. E. Springer, “Death and 

Life after Death in Martin Luther’s Latin Elegies,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Upsaliensis, Proceedings 

of the Fourteenth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, vols. 1 and 2 (Uppsala 2009), ed. Astrid 

Steiner-Weber (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 1049–059, at 1052.  

 
86 Bradley DePew, “Wordsworth on Epitaph: Language, Genre, Mortality,” ELH 79, no. 4 

(2012): 963–88, esp. 967; Vogler, Bernard, “Attitudes devant la Mort et Cérémonies Funèbres dans les 

Églises Protestantes Rhénanes vers 1600,” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 20, no. 39 

(1975): 139–46, esp. 139–40. 
 
87 See Martin Luther, “‘Ein Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben’ und ‘die spatmittelalterliche 

Ars Moriendi,’” Lutherjahrbuch 48 (1981): 97–114, at 97.  



121 
 

 

The confluence between mortality and resurrection suggests that Luther posited that 

death was ultimately containable.88 His later sermons appeared to introduce a 

confrontation with Death, a point that Christine Helmer suggests “possibly intended to 

mock the finitude of death itself.”89 Through the Resurrection, the nature and function of 

death and the soul changed, a point recast and debated throughout Luther’s teachings.  

 These debates were both conceptualized and visually presented in churches such 

as Saint Anna’s, with memorial epitaphs being a visual reminder and blurring of ongoing 

theological divides and growing rifts about death. By comparing the foundations of 

Lutheran thought with dominant church beliefs, we find differing theological concepts 

about images of death and the afterlife, and their resonance for the Fuggers and viewers 

of their relief epitaphs in Saint Anna’s Church over the decades. These ongoing debates 

about memorial and remembrance were pervasive in the Early Modern period, as were 

public reactions to and considerations of death and dying. Indeed, “the most common use 

of the word memory revolved around the relationship of the living and the dead.”90 This 

association—and the examples of full transi tombs or epitaphs that use the corpse motif, 

as with the Fuggers in Saint Anna’s Church—forced the viewer to consider his or her 

own imminent demise and reflected a larger connection with the experiences of all of the 

dead. Christ’s death, particularly in relation to the possibility of earthly decay beyond the 

                                                           
 

88 See Christine Helmer, “God from Eternity to Eternity: Luther’s Trinitarian Understanding,” The 

Harvard Theological Review 96, no. 2 (Apr., 2003): 127–46.  

 
89 Ibid., 134.  

 
90 Sherlock, Reformation of Memory, 31. 

 



122 
 

promise of the Resurrection, links humans and God in the same shared experience. The 

Resurrection, especially in relation to the Last Judgment, was considered a promise of 

immortality of the soul post mortem. The shared and finite confine of mortality was 

believed to be one, however, that must be experienced first. Images of the earthly demise 

of humankind’s collective mortal coil synthesized the living with the experiences of the 

dead. The implications of this finding and its application to the concept of the divine will 

be explored in the subsequent chapter.  

 

  



123 
 

CHAPTER 5:  

RECONSIDERING HANS HOLBEIN’S THE DEAD CHRIST IN THE TOMB AS 

TRANSI, EFFIGY, AND RESURRECTION 

 

Explication and Analysis of The Dead Christ and its Impact 

Hans Holbein the Younger painted The Dead Christ in the Tomb in oil on 

limewood between 1521 and 1522.1 The current frame is a later addition to the work, 

most likely added in the nineteenth century. At roughly eighty inches long and only 

twelve inches wide, the narrow panel dimensions compare well with the cramped 

dimensions of an actual tomb, into which we see a privileged view, as if through a 

cutaway of one side panel (figure 5.1). The painting itself remains a non-narrative, 

unflinching look at Christ’s suffering conveyed through a forthright image of his corpse. 

Jonathan Jones summarizes contemporary visitors’ responses today to this shocking view 

of mortality, one that, in confronting death so directly, has been seemingly shared for 

centuries since the work’s creation:  

It is difficult…to think of the object before you as a painting. It is a dead body 

that lies at eye level in a recess in the museum wall. And yet even as you admire 

Holbein's skill in painting it, you respond to the corpse not as a painted figure at 

all – but as a dead body. The painting is wide and low, the height and length of a 

coffin, and this is crucial to its disturbing effect. The painted tomb serves purely 

to hold the body and display its shocking details: dark blood caked on a wound 

made by a spear; the ridged hollowness of the ribcage; those small, unseeing eyes. 

There is nothing Christlike about this body, nothing to set it apart. It is anyone's 

corpse. Holbein presents it as naturally and clinically as a pathologist showing 

                                                           
1 The Basel Kunstmuseum utilizes these completion dates in its description and catalog. The 

variation is notable only in that the painting itself includes the year 1521. Earlier research did indicate a 

completion date of 1522 based upon X-ray findings. See Hans Reinhardt, “Das Entstehungsjahr des toten 

Christus von Hans Holbein D. J.,” Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 20, no. 

1 (1960): 41.  

 



124 
 

you an accident victim on a hospital mortuary slab. Few artists have ever exposed 

our fate more ruthlessly.2 

This fate is all the more shocking if the modern viewer believes that Resurrection is not 

possible. A consideration of the Dead Christ in relation to the longer transi tomb 

phenomenon with which the presumed viewers would have been familiar, however, leads 

to a novel interpretation of Holbein’s painting that places Christ in both a position of true 

death and simultaneously as in the process of Resurrection. The image of Christ as a 

corpse suggests interpretations of the divine that, echoing the words of Erwin Panofsky, 

are “transforming the ousia (reality) into the phainomenon (appearance), seem[ing] to 

reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness.”3 By calling on this 

tomb tradition, Holbein’s painting conflates Christ’s corpse as an effigy, transi, and 

resurrected body into one centralized image, expanding upon the depiction of the divine 

while also suggesting unique reconstructions of appearances and physical matter, 

reflecting contemporary reformist attitudes about death and the body. This problem is 

further compounded by the shift from its original location, as this loss of context and its 

placement in a museum further isolates it from considerations of mortuary tradition. 

The Dead Christ is believed to have been commissioned by the Basel printer, 

Bonifacius Amerbach (1495–1562), and came into the collection of his son Basilius 

Amerbach (1533–1591), a humanist and professor of jurisprudence at the University of 

                                                           
2 Jonathan Jones, “Holbein’s Dead Christ Delivers a Shock,” The Guardian, June 18, 2009. 

 
3 Jeff J. A. Gatrall, “Between Iconoclasm and Silence: Representing the Divine in Holbein and 

Dostoevskii,” Comparative Literature 53, no. 3 (2001): 214–32, at 217.  

 



125 
 

Basel.4 Both men were avid collectors of engravings, coins, and various antiquities.5 The 

painting’s owners do not appear to have publicly displayed it in a family chapel, for 

example, due to the increasingly hostile sentiments about religious images in Basel and 

fears of iconoclasm. Rather, Holbein’s painting entered directly into the Kunstkabinett of 

Basilius.6  It was first inventoried in 1587 as “an image of a dead man [by] HHolbein on 

wood with oil colors.”7 A small marginal comment reads “cum titulo Iesus Nazarenus rex 

J[udaeorum],” referring to Holbein’s painted inscription above, which itself refers to the 

titulus Crucis, the piece of wood nailed at the top of the Cross mocking the name of 

Christ as King of the Jews and inscribed in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.8  

For its narrow form, the Dead Christ has been interpreted as having been intended 

originally as part of an altarpiece—namely, as the predella, or Sarg—similar to the same 

section of Matthias Grünewald’s (1470–1528) Isenheim Altarpiece (1516), where he 

instead features a joint Lamentation and Entombment scene (figure 5.2).9 While the 

                                                           
4 Ibid., 216. 

 
5 Meilan Solly, “Researchers Unlock Secrets of Basel Papyrus,” accessed April 7, 2019. 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-unlock-secrets-basel-papyrus-now-identified-

late-antiquity-medical-document-180969625/ 

 
6 Giulia Bartrum Review of Hans Holbein der Jüngere: Die Jahre in Basel 1515–1532 (Basel, 

Kunstmuseum, 1 April–2 July, 2006) by Christian Müller, Renaissance Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 266–70. 

 
7 The entry from Basilius Amerbach’s inventory reads “Ein todten bild H. Holbein vf holtz mit 

olfarben cum titilo Iesus Nazarenus Rex.” See Arthur Bensley Chamberlain, Hans Holbein the Younger, 

vol. 1 (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1913), at 102. 

 
8 Translated as “with the titulus Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” For a discussion on the 

evolution of the titulus, see Mitchell Merback, “Recognitions: Theme and Metatheme in Hans Burgkmair 

the Elder's ‘Santa Croce in Gerusalemme’ of 1504,” The Art Bulletin 96, no. 3 (2014): 288–318; David 

Areford, “Multiplying the Sacred: The Fifteenth-Century Woodcut as Reproduction, Surrogate, 

Simulation,” Studies in the History of Art 75 (2009): 118–53, esp. 135–38.   

   
9 See Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein (Cologne: DuMo, 2012), 89. 

 



126 
 

subject of the Entombment was common for predellas, it is likely that Holbein’s father 

also had taken him to view Grünewald’s work, particularly as the elder Holbein was 

commissioned to complete a series of paintings for hospitals in Isenheim by 1517, when 

Holbein the Younger was still part of his workshop.10 The ragged depiction of Christ’s 

wounds, especially those of his feet and hands, suggests additional commonalities 

between the Dead Christ and Grünewald’s work. The positioning of Christ’s body, 

especially his legs and feet, further shows distinct similarities between the two paintings.  

Scholars have proposed a series of other possible explanations concerning the odd 

narrow format of the piece and its original purpose.11 Suggestions have ranged from it 

being a replacement for a stone figure within an Easter sepulcher, or as a work for display 

within the town hall of Basel, functioning as both an altarpiece and as a municipal 

showcase work of art.12 Additional suggestions include the possibility of it being a cover 

for a tomb, a conclusion likely tethered to the strong similarity in dimensions between the 

painting and the lid of a coffin.13 Many of these findings suggest that researchers 

interpreted the work to be part of a more expansive design, a conclusion that was 

                                                           
10 Barbara Butts, Lee Hendrix, and Scott C. Wolf, with The John Paul Getty Museum and St. 

Louis Art Museum, Painting on Light: Drawings and Stained Glass in the Age of Dürer and Holbein (St. 

Louis, MO: St. Louis Art Museum, 2000), 189. 

 
11 These suggestions are adroitly summarized in Bernd W. Lindemann, “‘The Dead Christ in the 

Tomb,’ Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532, eds. Christian Müller, Stephan 

Kemperdick and Maryan W. Ainsworth (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 257–59.   

 
12  In relation to the possiblity of an Easter reference, see Walter Überwasser, “Hans Holbein d. J. 

Christus in der Gräbnische,“ Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 18 (1958): 

187–88. The liturgical and municipal intepretations are explored in Heinz Klotz, “Holbeins ‘Leichnam 

Christi im Grabe,’” Offentliche Kunstsammlung Basel (Basel: Jahresberichte 1964–1966),110–32. 

 
13 See Tat'iana Kasatkina, “After Seeing the Original: Hans Holbein the Younger’s ‘Body of the 

Dead Christ in the Tomb’ in the Structure of Dostoevsky’s ‘Idiot,’” Russian Studies in Literature: A 

Journal of Translations 47, no. 3 (2011): 73–97, esp. 80. 

 



127 
 

countered by later research such as that of Herbert von Einem, who advanced the finding 

that the panel was done solely as an independent work, complete in itself.14 Christian 

Müller, curator at the Basel Kunstmuseum, has argued that the painting was first 

commissioned by Amerbach but originally designed for private use within the Basel 

Charterhouse of the Carthusian Monastery.15 Variations between the painting’s date of 

origin and its eventual installation add to this conundrum. It does seem possible that the 

painting was expected to be displayed in the Carthusian Monastery, but was pre-empted 

by the rise of the Reformation in Basel and the emergence of iconoclastic outbursts.16 So 

instead, it became part of the private Kunstkabinett of Basilius with numerous other 

works by Holbein, which would form a significant portion of the Basel Kunstmuseum 

when the city purchased the collection in 1661.17   

As previously mentioned, the physical elements of the painting are stark. The 

body is positioned within a closely cropped border and up close to the picture plane, such 

that little space exists between the edges of the frame and the corpse, and between the 

viewer and the corpse. The close quarters of the cramped painted space are seemingly 

broken in two ways, as Christ’s hand and some of his hair appears to break the so-called 

“fourth wall” and approach the viewer directly. The crypt into which Christ has been 

placed is a flat surface, completely covered in a flowing white veil, the same material of 

                                                           
14 Herbert von Einem, “Holbeins ‘Christus im Grabe,’” Kunstchronik 13, no. 10 (1960), 298. 

 
15 Christian Müller, Holbeins Gemälde “Der Leichnam Christi im Grabe” und die Grabkapelle 

der Familie Amerbach in der Basler Kartause (Zurich: Karl Schwegler AG, 2001).  

 
16 See Bernhard Mendes Bürgi and Bodo Brinkmann, Holbein. Cranach. Grünewald: 

Masterpieces from the Kunstmuseum (Basel: Kuntsmusem Basel, 2016), 6.  

 
17 David J. Roxburgh, The Persian Album, 1400-1600: From Dispersal to Collection (New Haven: 

Yale University Press, 2005), 325. 



128 
 

which surrounds Christ’s midsection—perhaps referencing the linen shroud belonging to 

Joseph of Arimathea. The shroud slightly bunches at his elbow, with more distinct folds 

emerging near his hands and feet. Unlike the results of the wounds on his hands, feet, and 

side, the wounds around Christ’s head are not apparent save for a few bloody blemishes.  

Radiography suggests a slightly different original work visible in the 

underdrawing, one replicated in a silverpoint sketch most likely completed by an 

apprentice in Holbein’s studio at the time of the painting’s creation (figure 5.3).18 

Although the claw of Christ’s hand and his half-opened eyes and mouth do appear in the 

silverpoint sketch, the representation of the corpse does not rise to the same level of 

verisimilitude afforded by the coloration with oil paint. In the painting Holbein adds to 

his underdrawing conception by building out through paint the composition of color, 

light, and anatomical details. Tension across a furrowed brow becomes more salient 

through the use of oils.  Holbein slackens Christ’s jaw, while adding pronounced teeth 

and gums to an elongated mouth. By slightly altering the poise to foreshorten the limbs 

and direction of Christ’s flowing hair, Holbein more effectively breaks the fourth wall, 

connecting the unfolding drama with the viewer in a more substantial manner.  Similarly, 

the movement of light that accompanies the rejuvenation of Christ’s body in Holbein’s 

final work is not indicated in the underdrawing. The depth and complexity of the human 

body, wonderfully mastered in paint by Holbein who highlights the persuasive 

dimensionality and modeling of the body even in the details of the tautness of the body’s 

sinews and desiccated muscles and flesh, are lacking in the silverpoint sketch. 

                                                           
18 For more information on the silverpoint drawing and its origin, see Winnipeg Art Gallery, 

“Hans Holbein, ‘The Dead Christ in the Tomb,’ c. 1521,” accessed November 1, 2018, 

http://wag.ca/art/collections/works-on-paper/display,collection/48391.  



129 
 

The anatomically suggestive rendering of death in Christ’s face, hands, and feet 

are startling and disconcerting focal points for the painting’s profound visual impact on 

the viewer (figure 5.4). Christ’s eyes are partially open, with barely half of the iris and 

pupil being visible, as if the eyes have rolled backwards into his head. The cheeks are 

sunken and clearly desiccated, which in combination with the slack jawline pulls the 

mouth open, showing the ridges of the teeth and gums. The combination of the half-open 

eyes and mouth creates an image of Christ being in mid-breath or in pronounced rigor 

mortis, as almost in a state of perpetual asphyxiation. Christ’s hands are similarly 

rendered, with the fingers either splayed in a post-mortem claw or as grasping at the cloth 

between it. Parts of the tomb’s interior and the body are covered in a slightly viridis tone, 

signaling in painted color the end of the circulation of blood.  

Unlike the remainder of the body, Christ’s feet and hands appear to be bathed in a 

green and gangrenous hue near his wounds.  Comparatively, the seemingly washed side 

wound is far less pronounced and is surrounded by a light bruising with a slight stream of 

blood near it. The blood on Christ’s hands is coagulated, with the oil forming a deep 

ridge along the boundaries of the wound (figure 5.5). The coagulation of blood is 

intensified by the condensed flakes of paint. The darkened redness of the blood stands in 

stark contrast to the green back and fingers of the hand, and the blanched pink of the 

interior of Christ’s mouth. His cheeks and nose are similarly covered in the same green 

shade, with his neck muscles being noticeably more relaxed than his taught cheeks and 

jaw. Christ’s abdomen shows little signs of the same decay. His upper torso is lean, and 

the muscles of his chest, thighs, and upper calves are full and textured, with his calves 

and triceps being particularly well-defined. The muscles near his collarbone and ribs are 



130 
 

noticeably distinct, as is his navel, although it is positioned slightly lower than what 

would be anatomically correct, emphasizing the stretched-out position of the corpse. The 

outstretched finger of Christ is foreshortened and extends out of the picture plane. This 

same technique is suggested in Christ’s right foot, which also breaks the picture plane 

slightly at the heel. The feet are flush with the bottom of the tomb, where Holbein has 

inscribed the completion date of the painting and his initials.  

The interior of a closed coffin would obviously be completely darkened, but 

Holbein cleverly has included distinct references to light. For example, the interior side 

of Christ’s feet and lower extremities are illuminated (figure 5.6). The same centralized 

beam of light progresses up Christ’s mid-section, splaying a natural light across his 

abdomen. The light maintains roughly a thirty-five to forty-degree angle from the base of 

the tomb at Christ’s feet to his chin, with more light appearing at the base of the coffin. 

The suggestion of movement of the light leading from the base toward the top of Christ’s 

neck adds to the unfolding drama. The division between the light at Christ’s jawline is 

evident and creates a particularly jarring effect. As Lorne Campbell notes, the 

demarcation of light at Christ’s jaw creates a sense of horror, seeming to separate the 

body even more by bifurcating the treatment of the head from the remainder of the 

body.19 Holbein has included no outward signs of decay that parallel that of Christ’s 

hands, face, or feet wherever the light touches. It may be interpreted that Holbein’s 

painting draws focus to the parts of Christ’s body that were primarily affected by the 

                                                           
19 Lorne Campbell, review of Holbein: The Paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger, Complete 

Edition, by John Rowlands, Burlington Magazine 128, no. 5 (1986): 149–51. 

 



131 
 

Passion, with the less notable treatment of the wound at his side and only slight 

suggestion of abrasions from a crown of thorns.  

Viewers’ reactions to Dead Christ crystallize along specific spectra. First, the 

sheer mortality and blunt depiction of death are tied to this larger test of faith by creating 

doubt in the likelihood or possibility of Christ’s Resurrection. Olga Meerson summarizes 

this ongoing view as both an oft-noted crisis of faith and as a direct exploration of 

Christ’s humanity, noting “human emotions as anguish, compassion...the emotions and 

temptations of which Christ Himself partook.”20 More than a reflection on the mortal 

decay of Christ’s body, an emotional connection is established between the viewer and 

subject, positioning Christ as not only memento mori, but also as empathic prototype. 

Holbein and Navigating Death through the Reformation  

Holbein’s Dead Christ thematizes novel interpretations of death that illustrate the 

triumph of painting and emergent theologies within the Northern Renaissance and 

Reformation. His career spans across the first half of the sixteenth century, employed the 

use of disparate media and took place in significant reform locations in western Europe 

and may have served as a bridge across artistic traditions to accompany shifts in viewing 

audiences. Holbein’s career usually is described as following four distinct stages of 

development, each situated along specific geographical locations: his artistic formation in 

Augsburg (1497 or 1498–1519), training and working under his father and brother, also 

formidable painters; his activities in Basel when he painted the Dead Christ (1519–1526); 

                                                           
20 Olga Meerson, “Ivolgin and Holbein: Non-Christ Risen vs. Christ Non-Risen,” The Slavic and 

East European Journal 39, no. 2 (1995): 200–13.  

 



132 
 

his first English period and subsequent return to Basel (1526–1532); and his second 

English period (1532–1543), when he left Basel in iconoclastic throes for a more stable 

and promising career back in England, where he finally earned a position at the English 

court.21 Historiographically, Holbein’s works have been seen as an extension of earlier 

Netherlandish and Germanic artistic traditions, on one hand, and as rudimentary 

digestions of Italian ones, on the other.22  

Pierre Coulanjon has argued that Holbein the Younger’s work emblematizes not 

only a strong break from his father and brother’s earlier creations, but also provides a 

synthesis of earlier religious and secular traditions, all culminating in a novel humanist 

approach to painting characteristic of the Northern Renaissance.23 Holbein’s work is 

underscored by a focus on mimesis and naturalism, prompting his contemporaries to 

remark: “[Y]ou wish to see pictures that perfectly resemble life? Behold this work by 

Holbein’s noble hand.”24 This tradition of humanism, naturalism, and portraiture—

Holbein’s specialty in artistic genres—earmarks Holbein as a catalyst for the changing 

ideological and socio-artistic patterns that were sweeping across Europe in the early 

                                                           
21 Campbell, Paintings of Hans Holbein, 149–51. 

 
22 The trajectory of Holbein’s work as an extension of these traditions is explored in Wilhelm 

Pinder, “Holbein der Jungere and das Ende der altdeutschen Kunst, vom Wesen und Werden deustcher 

Formen,” Geschichtliche Betrachtungern (Cologne: E. A. Seeman, 1951), 18–30. Holbein’s historic artistic 

connection to Italy is described in Jean Rousseau, Hans Holbein (Paris: Librarie d’Art, Jules Rouam, 1885), 

70.  

 
23 See Pierre Coulanjon, “Holbein,” Les Cahiers de la Peinture 12, no. 183 (1985–1985): 10–12. 

 
24 “Cernere vis, hospes, simulacra simillima vivis? Hoc opus Holbinae nobile cerne manus.” From 

Nicolas Bourbon (1503–1549/50) French poet and member of King Henry VIII, quoted in Alfred 

Woltmann, “Historiarum veteris testamenti icones ad vivum expressae,” in Holbein und seine Zeit (Leipzig: 

E. A. Seemann, 1846), 172. The phrase is translated with its history in Stephanie Buck, “Hans Holbein: 

Portraitist of the Renaissance,” in Hans Holbein the Younger 1497/98–1543, eds. Stephanie Buck and 

Jochen Sander (Zwolle, Netherlands: Royal Cabinet of Paintings, Mauritshuis/Waanders Publishers, 2003), 

11–36, at 33.  

 



133 
 

sixteenth century.25 As Larry Silver summarizes, Holbein’s international affiliations and 

experiences distinguish him from his German contemporaries and positioned him in a 

uniquely entrepreneurial position.26 Overall, Holbein’s prolific oeuvre crossed media, 

styles, and scale, with highly regarded paintings, prints, drawings, and miniatures all 

being part of his eclectic artistic trajectory. By leaving Basel largely to escape the limits 

on his career posed by radical reformers and iconoclasts, and by practicing as a 

successful artist in England and Germany, two locations also deeply affected by reformist 

thought, Holbein provides a unique opportunity to analyze and reconsider how he created 

works that could sustain interpretations from viewers on both sides of the religious 

divide, including The Dead Christ.  

 Holbein’s relationship with the Reformation was a textured one and his life was 

situated along a shared axis of growing theological debates surrounding the Reformation. 

Additionally, his career was underscored by changing socio-cultural and theological 

contemplations about the role of the artist in religious contexts. Beyond a conceptual 

consideration, Holbein’s work also stakes its claim as part of a pivotal shift from 

sculpture and relief to painting as the medium best suited for the creation of convincingly 

absorptive and mental images, especially of topics that are illusory like depictions of the 

afterlife or interior of a buried coffin. This development is particularly significant, as the 

medium of paint not only became dominant throughout Europe during this period that 

                                                           
25 Holbein was particularly affected by shifts toward Renaissance humanism from earlier portrait 

traditions in Europe, which did not prioritize visual likeness as its aim. See David R. Smith, “Portrait and 

Counter-Portrait in Holbein's ‘The Family of Sir Thomas More,’” The Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005): 484–

506. 

 
26  Larry Silver, review of Albrecht Altdorfer in seiner Zeit: Religiöse und profane Themen in der 

Kunst um 1500 by Thomas Nol, The Sixteenth Century Journal 37, no.  4 (2006): 1156–158. 

 



134 
 

also witnessed the conceptual dissolution or dismantling of the altarpiece, but also 

represented new implications in the growing image debates, including the more radical 

activities of iconoclasm of the sorts that took place in Basel in 1528 and likely 

necessitated Holbein’s departure to find more steady patronage elsewhere, and to seek 

additional work in the realm of printmaking.27  

This transition is specifically relevant to Holbein’s work principally in reference 

to representation, readily explored by Jeanne Nuechterlein. She posits that Holbein opted 

to represent images in a self-fashioned manner, positioning himself as the inventor of the 

image, as opposed to his religious imagery or portraiture in which he created a 

simulacrum.28 This dichotomy between authorial style versus passive description or 

replication is suggested by Nuechterlain as a hallmark of the categorical divisions 

between the artistic invention of images compared to the reconstitution of a particular 

vision, that is, of things seen in the world. Moreover, this praxis suggests a means to 

understanding how Holbein wrestled with the details of affective verisimilitude, while 

also considering the implications of the artist’s vision. These two matters were parcel to 

the ongoing debate about the function of the artist in the Reformation and “ultimately 

suggests that Holbein consciously employed them [inventions versus reconstruction of 

images] either in isolation or combination, to comment on the nature of the visible world 

                                                           
27 Christopher S. Wood, “Michael Pacher and the Fate of the Altarpiece in Renaissance Germany,” 

Res 15 (Spring 1988): 89–104; Amy Powell, Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the 

Modern Museum (Cambridge. MA: Zone Books, 2012); and Maria H. Loh, “The Death of the Medium and 

Technologies of the New in Early Modern Italy,’ in Novità—das ‘Neue’ in der Kunst um 1600, Theorien, 

Mythen, Pratiken, eds. Ulrich Pfisterer and Gabriele Wimböck (Munich: Diaphanes, 2011), 239–61.  

 
28 Jeanne Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance 

Rhetoric (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 147–51.  



135 
 

and the artist’s role in communicating this nature.”29 Holbein’s life was practically at the 

epicenter of these theological and artistic quagmires.  

Similarly, Holbein’s response to the “image problem” that would become 

iconoclasm may have been inflected by his contacts with the humanist Erasmus of 

Rotterdam, of whom he painted multiple portraits, works that were completed in the 

throes of debate about the function of images within civic and religious life.30 The very 

function of painting caused Erasmus distress as he found it to be problematically aligned 

with the principles of Christianity, namely that images may distract viewers from the 

meanings of scripture.31 In that regard, Jürgen Müller summarized: “Again and again 

[Erasmus] spoke of the dangers that painting holds for the trusting believer: it is the 

worship of saints and religious relics that leads to confusing a representation with an 

archetype and causes Christians to adhere to a silly, yet pleasant superstition.”32 Erasmus’ 

position suggests the particularly problematic dangers of verisimilitude in paint, and also 

                                                           
 

29 Susanne Meurer, review of Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and 

Renaissance Rhetoric, by Jeanne Nuechterlein, Renaissance Quarterly 65, no. 2 (Summer, 2012): 551–52.  

 
30 This relationship between Holbein and Erasmus is explored in Hans Reinhardt, “Érasme er son 

Portraitist Hans Holbein le Jeune,” in L’Humanisme Allemande (1480 – 1540), ed. XVIIIeme Colloque 

Internationale de Tours (Paris: Vrin, 1979): 537–50. Holbein’s association with Erasmus bridged much of 

his life, with his illustrations from Erasmus’ Praise and Folly completed when Holbein was seventeen or 

eighteen years old. See Erika Michael, “The Legacy of Holbein's ‘Gedankenreichtum,’” in Hans Holbein: 

Paintings, Prints and Reception—Studies in the History of Art: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual 

Arts Symposium Papers XXXVII, eds. Mark Roskil and John Oliver Hand (Washington D. C.: National 

Gallery of Art, 2001): 226–46.  

 
31 Erwin Panofsky, “Erasmus and the Visual Arts,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld 

Institutes 32 (1969): 200–27.  

 
32 Jürgen Müller, “The Eye of the Artist: Hans Holbein's Theory of Art,” in Hans Holbein: 

Paintings, Prints and Reception—Studies in the History of Art: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual 

Arts Symposium Papers XXXVII, eds. Mark Roskil and John Oliver Hand (Washington D. C.: National 

Gallery of Art, 2001), 140–53.  

 



136 
 

is a statement concerning the function and visuality of appearance of Kunst from Bild and 

ontology, a concept further explored by Hans Belting and Thomas Dunlap who noted 

differences between the appearance and reception of the image versus the elements of its 

actual content.33  

Prints—a medium wholly unconducive to verisimilitude—gave Holbein a 

relatively safe outlet to explore these issues about the problem of representation and the 

role of images, if not religious ones, in public and civic life, key artistic issues at stake 

during the Reformation. Namely, his woodcut cycle of Pictures of Death, designed by 

1526, but not published until 1538, played with the Totentanz, or Death’s Dance, 

tradition.34 As Kathi Meyer-Baer explains, “The skeleton is the leader and is intended to 

represent death.... The figure is usually leading his partner quietly very seldom is he in 

lively action, almost never is he dancing or fighting with his partner.”35 Images of a 

peaceful death and reactions to it underscored the ideologies of the Reformation, with a 

host of Basel-based artists exploring the connection.36 For example, The Ship of Fools by 

Sebastian Brant, published in Basel in 1494, had already been exploring pervasive 

characteristics in the depiction of Death that emblematized the skeletal presence and 

                                                           
33 See Hans Belting and Thomas Dunlap, eds., An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, 

Body (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), esp. 84–87.  

 
34 Holbein’s Pictures of Death is cataloged as Les Simulachres ez Historiees Faces de la Mor, 

aurantv elegammen! pourtraictes, que arztficiellemen imaginees, A Lyon: Soubz l'escu de Coloigne. 

Excudebant Lugduni Melchior et Gaspar Trechsel Fratres, 1538, B ivV C ir, C iV, C iiV (Pierpont Morgan 

Library.)  

 
35 Kathi Meyer-Baer, Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death: Studies in Musical Iconology 

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 299. 

 
36 For an exploration of exploration between public perceptions of death and the Reformation and 

how the two are explored through Basel based artists, see Alfred Berchtold, Bâle et l’Europe: Une Histoire 

Culturelle (Lausanne, Switzerland: Payot, 1990). 

 



137 
 

costuming.37 In fact, one could argue that the foundation for Holbein’s own artistic 

elaborations on death and his characterization of its role within the Reformation was 

likely established well before the publishing of his oft-noted depictions of Death in 

Pictures of Death. In working through his designs for the Pictures of Death in the early 

1520s, Holbein’s characterization of death was explored in multiple facets to sustain a 

broad and anonymous audience, around the time of the Dead Christ’s creation. As Peter 

Parshall summarizes:  

[Holbein] matured in a political and religious climate that by 1525, when the 

designs for the Pictures of Death were probably completed, lay on the threshold of 

what the historian Donald Kelley has termed ‘the beginning of ideology.’ By this 

Kelley means a Europe driven by polarized beliefs and rapidly moving beyond a 

point of conciliation or the reasonable exchange of opinion. Basel's liberal 

humanist community centered around its active, internationally connected 

printing industry, which had already begun to serve Lutheran interests by 1520.38  

This conclusion positions Holbein not only as being fundamentally affected by 

Reformation debates and divisions, but also as working in the very nexus of disparate 

theological and political thoughts in Basel, a situation that was mirrored during his earlier 

time in Augsburg prior to 1515.39  

                                                           
37 For more information on the proliferation of images of Death during Holbein’s era and its 

ongoing legacy, see Christiane Hertel, “Dis/Continuities in Dresden’s Dances of Death,” The Art Bulletin 

82, no. 1 (2000): 83–116.  

 
38 Peter Parshall, “Hans Holbein’s ‘Pictures of Death,” in Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and 

Reception—Studies in the History of Art: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Symposium Papers 

XXXVII, ed. Mark Roskil and John Oliver Hand (Washington D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 2001), 82–95, 

at 83. 

 
39 Katharine Baetjer, “A Portrait by Holbein the Younger,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 

57, no. 1 (1979); 24–29, esp. 24. 

 



138 
 

Holbein’s Pictures of Death garnered attention throughout Europe beyond the public 

response toward the Dead Christ.40 Death is portrayed as culling souls regardless of 

social station, effortlessly thwarting powerful regimes (figure 5.7) or assisting mortals 

with their final labors (figure 5.8). Though in a completely different way from the Dead 

Christ, Holbein’s Pictures of Death woodcuts make room for the viewer’s interpretation 

to complete the meaning of the work.41 By positioning Death as perpetually extant and 

omnipresent while moving across a wide swath of people, Holbein invited the viewer to 

see death as a constant presence in life, a potential extension of Basel’s liberal humanist 

ideology that tethered the Resurrection to that certainty.42 Although Holbein incorporated 

several of these same themes of representation into his earlier works, the Dead Christ 

exemplifies a complex shift in execution and more demands on the viewer to contemplate 

mortality. Holbein’s work resonates anew if we consider it within this context as itself a 

painted extension of the transi phenomenon. A consideration of Holbein’s work as a 

verifiable new form of transi has not yet been considered, nor has its links to Basel as a 

center for iconoclastic concerns about matter and medium. 

 

 

                                                           
40 For information regarding the public reaction to Holbein’s Pictures of Death, see Natalie Zemon 

Davis, “Holbein's Pictures of Death and the Reformation at Lyons,” Studies in the Renaissance 3 (1956): 

97–130, esp. 104–07. 

 
41 Ibid, 85–86. For a summary of the extensive literature on the series, see Stephanie Buck, 

“International Exchange: Holbein at the Crossroads of Art and Craftsmanship,” in Hans Holbein: 

Paintings, Prints, and Reception—Studies in the History of Art: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual 

Arts Symposium Papers XXXVII, eds. Mark Roskil and John Oliver Hand (Washington D. C.: National 

Gallery of Art, 2001), 54–71, esp. 54.  

 
42 K. J. Wilson, “More and Holbein: The Imagination of Death,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 7, 

no. 1 (1976): 51–58. 



139 
 

The Ontological Turn of The Dead Christ and its Legacy 

One might well envision Holbein’s work within a larger interpretation as a 

rendering not only of Christ and an anonymous corpse, but also as the personification of 

Death within a larger theological trajectory. Seeing Holbein’s work within the 

conventions of Renaissance portraiture at this time, in a desire for visual likeness and 

descriptive detail, introduces new perspectives, ones that as Nancy Struever has 

suggested, “do…‘social work,’ and that in the contemporary Lutheran artists’ practice, 

the portrait ‘gives order and establishes order, positioning bodies in social space.’”43 As 

the Reformation continued to take hold throughout Europe, a reconsideration of 

memorials and tombs also occurred. The alterations in graves and their purpose within 

the larger sphere of sacred spaces was noted by Paul Binski, who differentiated between 

the construction of tombs and their larger theological function as elements of sacred 

space.44 Binski’s work suggests that tomb construction in the medieval period was 

underscored by a belief in an ongoing dialogue of mutual and transactional obligation 

between the living and the dead. A series of religious and socio-cultural elements events 

were heralds for this growing art historical movement.  

Holbein has been typically regarded as one of the leading portraitists of the 

Northern Renaissance by both his contemporaries and current day scholars, a master in 

the handling of oil paint to achieve naturalistic effects.45The naturalism of his Dead 

                                                           
43 Nancy S. Struever, review of Translating Nature into Art; Holbein, the Reformation, and 

Renaissance Rhetoric by Jeanne Nuechterlein, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 30, no. 1 

(2012): 102–04, esp. 102. 

 
44 Binski, Medieval Death, 14–22; 70–122. 

 
45 Buck, Hans Holbein, 5, 11. 

  



140 
 

Christ has been characterized in deeply personal terms. Details of bodily internal 

hemorrhaging and decay are immediately evident upon viewing it, and the effect is 

jarring. A link to earlier styles of artistic representation has been suggested in other works 

by Holbein, particularly in situating himself in direct artistic lineage with early 

Netherlandish painting, namely in Van Eyck’s manner of illusionistic naturalism enabled 

by a mastery of oil paint and erasure of traces of the hand in the form of brushstrokes.46  

In particular, the Dead Christ has been referred to as an audacious transformation of the 

theme of Entombment. 47  The painting’s impact lingers as it suggests the interior of a 

claustrophobic coffin with the jarring and all too evident effects of death.    

With Christ’s half-opened mouth, askew eyes, and facial expressions, Holbein 

creates a complex visage of individual and universal experience. As Jeanette Kohl and 

Dominic Olariu propose,“[T]he belief in images and image-making all overlap in the 

face. The face as a high-density system of physically operating sensory signals and their 

finely tuned choreography represents the person more than anything else. Often enough 

we think of a face as identity.”48 This facial meaning, however, is beyond mere 

recognition but is instead, as Maria A. Loh concludes, “about bodies being transformed 

into data through significance and subjectification. These faces reterritorialise the bodies 

                                                           
46 For an exploration of other works that parallel the incorporation of a Van Eyckian tradition, 

particularly in consideration of Holbein’s ‘Solothum Madonna’, see Mark Evans, “Holbein. Basel. 

London,” Burlington Magazine 149, no. 1246 (2007): 58–61. 

 
47 On aspects of portraying the Entombment, see Jochen Sander, “The Darmstadt Madonna: On 

the Genesis of Holbein’s Panel for Jakob Meye zum Hasen,” in Hans Holbein the Younger 1497/98–1543, 

eds. Stephanie Buck and Jochen Sander (Zwolle, Netherlands: Royal Cabinet of Paintings 

Mauritshuis/Waanders Publishers, 2003), 32–45. For reactions to Holbein’s work and to The Body of the 

Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521) in particular, consult the seminal work of Julia Kristeva, “On the 

Melancholic Imaginary,” new formations 3 (Winter, 1987): 5–18, esp. 5 and 12–14. 

 
48 Jeanette Kohl and Dominic Olariu, En Face: Seven Essays on the Human Face, Special Issue of 

Kritische Berichte (Marburg, Germany: Jonas, 2012), 3.  



141 
 

attached to them … which in turn naturalises the construction of these ‘individuals’ along 

similar terms.”49 The ecumenical and liturgical function of Holbein’s painting can be 

considered by positioning the body of Christ not as a simultaneous effigy and a transi, a 

cadaver not of stone but of paint, caught in limbo between death and resurrection, 

between individual identity and universal experience. 

Christ’s mortality is stressed through the depiction of his tortured body and seems 

impossible to overcome. The promise of the life-affirming blood of Jesus Christ, so 

readily provided to humankind as a saving balm in myriad artistic depictions, is here 

coagulated and festered, an apparently all too lifeless thing. The decaying body that had 

been suggested through transi sculptures instead bore a verisimilitude that mirrored the 

rot of septic and decomposing flesh. The contradictions of representations of corpses with 

earlier depictions of the dead are pronounced. Contrary to the vibrant images painted 

above the transi of Alice de la Pole, Holbein opted to depict God’s incarnate body with 

the hues of gangrenous rigor mortis.  The waxy smoothness of Henry Chichele’s transi 

and the curves of pristine alabaster in Alice de la Pole’s shroud facilitated a tactile 

response from the viewer, mollifying the shock of death. Polychromy and gilding act in 

Henry Chichele’s tomb as a means of augmenting a three-dimensional representation of 

the human body and its costuming. The durability of the carved relief of the Fuggers’ 

epitaphs can also be contrasted with the cerebral and illusory images afforded by oil 

paint, a medium which itself is built up slowly in translucent layers. The Dead Christ is 

jarring in its removal of these discreet suggestions of visual euphemisms, a viewing made 

                                                           
 

49 Loh, “Renaissance Faciality,” 349.  



142 
 

only more powerful by its subject matter. The intense reception that is afforded by oil 

paint is not apparent in these earlier examples, and the odious experience of sensing 

rottenness is not as fully envisioned in the other examples of death.  

The visual experience is also kinetically different when a viewer’s body encircles 

memorial stones or a tomb, all the while noting unique images at each turn. In both Henry 

Chichele and Alice de la Pole’s tombs, the viewer’s eye may glance to the realms of 

familial or clerical power, attended by realms of saints and angels sculpted alongside the 

effigy. Similarly, the viewer experiences the base-reliefs of the Fugger memorial stones 

from different angles, facilitating a conceptual completion of the carved images as part of 

the nearby celebration of the life-affirming Eucharist. In the case of the Dead Christ, 

Holbein forces the viewer to mentally complete the horrific image of the emaciated body 

of the Divine in a roughly hewn coffin, solitary in its demonstration. Through the two-

dimensional surface of Holbein’s work, the viewer is apt to imagine contours of the depth 

of Christ’s wounds while also imagining the havoc wreaked upon his body. Even more, 

the presentation by Holbein of Christ still within a narrow sarcophagus bears additional 

implications about the moment we are witnessing of an utterly dead corpse encased by 

stone. And yet, as we shall see, that moment is extended in the viewer’s mental 

imagination, freeing and cleansing Christ’s body in perfection and Resurrection.  

As Joseph Koerner explains in The Reformation of the Image, etymologically 

linked to the Germanic term Sarg, or coffin, the sarcophagus of a tomb can be interpreted 

as an extension of the altar, a work made of stone since at least the time of 



143 
 

Charlemagne.50 Chichele’s tomb relates to the representation of a sarcophagus, along with 

the stratification of heavenly figures and allusions to death, and the combination of 

sculpture and polychrome entice the viewer through a suggestion of kinetic and tactile 

sensations. Like Dürer’s Self-Portrait of 1500 Holbein’s painting and the responses it 

solicits may be seen as entombment portraits, having implications for theology, 

representation, the status of a work of art, and larger questions of ontology. The 

underlying and historical premise of art and its creation carries with it distinct 

ramifications and conclusions about a state of being, including suppositions related to the 

experience of the hermeneutic aesthetic. As philosopher Hans George Gadamer explains, 

art invites a unique language as a form of communication and conversation, one based on 

a historical dialogue that is only reified through painting:  

[T]he work of art is handed on in the same sense as our literary sources are. At 

any rate, it speaks not only as remnants of the past speak to the historical 

investigator or as do historical documents that render something permanent. What 

we are calling the language of the work of art, for the sake of which the work is 

preserved and handed on, is the language the work of art itself speaks, whether it 

is linguistic in nature or not. The work of art says something to the historian: it 

says something to each person as if it were said especially to him, as something 

present and contemporaneous. Thus, our task is to understand the meaning of 

what it says and to make it clear to ourselves and others.51 

The conversation that art initiates suggests a manifestation of language, with 

communication being able to be manipulated through linguistic means.52 This dialogue 

                                                           
50 See Koerner, Reformation of the Image, 183. 

 
51 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Aesthetics and Hermaneutics,” in The Continental Aesthetics 

Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Clive Cazeaux (New York: Routledge, 2011), 181–86, at 184.  

 
52 A critique of Gadamer’s work is that he focuses primarily on Western languages and images, 

with very little regard to the association between the two in any non-European cultural tradition. The 

tenuous relationship between language and meaning, as well as between image and representation, is not 

confined solely to western art, despite several of Gadamer’s examples and conclusions. For an effective 

explanation of the link between language and meaning in contemporary Eastern art, see Bing Xu, Joseph 

Thompson, Jesse Robert Coffino, Delissa Handoko, Paulette Wein, Xuan Sheng, and Massachusetts 



144 
 

becomes complex and potentially problematic within the confines of religious orthodoxy, 

permitting variations of responses or ideas to contemplate that may be antithetical to the 

established lexicon of pervasive theological doctrine. Holbein’s Dead Christ participates 

in that debate.  

Holbein’s simultaneous invocation of the divine and human aspects of Christ in 

this painting—its dual function as an appeal to humankind’s interpretation of the divine 

while simultaneously suggesting corporeal decay—collapses the dichotomy between the 

destruction and redemption of the collective human body. In this way, Holbein showcases 

the destruction of corporeality alongside and through an interpretation of Christ’s 

entombment and its function within the milieu of Christian ideology, representing one of 

the more complicated works in all of Holbein’s substantial oeuvre, facilitated during 

tenuous and shifting ideological and ontological landscapes. Ingo Herklotz summarized 

events leading into the fifteenth century as emblematic of this re-categorization of the 

association between the living and the dead, conclusions part of the larger discussion 

about the role of the liturgy and clergy.53 Extending Binski’s claim, the movement of 

graves into churches, the rise in monastic provisions for the dead, the privatization of 

funerary liturgy, and the prolific amount of effigies and portraits of the dead during the 

early sixteenth century all suggest a reconceptualization of death and the Resurrection in 

the late medieval period.54  

                                                           
Museum of Contemporary Art. Xu Bing: Phoenix (North Adams, MA: Massachusetts Museum of 

Contemporary Art, 2015). 

 
53 Ingo Herklotz, review of Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation, by Paul Binski. Speculum 

73, no. 3 (1998): 809–11. 

 
54 Binski, Medieval Death, 142. 



145 
 

By representing a deceased person as occupying multiple conceptual and 

theological spaces, artists represented the soul as possessing uniquely active properties 

that actively and effectively crossed temporal boundaries and dimensions. Fred Paxton 

reiterates this point about death and remembrance by suggesting that corporeality, in 

particular the presentation of a corpse, is an illusory representation of the soul.55 Seeing 

the representation of the corpse as a sign or invitation for dialogue, Paxton and Binski 

suggest that medieval tombs invited discussions about selfhood while simultaneously 

positioning the soul as ambivalently related to both the living and the dead in an intricate 

balance. This point is furthered by visual theorist Griselda Pollock, who notes that by 

creating a corpse, “Holbein has managed to hold in tension form – namely the possibility 

of meaning – and death – the erasure or end of meaning, non-being – by means of the 

dismal palette he has deployed.”56  Within Holbein’s painting, the corpse of Christ can 

therefore be interpreted as suspended between representing the decay of the human body 

and its revitalization, a similar fate that was believed to befall the soul itself. 

Brian Repsher encapsulates this movement by summarizing Binski’s findings as a 

re-ordering of the “sensitive boundaries between the living and the dead.” 57 The tomb 

was instrumental in representing and evoking a dialogue with a deceased person. The 

liturgy and prayers played a vital role in the potential collective agency of the 

                                                           
 

55 Fred Paxton, review of Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation by Paul Binski, The 

Catholic Historical Review 84, no. 1 (1998): 75–76. 

 
56 Griselda Pollock, “The Missing Wit(h)ness: Monroe, Fascinance, and the Unguarded Intimacy 

of Being Dead,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 16, no. 3 (2017): 265–96; emphasis in original.  

 
57 Binski, Medieval Death, 12.  

 



146 
 

commemoration of the dead, a point advanced by Janet Burton in reflection of Binski’s 

findings.58 In particular, she contends that Binski’s observation on discourse between the 

living and the dead substantiates the importance of seeing tombs as serving a vital 

communicative and instrumental role, one that should be considered at a similar, if not 

greater, level to that of the aesthetic value of memorials. Particularly, Binski’s conclusion 

about the role of beneficent saints serving to intercede for both the living and dead is 

suggested through the presentation of vivacity in the effigy and the desiccating features 

of decay through the transi. Similarly, tombs underscore a fundamental shift in the 

perception of individuality versus collective responses to death and memory.  

What happens if we understand Holbein’s Dead Christ within the visual world of 

sixteenth-century viewers trained in viewing transi tombs and understanding the blurred 

demarcations between individual and collective responses to dying, between spheres of 

life and death? Any resultant separation between the seemingly contradictory spheres of 

life and death is contested, a conclusion that is intensified through Holbein’s painting. 

Temporal boundaries are dissolved as the affirmation of an immortal soul outside the 

earthly decay of the corpse is presented as being malleable. Simply, the line between 

mortal corporeality and immortality is tenuous, as Christ’s body shows little sign of an 

impending resurrection. The grossly discolored skin tones of the hands and feet embody 

lifelessness, a finding augmented through the powerful verisimilitude of painting. 

Simultaneously, however, Holbein’s incorporation of the movement and intensification 

of light across the body suggests the possibility of a revitalization of life within the dead 

                                                           
58 See Janet Burton, review of Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation by Paul Binski, The 

English Historical Review 113, no. 451 (1998): 420–21. 



147 
 

materiality of the corpse. The soul’s presence within the decay of entombment and the 

temporality of death is being reconsidered, contested, and potentially suspended. The 

fleshy hues on portions of the body suggest that it is not definitely and fully a mere 

corpse, but the lifelessness of the image creates a vision of finality.  

Contrary to many earlier depictions of the Dead Christ, Holbein does not include 

any references to the instruments of Christ’s torture as an indicator for the pain associated 

with his death. For example, there are no physical indications of a crown of thorns, nails, 

or spear. Instead, Holbein has removed any indicator of metaphysical mysticism and 

physical torture, as well as narrative. Sociologist John Lechte summarizes this depiction 

as one based on agony, with the torture and corporeal destruction associated with the 

Passion.59 Lechte notes that Holbein’s rendering is so disconcerting because the promise 

of the Resurrection has been nullified. This interpretation reiterates the claim that The 

Dead Christ is incontrovertibly an image of a corpse, the promise of immortality seeming 

so distant and unlikely.60 The viewer of the painting is forced to consider death as a 

fundamentally nihilistic, if not omnipresent, force. As Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal 

Griener observed in Holbein’s Pictures of Death, ‘[t]he dialogue between Man and Death 

as it is staged in the traditional Totentanz has been modified. The image is instead 

intended for the reader and the beholder, who must reckon with the unexpected 

                                                           
59 Lechte’s position is on the use of graphic violence in art and how images indicate our 

conceptualization of being. He also posits that art is tethered to theological experiences, stemming at least 

to the Byzantine era. These intersections are explained in John Lechte, “Beyond the Ontology of the 

Image?” Either/And (2013), accessed on January 22, 2019.  http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/281184. 

 
60 John Lechte, “Kristeva and Holbein, Artist of Melancholy,” British Journal of Aesthetics 30, no. 

4 (1990): 342–50, esp. 342. 

 



148 
 

interruption of Death into their everyday life.”61 While Death in Pictures of Death 

primarily overtakes his forthcoming victims with a personal touch, he is instead made all 

the more powerful in the Dead Christ by being present without being visible, forcing a 

dialogue in novel directions and directly confronting the viewer. 62 

Similarly, the presentation of the body suggests a study in a monochromatic 

rendering of death. Walter Überwasser found that the coloration of the body, particularly 

when compared with other similar works by Grünewald and even by Holbein’s father, 

lacks coloration and expressiveness, surmising that the palate of hues and bodily 

expression was more limited.63 Überwasser also concluded that the distortions of the 

head, feet, and hands further a late medieval approach, perhaps a deliberate stylistic 

anachronism to heighten the emotive effects and impact of viewing. While other images 

of the dead Christ suggest the inevitability of Christ’s immortality, Holbein’s depiction 

leaves the viewer without a hopeful resolution, inviting “a banal and non-transcendent 

mortal experience.”64 The implication of Christ’s apparent utter and unchanging mortality 

not only suggests an alternative interpretation or orientation to the promise of the 

Resurrection, but also to the foundation of Christ’s very nature. 

 

                                                           
61 Bätschmann and Griener, Holbein, Revised and Expanded, 97. See this idea echoed by Parshall, 

“Hans Holbein’s ‘Pictures of Death,’” 82–95. 

 
62 It is also possible to interpret Death as a guide or even an amicable assistant In Pictures of 

Death as noted in Death and the Plowman, which features a farmer tilling his fields alongside Death’s 

helpful hand.  

 
63 Walter Überwasser, “Holbeins ‘Christus in der Grabnische,’” Studien zur Kunst des Oberrheins: 

Festschrift für Werner Noack (Constance and Freiburg: Rombach, 1958), 125–30.   

 
64 Lechte, Kristeva and Holbein, 342. 

 



149 
 

A Novel Memento Mori: Re-Reading the Dead Christ as a Transi Figure 

A potential interpretation of Holbein’s Dead Christ as simultaneously effigy and 

transi raises philosophical and theological questions about the relationship of the body to 

the soul. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), had tried to resolve that question by arguing that 

the body and the soul were inherently dichotomous, distinct entities, with the body 

understood to encase the soul.65 His view represents an alternative to Aristotle’s principle 

of hylomorphism, which predated Christianity but nonetheless had enduring implications 

for Christian ideas about the body as a physical extension of the soul. In essence, 

hylomorphism is “in terms of its matter, understood as parts or components, and its form, 

understood as a principle of unity.”66 Aristotle developed his contention of hylomorphism 

not in relation to human beings specifically, but rather to the form and function of 

materiality in total, seeing a common experience within all living organisms.67 Aristotle’s 

and Aquinas’ views were not resolved, as questions about hylomorphism were reopened 

because of reformist’s interests, extends Aristotle’s explanation and defining it as a form 

that predates a particular material construction and that exists outside of, but also 

through, a materialized nature.68 Some sixteenth-century viewers—including one of the 

                                                           
65 For more on Aquinas’ explanation of materiality and refutation of Aristotle’s explanation of 

hylomorphism in his book De Anima, see Jeffrey E. Brower, Aquinas's Ontology of the Material World: 

Change, Hylomorphism, and Material Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 

 
66 Mark Johnston, “Hylomorphism,” The Journal of Philosophy 103, no. 12 (2006): 652–98, at 

658.  

 
67 Aristotle presented his contentions on hylomorphism in a series of writings, but a helpful 

synthesis is presented in William Jaworski, Structure and the Metaphysics of Mind: How Hylomorphism 

Solves the Mind-body Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 

 
68 Siyi Chen, “The Priority Argument and Aristotle’s Political Hylomorphism,” Ergo 3, no. 16 

(2016): 421–43, esp. 421.  

 



150 
 

presumed primary viewers, the humanist Basilius Amerbach—may have understood the 

Dead Christ as participating in ongoing debates about how the constitution of matter 

intersected with the ephemeral, particularly in relationship to the soul.  Holbein’s work 

presents some of these concerns and unresolved debates by positioning the body of Christ 

as emblematic of humanity’s mortality with the inevitability of humankind’s collective 

death.  

Through hylomorphism, the physicality of the body is seen as an extension of the 

soul, with the form of the soul being synonymous with the body’s matter in the same way 

that wax and its form are congruent.69 The split between the body and the soul, an oft-

noted consideration of transi tombs, is visually re-oriented in the case of Holbein’s Dead 

Christ.70 Holbein’s work suggests a novel interpretation of images of the soul not as a 

small homunculus, nor as the pristine and undefiled bodies of saints elevated to heavenly 

realms, both of which stand in stark contrast to the degeneration emblematized by transi 

tombs. Instead, Holbein’s work combines the image of the soul and body into one form, 

with the promise of the Resurrection and the grisly pall of death occurring 

simultaneously. By assuming that the corpse presented in Holbein’s painting could 

indeed have been understood by some viewers as a hylomorphic presentation of the soul, 

the dialogue between the dead and the living, or even between the soul in Purgatory and 

                                                           
69 The wax and its form analogy has been partial to the explanation of hylomorphism since its 

creation, with allusion occurring both in Aristotle and Aquinas’ writings on the topic. See Kendall A. 

Fisher, “Thomas Aquinas on Hylomorphism and the In-act Principle,” British Journal for the History of 
Philosophy 25, no. 6 (2017):1053–72, esp. 1053–54. 
 

70 For a consideration of the transi tomb as a display of decay and the immutability of matter, see 

Binski, Medieval Death, 149. 

 



151 
 

Eternity, emerges in a new light. States of being are conflated and subsequently open 

questions about the death of the body as an extension of the soul.  

Ideas about the foundation and constitution of matter, including attributes of the 

body, underwent dramatic shifts during Holbein’s time in Basel, coinciding with the 

lectures of Swiss medical doctor and professor Theophrastus von Hohenheim, commonly 

known as Paracelsus (1493 or 1494–1541). Paracelsus posited both anatomical and 

theological conclusions about the constitution of the body and nature of the soul—mainly 

that physical mass is separated into the planes of material versus spiritual existence, with 

humans being a combination of both elements, effectively augmenting Aristotelian matter 

theory.71 Paracelsus theorized that the body and the remainder of the natural world were 

comprised of four basic ontological components including the elemental, sidereal, 

immortal bodies, and the soul.72 These constructs, often recast as corporeal body, spirit, 

and divine soul, equated with the nature of the Triune God, a preternatural life-force 

present throughout the world.73 This presence was perpetual as “all matter contains some 

degree of this Trinitarian life force… from rocks to trees to animals to humans to 

                                                           
71 Walter Pagel, “The Prime Matter of Paracelsus,” Ambix 9 (1961): 117–35; and Massimo Luigi 

Bianchi, “The Visible and the Invisible: From Alchemy to Paracelsus,” in Alchemy and Chemistry in the 

Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, eds. Piyo Rattansi and Antonio Clericuzio (Dordrecht, Netherlands: 

Kluwer, 1994), 17–50. 

 
72 See Daniel Dane Thor, “Paracelsus on Baptism and the Acquiring of the Eternal Body,” in 

Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine, and Astrology in Early Modern Europe, eds. Gerhild Scholz 

Williams and Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr. (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc., 2002), 

116–34. 

 
73 See H. C. Erik Midelfort. “The Anthropological Roots of Paracelsus’ Psychiatry,” in Kreatur 

und Kosmos: Internationale Beiträge zur Paracelsusforschung, ed. Rosemarie Dilg-Frank (New York: 

Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1981), 67–77. 

 



152 
 

angels.”74 He posited that all matter was a combination of these disparate elements that 

merely shifted in ratio across time, but that were always imbued with the manifested 

presence of the Divine, extending debates about the corporeality of the body and the 

composition of the soul. 75 These conclusions posited that the body was imbued with 

formed by multiple and comingling attributes, existing in an interpolated manner.  

While Aquinas, Aristotle, and Paracelsus were apt to suggest that the body and 

soul were conjoined and mutually bounded through shared space, Holbein extends that 

premise by synthesizing a living soul with inert corporeal matter, while also suggesting 

that the Resurrection is a vital component of this amalgamation. Holbein’s work 

represents an interpolation of vivacity, a rotting corpse, and an eternal soul into one 

singular entity, as with the stratification of a transi tomb. The progression of Christ’s 

reconstitution is an inherent element of this depiction. As the light painted at the base of 

Christ’s feet progresses from his tortuous wounds to his gangrenous hands and lifeless 

visage, reanimation and Resurrection awaits in the balance. This life-bearing light 

emanates from outside the tomb but is supernatural light, because its presence is a 

physical impossibility in a light-defying crypt or in the complete darkness of encased soil. 

Holbein effectively eliminates these strictures as light appears to emanate from both 

above and through Christ’s body, suggesting that the wounds may be in the process of 

becoming healed and the body reanimated through both external and internal means. The 

decay and fallibility of flesh, previously artistically signified by a decomposing transi and 

                                                           
74 Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in 

Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 67.  

 
75 Dane Thor Daniel, “Invisible Wombs: Rethinking Paracelsus’s Concept of Body and Matter,” 

Ambix 53, no. 2 (2006): 129–42. 

 



153 
 

lifelike effigy, would reanimate not through a progression of stratified tiers but 

simultaneously as a unified phenomenon, conjoining soul, body, and Resurrection 

together. 

Holbein represented the salvation of redemption and the mortality of flesh 

concurrently in one body and image, as if a kind of conflation or compression of the 

separate strata previously designated to a transi tomb. Holbein can be seen extending the 

ethos of transi tombs and translating it into another medium, with the living body of the 

portrait effigy, the rotting corpse of the transi, and the unviewable bodily remains 

becoming synthesized into one image. What had been a depiction of the dead through a 

three-dimensional sculpture was now a matter of an optic and conceptual image of the 

interior of a sealed tomb—really an impossible view—a view only achieved through the 

illusory qualities of paint. Expanding beyond the physicality of sculpture, be that of a 

life-size effigy, as with Henry Chichele and Alice de la Pole, or through the narrow 

depths of a base-relief, as with the Loscher epitaphs for the Fuggers, it is worth 

considering the experiential role of painting within the Reformation. Echoing the points 

of Joseph Koerner, the communicative function of art shifted during this period, as the 

preferred medium changed from stone to paint: “Painting as a silent medium simply 

makes visible what in preaching is audible.... taken at another level, the medial shift from 

saying to showing, ... [the shift from] word to image articulates the difference between 

any medium of transmission and the information it transmits.”76 This trajectory is even 

more apparent in relation to portrayals of death. 

                                                           
 



154 
 

Moreover, the representation of Christ’s corpse evokes a sign of suffering by 

evoking the ephemeral, presenting evocations of the frailty of life by offsetting feelings 

of melancholia and increasing its beauty, even though the image is of a human corpse. 

The portrayal of a corpse and sixteenth-century reactions to it would have been grounded 

in viewer responses to the executed body, a point that suggests a different 

phenomenological reaction to the corpse of a criminal or the damned.77 Intriguingly, 

however, Holbein’s painting may create a moralizing response, particularly in making the 

viewer consider Christ’s human experiences and imploring him or her to a life of imitatio 

Christi. Similarly, Olga Meerson suggests that the painting is not a visual manifesto 

against divinity, but rather is instead a guide for expected human behavior, “to morally 

implicate the reader [i.e., viewer] in the tempting experience of such purely human 

emotions as anguish, compassion, and passionate doubts about the possibility of Christ's 

resurrection—the emotions and temptations of which Christ Himself partook.”78  The 

Dead Christ serves a dualistic purpose in that “[i]t is both a desperate appeal to what is 

best in us and in the world against violence, and, at the same time, an attempt to 

                                                           
76 Koerner, Reformation of the Image, 187. Also, see Bradley James Cavallo, “Matter(s) of 

Immortality: Oil Paintings on Stone and Metal in the 16th and 17th Centuries,” PhD diss. (Temple 

University, 2017). 

 
77 The perception of the body of Christ as being an extension of the depiction of corpses of an 

executed person is noted in Alexander Burry, “Execution, Trauma, and Recovery in Dostoevsky’s ‘The 

Idiot,’” The Slavic and East European Journal 54, 2 (2010): 255–71. Similarly, Dostoevsky’s compatriot 

and contemporary Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) explored a shared conclusion about societal reactions to a 

criminal’s corpse. See Thomas Seifrid, “Gazing on Life’s Page: Perspectival Vision in Tolstoy,” PMLA 

113, no. 3 (1998): 436–48.  The implication of the body of the executed and the treatment of the criminal is 

also discussed effectively in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan 

Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 3–31. See also Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, 

and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 1999), 11–40. 

 
78 Meerson, Ivolgin and Holbein, 1995. 

 



155 
 

authenticate the primacy of the self-vis-à-vis and against others.”79 Holbein’s depiction 

acts as a recollection of loss and suffering, while simultaneously evoking a brief moment 

of suspended time toward the portal of death. Holbein depicts Christ as an amalgamation 

of different ontological spheres, being both living and dead, as well as being 

simultaneously in the process of resurrection and decay. This confluence forces the 

viewer to consider how death and the Resurrection are not separate moments, existing 

instead in a state of chronological limbo, or outside Time. By synthesizing images of 

melancholia and exaltation, as well as humanity and divinity, Holbein posits the death 

and Resurrection of Jesus Christ as variables that defy the silos of easy temporal 

categorizations and definitions. The progression across art forms provoked changing 

conclusions about the role of death in quantifying the experience of existence.  

Holbein gives Death a characterization that is devoid of the usual artistic motifs, 

an object of veneration and reflection, presented in sorrow and hope simultaneously.80 It 

is, in essence, a modern work of art that also marks the death of sculpture. Maria Loh 

notes that the medium of sculpture began to give way to an innovative means of 

sustaining modern imaginations.81 Succinctly, she purports that “tradition and academic 

theory could have sculpture; but contemporary practice claimed painting.”82 Coupled with 

a shift away from the dimensionality and space-occupying status afforded by sculpture 

                                                           
79 Alexander Spektor, “From Violence to Silence: Vicissitudes of Reading in ‘The Idiot,’” Slavic 

Review 72, no. 3 (2013): 552–72. 

 
80 Martin Bidney, “Flame-Engulfing Storms and Seas of Darkness: Byron’s Love-Death 

Epiphanies in Kristevan Context,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 12, no. 2 (2011): 97–125. 

 
81 Loh, “Death of the Medium,” 244. Loh builds on the contentions of Marshal McLuhan, the 

forerunner of mediated determinism. See Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of 

Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press; reissued by Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). 

 
82 Ibid., 245.  



156 
 

into the illusory qualities imbued through painting, Holbein’s work created a novel image 

in the mind of the viewer while also suggesting a division between late medieval and 

early modern thought. Concurrently, Holbein’s work can be interpreted as grounded 

squarely in each era, with the final determination of its meaning resting upon the 

theological and philosophical leanings of the viewer. This conclusion supports the 

suggestion that Holbein—as also his patron Basilius Amerbach—was caught in the throes 

of reformist thought. He represented the body of Christ as both a corpse composed of 

merely inanimate matter, thus cordoning himself from attacks of iconoclasm, while he 

simultaneously suggested that Christ’s corpus was becoming supernaturally reanimated, 

paralleling a belief in transubstantiation. Considering the shifting exigencies of the 1520s 

in Basel, both approaches would be sustained by Holbein’s Dead Christ, and ultimately 

illustrate an innovative means of encapsulating and representing the tenuous positions of 

a finite death, eternal life, and the precarious position of the viewer.    

  



157 
 

 

CHAPTER 6: 

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS  

 

Throughout the late medieval and early modern eras, transi figures and effigies 

thematized death by situating vivacity alongside eminent decay, and forged a dynamic 

depiction of time through images of death. These depictions captured and explored the 

state of death and the dead body, encapsulated by stone and three-dimensional figures. 

Relief sculpture was an outlet as another medium for translating the transi figure, 

suggesting dimensionality through degrees of depth, but without offering fully in-the-

round experience or life-size elements of sculpture. These artistic facets of verisimilitude 

were more developed and became more nuanced through painting of the dead body, even 

while repurposing the kind of bodily engagement the viewer had with a tomb monument. 

Where the images that the artist had previously considered were life-size and life-like 

sculptures that occupied physical space, painting allowed the viewer to formulate 

individualized meanings and conceptualization, with the viewer’s imagination 

completing dimensionality and details. Throughout each development of artistic 

techniques or medium a novel consideration of death, the body, and matter emerged, 

interacting, and participating with ongoing theological debates in various moments of 

reformist periods in England in the fifteenth century and German-speaking lands in the 

early Reformation years of the sixteenth century. Both of these locations underwent 

cultural and ideological shifts resultant from the emergence of reformist beliefs. 

Holbein’s Dead Christ extended these debates while also framing a reconceptualization 

of the public tomb and private contemplation of death.  



158 
 

My study investigates how images of the body interconnect with changing 

concepts of time, memory, theology, and viewership during the Reformation and 

Northern Renaissance through consideration of how transi tombs activated the viewers’ 

experience of death by eliding a sense of temporal and spatial differences. Such 

monuments raise questions about assumptions concerning the process of living and dying 

by recategorizing time and exposing its complex and non-linear nature. Transi tombs did 

not merely reflect contemporary notions about dying and resurrection, but actively 

shaped perceptions about death, matter, and memorial. Conclusions about these issues are 

not resolved through transi tombs. Instead, they initiate contemplation about these 

matters, acting as agents for viewers’ individualized reactions and experiences. 

Transi tombs may represent a flattening of time, one in which the viewer may 

enter into the artistic narrative or staged drama at any reference or visual point. The 

viewer may contemplate the interred remains, the decomposing representation, or the 

vitality of an effigy singly or simultaneously. The glory of the Divine and immortality is 

presented alongside messages about the repugnant demise and putrefaction of human 

flesh. The reorganization of time that is suggested by transi tombs conflates the promise 

of an afterlife with that of earthly existence. The viewer may reorient the ensuing artistic 

conversation in myriad fashions. A visual entry may follow the literal steps suggested by 

the varying strata—downward from effigy to transi to interred remains—or the viewer 

may visualize the tomb in reverse, moving upward through the vertical layers, as the soul 

proceeds through its journey in a less linear fashion. The options for potential directions 

or the progression of the pathway of the deceased person’s soul fluctuate depending upon 

the experiences and beliefs of the viewer. As Diane Wolfthal explains, the Mass can be 



159 
 

interpreted as a dramatic narrative, complete with liturgical roles and themes. Tombs 

would have augmented the ensuing storyline, while also serving as a visual rejoinder for 

participating audiences.1 

A similar deduction about varying entry points and malleable narratives for a 

visual work was suggested also by Marshall McLuhan, who noted that any medium could 

be understood by accessing it at different entrees.2 He positions information not as a 

linear construct, but instead as a series of clusters best understood as an evolving and 

ever-changing set of mosaics. 3 McLuhan’s ideas, originally applied to modern 

technologies such as film or broadcasting, can also be seen to share deeper commonalities 

with other media, including forms of sculpture, relief carving, and painting in oil.  

 Through transi tombs, the viewer is able to fold time and history, as suggested by 

the tomb and canopy of Archbishop Henry Chichele. Beyond the similarly suggested 

strata of progression in the tomb of Alice de la Pole, Chichele’s tomb is a pronouncement 

of historical and contemporary figures. Statues that were placed around the columns of 

Chichele’s tomb are primarily a representation of the political and theological hierarchies 

and genealogies of England and the Church. Their positioning, however, also suggests 

the layers of saints that would be encountered upon the transmigration of the deceased’s 

soul. More than the tomb of Alice de la Pole, Chichele’s tomb references an eclectic 

                                                           
1 Wolfthal, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 741.  

 
2 See Sergio Roncallo-Dow and Carlos A. Scolari, “Marshall McLuhan: The Possibility of Re-

Reading his Notion of Medium,” Philosophies 1, no. 2 (2016): 141–52. 

 
3 These ideas on the non-linearity of communication and human experiences as a whole are 

addressed in McLuhan, Guttenberg Galaxy, 282–87. McLuhan posited that human expression was not 

typically confined to mere linear progression, especially in an electronic age as part of a post-Gutenberg 

digitally mediated era.  



160 
 

assortment of characters. They are arranged not in a chronological trajectory with a 

singular point of temporal origin, but instead as figures scattered throughout different 

periods of history. England’s kings and military leaders are presented in tandem with 

ancient biblical heroes, the viewing of which echoes the disparate points of entrée 

suggested by McLuhan’s contentions.  

Simultaneously, each of these tombs suggest nationalistic, familial, and self-

fashioning themes that illustrate how the deceased person’s lineage is not only 

memorialized, but also displayed in space. References to immutability of the Crown and 

the nation state are most apparent in Henry Chichele’s tomb. Conversely, by linking 

Alice de la Pole’s legacy to the almshouse of Ewelme and to the lineage of the Chaucer 

families, the viewer is able to ascertain a daily life that is both memorable and inherently 

linked to the foundations of the church in which she is memorialized. Through stone life-

size carvings, the viewer is able to clearly envision the deceased as still extant and even 

occupying shared space, with the promise of their immortality and earthly legacy intact 

and firmly constructed.  

Similarly, the relief sculptures of the Fugger chapel serve much of the same 

function. The central panels of the Fuggers’ memorial stones focus on the degradation 

and resurrection of the body, while the outside panels showing heraldic devices represent 

both the Fugger family and the ongoing presence of their financial empire. In a different 

fashioning from the promise of immortality in transi tombs, the epitaphs associate the 

Resurrected Christ with a practically anonymous transi, which could be a Fugger family 

member or Christ. The depiction of death changed as the Reformation took hold, with 

artistic responses consisting of capturing images and familial legacies in a more illusory 



161 
 

or conceptual manner. The Fugger lineage is suggested by the incorporation of a family 

coat of arms in a similar fashion as the inclusion of the heraldic shields and denotations 

of historical and familial heritage in transi tombs. Rather than being depicted practically 

nude, the Fugger transi reliefs are portrayed as almost entirely wrapped in shrouds, a 

presentation of the body partially used by Holbein that obfuscates the material aspects of 

the body and yet emphasizes its corporeal nature simultaneously by directly referencing 

burial rituals. Unlike earlier depictions, flesh and cloth equally bind the body to the 

materiality of fibers and earth. The verisimilitude of stone cadavers is tethered to a 

suggestion of the finite materiality of flesh and cloth, with hopeful resurrection eclipsing 

the confines of death.  

The Fugger epitaphs extended the developments made in earlier fully sculptural 

depictions of death, advancements that would further be explored through painting. At 

the front of the Fugger Chapel and serving as backdrop for the altar, the relief showing 

Christ Resurrected, designed after Dürer, is one of the three levels of Ulrich Fugger’s 

epitaph. The largest field is dominated by the body of the resurrected Christ, surrounded 

by angels and putti in an umbra of light. Christ hovers above his broken tomb. 

Immediately below this depiction is a long-pronounced line separating the scenes into 

clear divisions, effectively fashioning a center section for a sarcophagus. The 

incorporation of the transi here on Ulrich’s epitaph and again on Georg’s epitaph beside it 

are, however, distinctive features of the reliefs that do not appear in Dürer’s drawing 

studies. These shifting images capture the meaning of memorialization and present an 

understanding of the social construction of death in the space of St. Anna’s Church as 



162 
 

Augsburg itself was negotiating its own reformist positions about masses for the dead, 

resurrection, and the nature of matter—be it the corpse or the holy host.4  

Holbein’s painting extends these ontological inquiries beyond variations of the 

life and death binary. Instead, Holbein combines earlier traditions of transi and effigy 

tombs into a work supporting new interpretations. By condensing time and space, 

Holbein presented a painting that is at its crux a non-temporal work, suggesting that death 

is not tethered to a specific chronological continuum, more or less confined to a simple 

linear binary. The Dead Christ is a work that reconfigures the physical confines of time 

as it combines different states of being, effectively blending depictions of death, 

decomposition, and immortality into one image. This conflation establishes the 

movement of time in an innovative direction, one in which chronology is assumed not 

only to move in a linear fashion but also pivots across a variety of temporal planes, all 

suspended within a single depicted moment. In taking a recent cue from Gerhard Wolf, 

works such as transi tombs allow the viewer a chance to “free the concept from the 

connotation of an ‘error’ in an order of time.”5 This observation suggests a reading of 

death not as the end of a chronological trajectory, but instead as a mixture of temporal 

possibilities, and it does so visually in a way prompted through the horizontal strata of 

depictions.  

As noted by Jacques Derrida, at its core death poses an ontological difficulty.6 

Rather than seeing death as a horizon that must be crossed, what Heidegger refers to as 

                                                           
4 The concept of social construction of realities, particularly through language, can be found in 

John Shotter, Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through Language (London: Sage, 1993). 

 
5 Gerhard Wolf, review of Anachronic Renaissance, by Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. 

Wood,” The Art Bulletin 94, no. 1 (2012): 135–41. 

 



163 
 

“the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Da-sein [there being],” Derrida asserts 

that “dying would be the aporia, the impossibility of being dead, the impossibility of 

living or rather ‘existing’ one’s death.”7 For Derrida, death presents a performative 

contradiction: “if death turns out to entail the cessation of experience, and I cannot 

experience the cessation of experience, then, strictly speaking, my death does not happen 

to me.”8 Holbein’s painted Dead Christ goes beyond Heidegger’s notion of Da-sein and 

allows the viewer to contemplate, if not experience, the state of the impossibility of 

death. Holbein’s incorporation of the tiers of tombs within a singular work, as I have 

argued, represents the experience of death without the cessation of being. The 

implications of Derrida’s finding suggest that tombs are able to fill a vital role for the 

viewer. They effectively and visually bridge the gap between the incomplete 

contemplation of death and the manifestation and experience afforded to the dying of the 

Other.  

Realizing the inherently difficult means of contemplating and creating images that 

depict non-existence is a challenging task, one fraught with ontological quagmires. The 

reception that is suggested by the work is also commonly noted throughout the modern 

                                                           
6 While Derrida focuses on death as an ontological quagmire, he also refutes the distinct 

delineations and demarcations of the experience of dying. In particular: “Derrida is also undermining the 

various problematic closures or borders that Heidegger sets up in his attempt to distinguish the “properly 

dying” (eigentlich sterben) from perishing (Verenden), demising (Ableben), and dying (Sterben).  For 

Derrida, there is only perishing, demising, and what he calls the death of the other.  Thus, rather than 

viewing death as a problem, one that depicts death as a border, Derrida proposes thinking of death as 

aporia, whose apposite image would therefore not be of a border “not to be bypassed,” but rather as a 

nonpassable border, that is, death as a nonpassage.“ Quoted in Paul Nadal, “Be Late: Death as Impossible 

Possibility: Notes on Derrida’s Critique of Heidegger’s Existential Analysis of Death,” accessed on March 

12, 2017, https://belate.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/derrida-aporia-death/.  

 
7 Derrida, Aporias, 73. 

 
8 Iain Thomson, “Can I Die? Derrida on Heidegger on Death,” Philosophy Today 43, no. 1 (1999): 

29–42, at 33. 



164 
 

era and in myriad field. For example, Swiss poet and theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater 

wrote in 1791 that it is “impossible to behold and is revolting in the face… the whole 

work lacking in taste, love, and sentiment,” a position shared by both Dostoevsky and 

Goethe.9 An assumption is also made that the painting is parcel to a much more Gothic, 

that is to say medieval, tradition than that of a later more modern art tradition.10 Even 

more, the contemplation of death itself may, to echo the words of Carl Jung, be a 

showing of “nothing but the dark pit.”11 Conversely, Jung contended that myth and 

religion celebrated the possibility of a novel direction for living and ultimately dying, 

seeing death not as an end, but as a goal.12 This reflection was part of what Jung 

considered to be a novel application of the Ars Moriendi, particularly in relation to the 

imitation of Christ .13 Jung posited that a death that paralleled the uniqueness of the 

demise of Jesus Christ illustrates what is “capable of evolving out of ourselves with or 

                                                           
9 See Friedrich Karl Mathys, “Holbeins toter Christus, und was berühmte Betrachter über das Bild 

sagten,” Sonntagspost: Wöchentliche Beilage zum “Landbotn und Tagblatt der Stadt Winterthur” 78, no. 

13 (1958): 1.  

 
10 The placement of Holbein as a bridge between various art historical periods has been considered 

throughout research, particularly in relation to what Julia Kristeva would refer to as the “Gothic eroticism 

of paroxistic pain.” See Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia 

University Press, 1989), esp. 136–37. For more information on the associations between these periods as 

explicated through Holbein’s oeuvre, see Karma Lochrie, “Embodying the Text: Boisterous Tears and 

Privileged Readings,” in Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of 

Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 167–202. 

 
11 Carl G. Jung and Aniela Jaffe, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Clara Winston and 

Richard Winston (New York: Vintage, 1989), 306.  

 
12 C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol.13. trans. Gerhard Adler and 

R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 46. Jung was forthright in his conviction that 

beliefs in immortality and myths that suggested elements of it are inherently important aspects of the life 

cycle, particularly in later life. He argued that a discussion of the possibility of immortality was, through 

the lens of religion or myth, a fundamentally important aspect of understanding an impending death.  

 
13 For a general overview of the Ars Boni Moriendi, see David William Atkinson, The English Ars 

Moriendi (New York: Peter Lang, 1992). 

 



165 
 

without divine grace.”14 This finding suggests a tethering between the experience of death 

among all mortals and their connection with the humanity of Jesus Christ. In furthering 

Julia Kristeva’s contention, Pollock summarizes:  

Then, there is the violence of compositionally enclosing the anguished dead body 

in the chilling confinement of the narrow, horizontal tomb closed by the painted 

slab so close to the body. This insistent horizontality incites in viewers both the 

terror of imagining ourselves locked in the interior of the airless tomb while at the 

same time that chill condition so physically evoked serves as a displaced sign for 

psychic pain: the living deathliness of profound depression as a modern condition 

as well as a psychic affliction.15  

This interpretation echoes the perception of Dostoevsky, who found the painting to be 

simultaneously posing the hopelessness and denial of the foundation of Christianity itself. 

It also proposes the likelihood that the viewer sees the painting as the representation of a 

lifeless corpse, potentially their inevitable own.  

This conclusion is shared by others. Olga Meerson extends Dostoevsky’s 

noteworthy perspective, that “this is only the corpse of a man who endured infinite 

suffering even before the cross… indeed, the corpse of any man after such torments 

would look like this, no matter who he is.”16 Contemporary writers have even postulated 

that the Dead Christ presents a deeply disturbing theological conundrum concerning 

Christ’s own mortality and decomposing body.17 The interpretation of the painting as a 

corpse instead of as a ‘resurrectable’ body and divine image was underscored by Robert 

                                                           
14 Carl G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Collected Works, vol. 11, eds. Herbert 

Read and Gerhard Adler, trans. R. F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 483. 

 
15 Pollock, The Missing Wit(h)ness, 282.  

 
16 Ibid., 201.  

 
17 The impact of this quagmire was also noted in regard to personal and public reactions to suicide, 

a point nicely articulated in Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca, 

NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 14–17.  

 



166 
 

Bush, who forthrightly noted that the painting “symbolizes the absolute power and 

finality of death.”18 That the image appears to be the unflinching rendering of a corpse is 

attested by unsubstantiated anecdotes from the seventeenth century positing that Holbein 

based his painting on a body that had been recovered from the Rhine River.19 

Recalling Derrida’s contention that the experience of death is impossible to 

envision, the cessation of the viewer’s life is similarly elusive, except for artistic attempts 

to visualize or represent that experience in a work of art.20 Indeed, Dostoyevsky was 

rumored to have questioned the very basis of Christian faith while observing the Dead 

Christ, noting “It is strange to look on this dreadful picture of the mangled corpse of the 

Saviour, and to put this question to oneself... How could they have gazed upon the 

dreadful sight and yet have believed that He would rise again?”21Similar to the 

                                                           
18 Robert L. Busch, “Dostoevski’s Major Novels and the European Gothic Tradition,” Russian 

Language Journal / Русский язык 40, no. 136/137 (1986): 57–74.  

 
19 The discussion about the accuracy of the account of Holbein’s retrieving a corpse from the 

Rhine as a model for his study has been contested. As Holbein was increasingly drawn to painting in a 

naturalistic and realistic tradition, the account clearly has a place in an interpretation of this work. Having 

noted, I am not advocating that Holbein intended or ultimately created an anatomical study, despite the 

depiction of great detail and verisimilitude that is parcel to his painting. For more information on this 

anecdote that Holbein procured a corpse from the Rhine, see Pál Ács, “Holbein’s ‘Dead Christ’ in Basel 

and the Radical Reformation,” The Hungarian Historical Review: New Series of Acta Historica Academiae 

Scientiarum Hungaricae 1 (2013): 68–84. Additionally, research has focused on the potential for the corpse 

to specifically that of a Jewish person, resulting in considerations both of Holbein’s motivations and 

potential interpretations of cultural identity. See Gatrall, Between Iconoclasm and Silence, 214–32; and 

Jefferson J. A. Gatrall, The Real and the Sacred: Picturing Jesus In Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Ann 

Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014), esp. 182. 

 
20 Derrida specifically questioned the ability of a person to conceive of his or her own death by 

positing: “Is my death possible? Can we understand this question? Can I, myself, pose it? Am I allowed to 

talk about my death? What does the syntagm ‘my death’ mean? … ‘My death’ in quotation marks is not 

necessarily mine; it is an expression that anybody can appropriate; it can circulate from one example to 

another.” From Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 

1993), 21–22. 

 
21 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot (New York: Brentanos, 1887), at 285. For more explanations of 

the impact of Holbein’s painting on Dostoyevsky, see Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans 

Holbein, Revised and Expanded, 2nd ed. (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 138.  

 



167 
 

construction of effigies and transi tomb figures like the ones examined in Henry Chichele 

and Alice de la Pole’s tombs, the Dead Christ suggests a life-sized subject, but one that 

forces the viewer to consider death in a new manner—responses articulated also by 

Dostoevsky and Julia Kristeva. Sensing the role of the unobtainable experience of death, 

Kristeva asserted that the viewer contemplates and negotiates a personal response to their 

own experience of melancholy.22 She also concludes that art may assuage these concerns: 

“Artistic creation combines and consumes them; works of art thus enable us to establish 

less destructive, more pleasurable relations with ourselves and with others.”23 Holbein’s 

work forces the viewer to consider how the collective death of the Other is related to the 

death of the Self. Holbein’s Dead Christ can therefore be interpreted as claiming ground 

at the intersection of Derrida’s observation of death as not representable and melancholy 

as a response to mortality. While earlier fully sculpted transi tombs stage an easily 

decipherable visual ‘diagram’ or drama about the distinct phases of death, decay, and 

resurrection of the body, Holbein’s work through oil paint suggests a more conceptual 

experience.  

Kristeva’s additional findings on the rhetorical interpretation of the Dead Christ 

similarly incorporates an Aristotelian approach but departs from his concept of 

hylomorphism as described previously. Instead, Kristeva takes a linguistic turn to her 

interpretation, focusing primarily on the representation of the melancholic.24 She 

incorporates Nietzsche’s contention on the death of God, while furthering the argument 

                                                           
22 Kristeva, On the Melancholic Imaginary, 7. 

 
23  Ibid., 17.  

 
24 Kristeva, Black Sun,110–24. 



168 
 

that Holbein positions depictions of grief and despair in his painting so that it they 

resonate within that interpretation. As Sara Beardsworth summarizes, “[Kristeva’s] 

analysis of the Dead Christ turns on the ways in which this image of severance— ‘God is 

dead’—renders the severance of representation (the challenge to the aesthetic) in artistic 

form.”25 Kristeva adroitly summarizes this impact as “God is dying, I am dying.”26 This 

severance, complete with allusions of grieving and loss, invites a larger discussion of 

melancholy, loss, and remembrance. Coming from a psychoanalytic background, 

Kristeva positions the Dead Christ as a rupture from the traditional depiction of Christ’s 

suffering and death. Specifically, she focuses on “the martyrizing side of Christian 

tradition associated with representing an eroticized image of pain and suffering. Counter-

posed to the cathartic power of the Resurrection, the dead Christ in Holbein's work offers 

an imaginary re-enactment of the void that is depression and death.”27  This reenactment 

is an amalgamation of Christ’s and the viewer’s ultimate demise and is also a 

personification of total despair, a concept further explicated through Kristeva’s 

investigation of melancholy.  

Through the Dead Christ, melancholy may be interpreted as a part of a 

contentious debate about Christ’s descent into Hell. This removal from any state of Grace 

prompted Richard Bloch and Michael du Plessis to augment Kristeva’s analysis by 

                                                           
 

25 Sara Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity (Albany, NY: State University 

of New York Press, 2004), 177–78.  

 
26 Quoted in Stephen J. Fountain, “Ashes to Ashes: Kristeva’s ‘Jouissance,’ Altizer’s Apocalypse, 

Byatt’s Possession and the ‘Dream of the Rood,’” Literature and Theology 8, no. 2 (1994): 193–208. 

 
27 Lawrence D. Kritzman, “Melancholia Becomes the Subject: Kristeva's Invisible ‘Thing’ and the 

Making of Culture,” Paragraph 14, no. 2 (1991): 144–50. 

 



169 
 

suggesting that Holbein’s painting is not a cessation of the soul’s link to Heaven as much 

as a presentation of damnation. By referencing Calvin, they note that Kristeva “insists on 

the ‘formidabilis abysis into which Christ has been thrust at the hour of his death, 

descending to the depths of sin and hell.’ In other words, the Jesus of the Reformation, or 

at least of Holbein, is not certain of his salvation.”28 This interpretation suggests dread 

and apprehension about the promise of salvation, testing the viewer’s faith. It also blends 

the temporality and space of Christ’s presentation: he is confined to Hell while being 

viewed as a potentially resurrectable corpse that is entombed in earth.  

As John Lechte summarizes: “Kristeva's analysis [of the Dead Christ] evokes the 

idea that life as such is a temporary overcoming of death: this can be its meaning, the 

source of its beauty is its potential for overcoming melancholy.”29 The sense of how the 

corpse functions as a reminder of the brief ability to overcome death presumes that 

images of the living are evoking a period between two larger states of non-existence. 

That is, life is book-ended by two states of non-being. The negative space of the pre-

object and the ultimate demise and decay of life remind the viewer of the brief interlude 

in which a lost and unknown thing takes form.  

The resultant foreboding sense of melancholy that emerges while viewing the 

Dead Christ is linked to what Jacques Lacan and Kristeva would refer to as a pre-object 

that can never be fully recovered and whose origin lies beyond a point of human 

                                                           
28 Richard Block and Michael Du Plessis, “A Treacherous Subject: An Introduction,” CR: The 

New Centennial Review 12, no. 3 (2012): 1–15, esp. 9.  

 
29 John Lechte, “Kristeva's ‘Soleil Noir’ and Postmodernity,” Cultural Critique 18 (1991): 97–

121. 



170 
 

understanding.30 Kristeva suggests that Holbein is thus giving a substantiated form to 

negative space, depicting a viable existence to a physiological state that cannot be overtly 

defined. If viewed as a visual exploration and representation of the nothingness of death, 

“the painting gives form and color to the un-representable, understood not as erotic 

profusion but conceived as the eclipse of the means of representation on the brink of their 

extinction in death.”31 By representing the dead as being both extant and viable, as well as 

devoid of positive space in its claustrophobic rendering, Holbein straddles the fields of 

viewership and loss, a hallmark of what Kristeva notes is a primary function of the 

painting.32  

Images of death, as seen in the examples from this analysis, present an 

intersection of ontology, theology, and art. Tombs and depictions of the dead created 

meaning through participating in changing theological and philosophical contentions that 

were under pressure during this extended period in England and German-speaking lands. 

Throughout the Reformation, the presence of tombs forced viewers to confront and 

consider altering definitions of immortality, the link between the living and the dead, the 

material body and the soul. These tombs also posed pronounced questions about the 

changing nature of the self and selfhood, and the role of art to represent the unknowable 

ethos of death. In the same way that the dead progressed through variable stages of 

                                                           
 

30 The identity and definition of the pre-object are summarized in Perry Meiseal. 1990. “Sadness 

Starts Early: Review of Black Sun, Depression and Melancholia by Julia Kristeva, Translated by Leon S. 

Roudiez,” The New York Times, February 26, 1990. 

  
31 Timothy Murray, “‘Et in Arcadia Video’: Poussin the Image of Culture with Marin and 

Kuntzel,” MLN 112, no. 3 (1997): 431–53. 

 
32 Helen Weston, “Jacques-Louis David’s ‘La Mort De Joseph Bara’: A Tale of Revolutionary 

Myths and Modern Fantasies,” Paragraph 19, no. 3 (1996): 234–50. 



171 
 

corporeality, decay, and reconstitution, transi tombs reimagined and reformed death and 

redemption. Through the promotion of painting, the allusive image and meaning of death 

took atypical forms. Holbein’s Dead Christ reified contentions about mortality and 

affirmed beliefs about the collective state of humankind. Transi tombs further 

reconstituted public memorial and personal recollections of the dead, a trajectory that 

ultimately resulted in a reconsideration of the collective body of Christianity and the 

corporeality of Jesus Christ. By exploring these tenuous definitions and operations of 

time, these tombs created an altogether innovative method of experiencing the mutable 

strata of life, death, and resurrection.  



172 
 

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APPENDIX 

FIGURES 

 

Figure 1.1: Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele of Canterbury Cathedral (d. 1443), 

Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, Kent, England. 

  



198 
 

 

 

     

Figure 1.2: Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele of Canterbury Cathedral, marble, effigy  

detail, Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, Kent, England   



199 
 

  

 

 Figure 1.3: Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele of Canterbury Cathedral, marble, transi 

detail, Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, Kent, England. 

  



200 
 

Figure 1.4: Church of Saint Mary the Virgin Church (c. 1435 – 1440), Ewelme, 

Oxfordshire, England.   



201 
 

 

    

Figure 1.5: Tomb of Alice de la Pole, Duchess of Suffolk (d. 1475), alabaster, effigy 

detail, Ewelme Parish Church, Oxfordshire, England. 

  



202 
 

 

Figure 1.6: Tomb of Alice de la Pole, Duchess of Suffolk (d. 1475), alabaster, transi 

detail, Ewelme Parish Church, Oxfordshire, England.   



203 
 

 

Figure 1.7: Fuggerkapelle Memorial plaque of Ulrich Fugger, d. 1510 (1509 - 1512), 

marble, Saint Anna’s Church, Augsburg, Germany. 

  



204 
 

Figure 1.8: Hans Holbein the Younger. The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (c. 
1521), oil on wood, 12 x 79 in., Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland.         

 

 

 

 

 

  



205 
 

 

 

Figure 2.1: Chichele Gate, outside tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), 
Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England. 

 

 

 

  



206 
 

 

Figure 2.2: Modern chair of the Archbishop of Canterbury, view from the tomb of 
Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England.   



207 
 

 

 

Figure 2.3: Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), side view, Canterbury 

Cathedral, Canterbury, England.  

  



208 
 

  

Figure 2.4: Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), marble, upper tier canopy 

detail, Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England. 

  



209 
 

 

 

Figure 2.5: Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), marble, Bosom of Abraham 

detail, Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England.  

 



210 
 

 

Figure 2.6: Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), marble, Virgin Mary detail, 

Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England.  

 

 



211 
 

 

Figure 2.7: Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), marble and gilt, effigy with 

angels detail, Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England.  

  



212 
 

 

Figure 2.8: Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), marble, transi body detail, 

Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England.  

  



213 
 

 

 

Figure 2.9: Tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (c. 1424), marble, transi face detail, 

Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England.  

  



214 
 

 

Figure 3.1: Saint Mary’s Church and Complex (c. 1435 – 1440), Ewelme, Oxfordshire, 

England. 

 

  



215 
 

Figure 3.2: Tomb of Alice de la Pole (c. 1475) alabaster, Saint John’s Chapel, Saint 

Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England.  

  



216 
 

 

Figure 3.3: Monogram of Saint John’s Chapel (c. 1435 – 1440), polychrome and gilt, 

Saint Mary’s Church Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England 

  



217 
 

 

Figure 3.4: Tomb of Alice de la Pole (c. 1475), alabaster, Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, 

Oxfordshire, England.  

  



218 
 

 

Figure 3.5: Memorial Plaques of Thomas Chaucer and Matilda Chaucer (née 

Burghersh) (c. 1438), brass, Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England. 

  



219 
 

 

Figure 3.6: Tomb of Thomas Chaucer and Matilda Chaucer (c. 1438) Saint Mary’s 

Church, marble, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England. 

  



220 
 

 

Figure 3.7: Effigy of Alice de la Pole (c. 1475), alabaster, Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, 

Oxfordshire, England.  

  



221 
 

 

Figure 3.8: Tomb of Alice de la Pole (c. 1475), wood, angels at top of canopy detail, 

Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England 

  



222 
 

 

 

 

Figure 3.9: Effigy of Alice de la Pole (c. 1475) alabaster and gilt, angels and pillow 

detail, Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England. 

  



223 
 

 

 

 

3.10: Master E. S., Ars Moriendi (c. 1450) engraving, 3.58 x 2.71 in., Ashmolean 

Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford, England. 

  



224 
 

 

 

Figure 3.11: Effigy and transi of Alice de la Pole (c. 1475), alabaster, Saint Mary’s 

Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England.  

  

 

  



225 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 3.12: Tomb of Alice de la Pole, The Annunciation, transi tomb painting (c. 1475) 

Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England. 

 



226 
 

                  

 

Figure 3.13: Tomb of Alice de la Pole, John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene, (c. 1475), 

polychrome, Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England.  

 



227 
 

 

Figure 3.14: Tomb of Alice de la Pole, The Annunciation, polychrome, transi tomb detail 

(c. 1475) Saint Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire, England. 

 

 

 

  



228 
 

  

Figure 4.1: Sebastian Loscher, Fugger chapel with epitaphs, marble, Saint Anna’s Church 

(c. 1525), Augsburg, Germany. 

  



229 
 

 

 

 

 

   

Figure 4.2: Albrecht Dürer, Design for the Fugger Chapel in Augsburg, Christ 

Resurrected, Ulrich Fugger epitaph sketch, 1510, pen, charcoal, and chalk on paper, 12.63 

x 6.14 in., Albertina, Vienna, Austria. 



230 
 

 

Figure 4.3: Albrecht Dürer, Samson Slaying the Philistines, sketch for the Georg Fugger 

epitaph, 1510, pen, charcoal, and chalk on paper, 12.63 x 6.14 in., Kupferstichkabinett, 

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. 

  



231 
 

 

Figure 4.4: Attrib. to Sebastian Loscher, Epitaph for Georg Fugger (c. 1525), marble, 

Saint Anna’s Church, Augsburg, Germany. 



232 
 

 

 

 

Figure 4.5: Attrib. to Sebastian Loscher, Epitaph for Ulrich Fugger, (c. 1525), marble, 

Saint Anna’s Church, Augsburg, Germany. 



233 
 

 

Figure 4.6: Attrib. to Sebastian Loscher, Epitaph for Jakob Fugger (c. 1525), marble, 

Saint Anna’s Church, Augsburg, Germany. 



234 
 

 

Figure 4.7: Attrib. to Sebastian Loscher, Epitaph for the Fugger Famil (c. 1525), marble, 

Saint Anna’s Church, Augsburg, Germany. 



235 
 

  

Figure 4.8: Hans Daucher, Lamentation of Christ and Altar, (c. 1522) marble, Saint 

Anna’s Church, Augsburg, Germany. 

  



236 
 

 

Figure 4.9: Memorial plaque of Ulrich Fugger, d. 1510 (1509 - 1512), marble, Chapel of 

Saint Mark, The Fuggerei, Augsburg, Germany. 

 

 



237 
 

 

 Figure 4.10: Saint Anna’s Church (c. 1321), Augsburg, Germany.  

 



238 
 

 

Figure 4.11: Figure 4.11: Crypt Entryway and marker (1538) marble, 118 x 157 in. Saint 

Anna’s Church, Augsburg, Germany. 

 



239 
 

Figure 5.1: Hans Holbein the Younger, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (c. 

1521) Oil on wood, 12 x 79 in., Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland.         

 

  



240 
 

 

 

Figure 5.2: Matthias Grünewald, The Crucifixion (c. 1512–1516) oil on wood, predella 

detail, 30 x 134 in., Colmar, France, Unterlinden Museum.  

  



241 
 

 

 

Figure 5.3: Unidentified artist, after Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497–1543), The 

Dead Christ in the Tomb, c. 1521 silverpoint, chalk on paper, blue ground, 5 x 11.5 in., 

Winnipeg, Canada, Winnipeg Art Gallery. 

 

  



242 
 

 

Figure 5.4: Hans Holbein the Younger (1521), The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 

oil on wood, face and head detail, Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland. 

  



243 
 

 

Figure 5.5: Hans Holbein the Younger (1521), The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 

oil on wood, hand wound detail Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland. 

  



244 
 

      

 

Figure 5.6: Hans Holbein the Younger (1521), The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 

oil on wood, feet and legs detail, Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland.   



245 
 

 

Figure 5.7: Hans Holbein the Younger, Pictures of Death, The Emperor (c. 1526), 

woodcut, 2.55 x 1.92 in., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  



246 
 

 

Figure 5.8: Hans Holbein the Younger. Pictures of Death, The Plowman (c. 1526), 

woodcut, 2.55 x 1.92 in., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.