G Dizdar

The Culture of Death in late Medieval and early Renaissance Italy

Gorin Dizdar
The Culture of Death in late Medieval and early Renaissance Italy
History 1222: Ritual in Renaissance & Early Modern Europe
Prof. Nicholas Terpstra
29th November 2010

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Introduction

In his essay Death and the Concept of Person, Maurice Bloch reminds us of a crucial
insight by the pioneer of the anthropology of death, Robert Hertz: in many cultures
death is not something which is believed to occur in an instant nor is it seen, as with us,
as the passage of a line without thickness. Rather death is visualized as part of a long
transformative process. (Bloch 11). Going a step further, Bloch accuses Hertz of
allowing himself to be blinded by Western ideology in believing that the actual moment
of the termination of the bodys vital functions necessarily retains a privileged status
unlike any other single instant in the extended social process that may be called death.
Avoiding a theoretical entanglement in the delicate issue of cultural relativism, the
exploration of the meanings of death in the late medieval and early Renaissance period
carried out in this essay will largely follow Blochs approach in seeing death as a process
that both temporally and spatially extends beyond our contemporary understanding of the
word, gradually blending into the context of the wider social world.

Nevertheless, an attempt will be made to show that it is precisely during this period that
certain fundamental changes in the conception of and attitudes towards death took place,
changes that can be seen as the starting points of a long process that would eventually
lead to the medical and utterly despiritualized view of death prevalent in the
contemporary Western world. I am deliberately avoiding the term individualized,
aiming to shift the discussion away from the long-standing stress on this somewhat
misleading concept originating in humanistic philosophy and art history. As Bloch argues,

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the contrast between individualism and holism is ultimately too simplistic, as the crucial
point is not whether a culture possesses the idea of individualism, but the way in which it
is conceptualized: what differentiates our system of thinking from such examples is
therefore not the presence of individualism, but the possibility of the occurrence of the
idea that we are nothing but individuals and that, as a result, when the combination of
elements which creates the individual breaks up, the constituent elements then have no
value in themselves. (Bloch 18) Rather than conceiving of the changes occurring in this
period along the axis individual/society, the essay will focus on the perceived
formalization and systematization of the culture of death during this period.

The transformation of the culture of death in the late medieval period will be explored
through the interrelated, yet distinct categories of ritual, belief and tomb design. Rather
than aiming for a comprehensive overview of either one of the categories, the essay will
analyze a few specific issues that illustrate what are perceived as wider trends. The two
interdependent underlying question of the analysis will pertain to the nature of the
changes occurring during this period on the one hand and their purpose and wider
significance on the other. As a methodological guideline, let us quote the new paradigm
of medieval religion envisaged by Donald Weinstein: it will have to be
multidimensional and dynamic rather than dualistic and static, pluralistic rather than
hierarchical. It will also have to incorporate what medieval people themselves thought
about the matter.1 (Weinstein 90)

Ritual
1

Although it was made back in 1989, this approach remains pertinent to current historiography.

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In a treatise on mental prayer, the Florentine Dominican friar Savonarola wrote that true
cult, which is interior, had been established in the primitive church for all Christians,
whereas ceremonies had come to be adopted as a concession to the decline of religious
ardour (fervore), a medicine for weak minds. (Weinstein 101) Although Savonarola
lived in the latter half of the 15th century, his opinion undoubtedly reflects a long-standing
clerical attitude towards contemporary religious rituals. Without adopting his elitist
extension of this duality onto the class distinction between the clergy and the laity, the
contrast between interior cult and external ceremony is a useful one to keep in mind when
analyzing late medieval rites surrounding death. As Franco Mormandos insightful
analysis of the sermons of the popular Franciscan reformer Bernardino of Siena (13801444) shows, Christian believers were urged to constantly meditate upon death and the
afterlife, adding further weight to the previously expressed claim that death in this period
should not be regarded as merely the last moment of a persons life, but rather as a more
or less permanent presence in a virtuous Christian mind. In addition to these reflections
on death, Christians were encouraged to visit their dying relatives and acquaintances to
reinforce their beliefs, thus forming an inextricable link between the internal and the
external.

If, expanding Hertzs previously quoted figure of speech, death in the late Middle Ages is
visualized as a shaded area with different degrees of darkness rather than a line without
thickness in the temporal map of human existence, it can be said that the darker areas are
generally characterized by more formalized, ceremonial behaviour. Physical death

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appears to be only one of several critical moments in the medieval experience of this
phenomenon. As Roger S. Wieck notes, in the Middle Ages graves were temporary rather
than permanent resting places for the large majority of deceased people (440). After a
certain number of years required for the complete decomposition of the body, the
remaining bones were removed and stored in charnel houses surrounding the graveyard.
While Wieck merely mentions this custom as a technical peculiarity, it is difficult to
believe that an age so profoundly concerned with the religious significance of physical
remains would not attach any meaning to this deeply symbolic act. As the literature on
medieval death consulted for this essay remains silent on this matter, it has appeared
necessary to adopt a comparative method to flesh out this intuition pertaining to the
religious significance of the exhumation of bones from their graves. A relevant source for
this purpose was found in Loring M. Danforths The Death Rituals of Rural Greece, an
anthropological study of a similar custom that has survived deeply into the 20th century.

While care must be taken when comparing such different contexts as pre-Renaissance
Catholic Italy and twentieth-century Orthodox Greece, certain emotions such as a
mothers affection towards her deceased child can be assumed to be relatively constant
across time and space. Describing the touching moment in which a mother is faced with
the bones of her daughter who had been buried three years earlier, Danforth writes: Irini
cradled her daughters skull in her arms, crying and sobbing uncontrollably. The woman
behind her tried to take it from her but she would not let go. She held Elenis skull to her
cheek, embracing it much as she would have embraced Eleni were she still alive.
(Danforth 20) The intense emotions described here are tied to a whole set of explicit and

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implicit beliefs about death held in rural Greece. In the period between the deceaseds
burial and exhumation, the closest female relative is excluded from society and obliged to
visit the grave on a daily basis, thus finding herself in a liminal state between the world of
the living and the world of the dead. Furthermore, a profound significance is attached to
the whiteness of the bones at the moment of the exhumation, with any signs of the
incompleteness of the bodys decomposition being interpreted as an indication of
unforgiven sins committed by the deceased. Most importantly for the purposes of this
essay, Danforth reflects on the Greek villagers attitude towards the official beliefs of the
Orthodox Church: The resurrected body and the soul will enjoy eternal life in the
kingdom of God. However, this mystical belief is rarely mentioned by Greek villagers,
and when it is, it is often accompanied by an expression of incredulity and scorn (68).

What this brief overview of the exhumation customs of rural Greece shows is the
profound correspondence between social rituals and individual emotions, with officially
sanctioned beliefs being somewhat further removed from peoples subjective experiences
of death. On a general level, this situation can be compared to the late medieval period,
throughout which the Catholic Church was concerned with formalizing and regulating
religious behaviour (Binski 41), indicated, among other things, by the disappearance of
the custom of exhumation in Western Europe. In this respect, it is necessary to qualify
Binskis claim that thoughts, or mentalits, are beyond reconstruction, all we can
ponder is the formulaic or conventional character of emotion (51). While this claim is
beyond dispute as a general argument of a solipsistic type, it nevertheless appears
reasonable to claim that in certain contexts there is a higher correspondence between

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internal attitudes and external expressions than in others. It is in fact the basic argument
of this part of the essay that the late medieval period saw a growing disjunction between
subjective emotions and official ceremonies, a development indicated by the appearance
of the so-called flamboyant funeral style in the second half of the 14 th century in
Florence. Seen in this light, the decline of religious ardour observed by Savonarola may
have been caused precisely by the lack of correspondence between elite and lay
religiosity in this period, rather than the inherently weak minds of the laity.

In Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, Sharon Strocchia provides a detailed

analysis of the social conditions that led to the development of the Florentine flamboyant
style in the late Trecento. The single most important factor was the plague epidemic,
leading to a dramatic population decline from around 100,000 to 50,000 between 1348
and 1349 (Strocchia 58). A second crucial factor was the status competition between
traditional patrician families and the new men, the nouveau riche created primarily by
the income redistribution caused by the plague. From the perspective of the question of
the relationship between external ceremony and internal attitude, Strocchias most
interesting claim is that the greater use of material resources, reflecting a newfound
delight in the ephemeral, offered psychological assurances and protection in an
environment destabilized by the uncertainties of plague (64). This argument
demonstrates Strocchias rejection of Binskis reservation towards postulating thoughts
on the basis of their conventional expression. Furthermore, it implies the position that

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changes in ceremonial expressions are a direct consequence of shifts in underlying

attitudes towards death.2

Rather than rejecting Strocchias claim, I would like to offer a theoretically more solidly
founded conceptualization of the changes involved in this shift of ceremonial customs,
going beyond the rather vague idea of psychological assurances. In his anthropological
analysis of burial customs, Bloch notes that the death of the individual is the source of
rebirth of the group (24), offering as a general hypothesis the claim that the world
religions bury the individual and send him to God and out of the social world. At the
same time this expulsion purifies that part of the person which continues on earth and
which will be re-used and reincarnated in other members of the corporate group to which
the dead belonged (20). Thus, rather than seeing burial as a ritual concerned only with
attitudes towards the deceased, it should also be viewed as an event in which social
relations are reshuffled and the continuity of society is affirmed. In this respect, Van
Genneps ubiquitous taxonomy of rites of passage can be misleading and has been
deliberately ignored. Despite its obvious value in understanding the mechanism of
diverse rituals, its neat tri-partite structure can occasionally blind the analyst to the
ambiguities and multiplicities of meanings inherent in complex ceremonies such as the
burials of distinguished citizens. Following Blochs conceptualization of burials, the shift
towards more conspicuous consumption (Strocchia 58) should be seen as not only a
consequence of a psychological defence mechanism of the deceaseds nearest kin or an
indication of a growing individualism, but also as an attempt of an entire society to offset
2

It should be noted Strocchia qualifies the claim quoted above by stating that flamboyance may have
created a kind of ceremonial buffer against the onslaughts of morality (italics mine) in the preceding
sentence.

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a collective anxiety about its very survival through the conscious display of its material
wealth. This view would also allow for an understanding of the communes willingness to
sell exemptions to legal consumption ceilings after 1384 that goes beyond a mere cynical
greed of the city officials (which should of course continue to be seen as part of the
explanation).

But does this mean that we should, following Danforth (32), accept a Geertzian
explanation, according to which death rites attempt to establish a religious perspective
by postulating a sacred order, standing in stark contrast to a common-sense perspective
in which the finality of death is accepted? In my opinion, these perspectives may be
useful analytic categories, but they do not correspond to empirically identifiable,
consciously differentiated states of minds or modes of thinking. Instead of persepctives, it
would be more useful to talk of mentalits as complex amalgamations of a multitude of
usually inconsistent beliefs, attitudes and dispositions which are rarely classified into any
kind of categories by the persons who hold them. Nevertheless, rituals can be viewed as
attempts to modify or control mentalits by, paraphrasing Geertz, telling societies stories
about themselves. As all stories, rituals can correspond to the lived experiences of the
societies performing them to a greater or lesser degree. The growth of conspicuous
consumption in 14th century Florentine rituals can be considered as a symptom of the gap
that had arisen between the precarious state of the citys socio-economic situation and the
story of continuity told through its burial ceremonies. In order to make up for its lack of
correspondence with everyday beliefs, the story of burial had to be enriched with
extravagant special effects so as to retain a measure of credibility.

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Belief

Having already touched upon the complex issue of the relationship between explicitly
formulated beliefs and actual religious behaviour in the context of rural Greece, this
section will deal with changes in official Church doctrine regarding death and the afterlife
in the late medieval period. Focusing on the concept of Purgatory as a third possible
destination for the soul in the afterlife, I will look at the ways in which the early Christian
belief in the purgation of the soul after death led to the theological postulation of a
specific place where it is carried out and its eventual adoption as a dogma of the Catholic
Church. The extent to which the adoption of the doctrine of Purgatory was a gradual
process is indicated by the gap of one hundred years between the time the idea was first
formulated by Parisian theologians and the moment in which it was adopted by the
Church at the Second Council of Lyons (1274), as well as the much longer time period
that was required for it to be accepted by wider circles of Christian believers. Putting this
theological development into a wider context, the birth of Purgatory will be considered in
relation to the rationalization of services for the dead that occurred during the same
period.

In The Birth of Purgatory, Jacques Le Goff provides a meticulous textual analysis of

some of the most important works of 12th century theology, essentially arguing that the
development of the concept of purgatory was a gradual process caused by the desire to
provide ever more precise answers to long-standing religious questions. Combining

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certain biblical passages which suggest a purgation for almost perfect souls on Judgement
Day and the deep-seated Christian belief that the souls of the dead can be helped through
prayers and suffrages, in the 1170s theologians of the School of Notre-Dame made the
decisive step from talking about places of purgation in the plural to the notion of a
singular Purgatory as a specific place in which the souls of imperfect souls are purged
from their sins. The idea was then popularized through monastic visions of visits to
Purgatory, spreading through the mass media of the 13 th century (Le Goff 298),
sermons enriched by exempla.

An original enrichment of Le Goffs linguistic model of the development of Purgatory is

provided by Anca Bratu-Minott in her article From the Bosom of Abraham to the
Beatific Vision: On Some Medieval Images of the Souls Journey to Heaven. Analysing
several images from the Bury of St. Edmunds Psalter (c. 1030 1040), Bratu-Minott
argues that they should not be seen as mere illustrations of individual biblical passages,
but rather as more complex visual statements incorporating several scriptural references
as well as expressing evaluative theological ideas (190). Thus, for example, one image
located next to Psalm 65, which mentions the idea of the refrigerium, a concept related to
the afterlife preceding the development of Purgatory, shows souls passing through fire
and water. While these details can be found in Psalm 65 itself, a vase with the inscription
opera justitae carried by one of the souls in the image can be read as a reference to two
biblical passages (1 Corinthians 3:13-15 and Malachi 3: 2-3) which were eventually
explicitly used as scriptural evidence for the existence of Purgatory (Bratu-Minott, 190191). Commenting on the illustration, Bratu-Minott concludes that it anticipates some

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ideas that theologians will later organize into the doctrine of purgatory (193).
Unfortunately, the author does not go into the controversial question whether the
correlation between the illustration and theological ideas may be stronger than a mere
anticipation.

The question of the precise relation between word and image is not merely philological,
but pertains to the wider issue of the conditions that have allowed for the occurrence of
this fundamental shift in the Western Christian conception of the afterlife. A crucial factor
mentioned by Le Goff is the decline of contemptus mundi, the Christian attitude of the
rejection of the material world in favour of the afterlife. A general socio-economic
progress led to the doubling of the population in Latin Christendom between the 11th and
13th centuries (Le Goff 131), creating an interest in the meanwhile between the present
and the Apocalypse, whose impending arrival was not felt as strongly as in the preceding
centuries. Parallel to this rising optimism about the future was the development of
terrestrial cartography and precise measurements of time, a manifestation of which was,
according to Le Goff, the previously mentioned usage of exempla with their alleged
historical authenticity in sermons (230). Although this claim may appear strange from a
contemporary perspective, these developments can be seen as part of the previously
argued shift from internal cult to ever-more elaborate external ceremony, in the sense that
maps and historical narratives are also, in one way, stories that societies tell themselves
about themselves.3 The fundamental point here is that an underlying tendency towards
precise visual representations (whether mental or physical), stemming from the way the
3

Albert Tenenti seems to have something similar in mind when, in his discussion of Florentine
Historiography, he refers to the historiographic ritual, seeing it as the very fashion in which writers feel
they have a duty to present and display events. (Tenenti, 9)

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world was increasingly experienced, may have played a larger role in the development of
Purgatory than hitherto recognized.

According to Le Goff, however, the birth of Purgatory is a consequence of a more

fundamental shift in the mental framework of Latin Christianity than a mere propensity
for visual and linguistic representations: Purgatory was one of a group of phenomena
associated with the transformation of feudal Christendom, of which one key expression
was the creation of ternary logical models through the introduction of an intermediate
category (227). In other words, Le Goff is arguing that during the late Middle Ages,
Western European society modified its basic conceptual apparatus, shifting from a
tendency to categorize the world into two poles to one in which its structure was viewed
as tri-partite. In the social realm, the most obvious example in this respect is the
emergence of a third social category of citizens between the traditional classes of
peasants and landholders. Eventually, this ternary model was transferred from this world
to the afterlife, leading to the insertion of Purgatory into the binary structure of Heaven
and Hell. Without offering a final verdict on this thesis, it must be pointed out that it
appears as an unmistakeable product of a French historiographic culture, directly
contradicting the empirical principles of its English-speaking counterpart. 4 Rather than
dismissing it as a matter of principle, however, a more relevant criticism would relate to
the fact that Le Goff devoted just over three pages to this controversial metahistorical
theory.

For example, a sentence like it happens, sometimes, that at an unexpected place in a document history
drops it mask (Le Goff, 220) would hardly be appreciated in English-speaking academic historiography.

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On a more empirical level, Le Goff suggests that the doctrine of Purgatory played a
crucial social role, enabling certain occupational groups whose economic role had
become more significant (such as usurers) to be saved from eternal damnation. More
importantly, however, it defined the relationship between the dead and the living,
simultaneously providing believers with a rationalized form of ritual care for their souls
and securing a reliable source of income for the Church. Although, as has been previously
pointed out, the belief that prayers could help the deceased had already been deeply
engrained within the Christian community, it was only with Purgatory that it was given
official confirmation and its nature was precisely defined. Christians were now provided
with exact information as to how much each prayer and clerical intercession was worth in
terms of reduction of time to be spent in Purgatory. It was also during the time of the
institutionalization of Purgatory that the traditional monastic system of commemoration
was fundamentally reformed. As Colvin explains, by the end of 12 th century, monasteries
were overburdened with obligations such as annual re-enactments of burials, vigils,
masses, recitations of psalms and distribution of food to the poor. While the obligations
were originally linked only to the founders of their monasteries, by this time the privilege
had spread to distinguished monks, other monastic communities as well as members of
the laity who were willing and able to pay. Towards the end of the 13 th century, all
previous obligations were unified into 12 general annual ceremonies. The official
adoption of Purgatory which occurred in this same period, however, ensured that the laity
would keep paying for individualized attention by limiting the time period during which
the masses would have to be carried out in the future and thus preventing the need for
similar reductions in the future.

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In my opinion, this brief analysis of social functions provides a more fruitful direction
towards an accurate historiographic explanation of Purgatorys success than Le Goffs
postulation of a shift from binary to ternary models of thought. Nevertheless, similarly to
the discussed impact of cartography, the appearance of ternary social models certainly
may constitute part of the explanation why it appeared as an attractive idea in the first
place, particularly considering that the medieval mind functioned in terms of
correspondences rather than causality (Waite 12). In terms of its effect on the wider
Christian world, it is an example of a development that largely appears to conform to the
traditional medievalist paradigm of an elite innovation acting upon the masses of
common believers. By analogy with the attitude of the Greek villagers towards official
beliefs, it may be speculated that the newly-found clerical certainty towards the after-life
was met with scepticism, taking a long time before being fully accepted by wider circles
of believers. The eventual triumph of the belief in Purgatory is the strongest evidence of
the formalization and externalization of death in the late medieval period: instead of an
uncertain and ultimately subjective relationship with the dead, it created a legalistic
system whose parameters were determined by the Church. The closing words of The
Triumph of Purgatory seem to perfectly encapsulate the cold and emotionally suppressed
world of its monastic creators: Yet there will always, I hope, be a place in mans dreams
for subtlety, justice, accuracy, and measure in every sense of the word, for reason (O
reasonable Purgatory!) and hope (Le Goff 360). Keeping in mind its role in the growing
cynicism and ruthlessness of the Catholic Church in this period, it is difficult to share Le
Goffs enthusiasm for the idea of Purgatory.

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Tombstones

An analysis of Christian tomb design of this period shows that Panofskys claim that it is
precisely in its attitude toward the dead that the [Renaissance] most vigorously asserted
its modernity (67) is only true to a certain extent. Most importantly, the familiar claim
that the Renaissance (or the renascences preceding it) has rediscovered antiquity must
be qualified: numerous medieval papal and other notable gravestones were in fact
literally recycled ancient sarcophagi, suggesting an unbroken continuity with the GrecoRoman past. Furthermore, it is precisely during the late Middle Ages that Latin
Christianity asserted a fundamentally Christian attitude in breaking an ancient pagan
taboo by allowing the erection of tombs and graveyards within city walls. 5 Beginning
with subtle modifications of familiar motifs from the sarcophagi of the early Christians,
the late medieval and early Renaissance period developed a highly complex visual
language that spoke not only through its explicitly displayed motifs, but also through its
relationship with the surrounding space as well as the absences in comparison to other
tombs that would have been known to its audiences.

There were three major structural elements through which the late medieval tombstone
could convey its message. The fist one is the tomb chest, the part of the grave with the
greatest degree of continuity with ancient sarcophagi, which, in Panofksys words,
[leaned] heavily on the works of their professional predecessors [] for artistic syntax,

Although, on the other hand, an ancient Christian taboo was also broken by allowing large numbers of
people to be buried within churches.

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phonetics, and, above all, phraseology (40). The second element were the canopied
tomb-niches which could be seen as a reference to ancient catacombs (Binski 82), but
also, more symbolically, evocations of death as a liminal moment between two worlds.
While the niches initially could constitute expressive elements in their own right, in the
later Middle Ages they tended to be richly decorated, acting as not more than frames for
mosaics or paintings set above the tombstones. Finally, medieval tombs often
incorporated representations of the deceased on the deathbed in different forms, ranging
from the relatively modest sgraffito specific to Sienna (a shallow slab engraving) to
elevated effigies tilted towards the viewer. It may be too obvious to point out that the
progression from relatively simple graves utilizing only one of these elements to highly
complex ones consisting of their elaborate combinations demonstrates yet another
symptom of the reification of the culture of death during this period.

An example that demonstrates the gradual shift from the habit to recycle ancient
sarcophagi to developing a specifically late medieval language of tombstone design is the
tomb of the Doge Marino Morosini (1249-1253) situated in the San Marco church in
Venice. The tomb chest is decorated with two scenes that appear to be situated in a purely
religious realm: while the upper register evokes the theme of traditio legis, Christs
transmission of law to his apostles (Pincus 47), the lower one complements it with the
Virgin Mary and five unidentified figures in the early Christian orant gesture. The
traditional humanist argument according to which early Christian and medieval funerary
art were essentially prospective, i.e. concerned with the deceaseds afterlife, whereas the
Renaissance rediscovered the pagan retrospective approach (Binski 72) would not

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provide many clues to the meaning the Morosini tomb. Even remaining within the purely
religious realm, the tombs references to early Christianity would be difficult to
understand without an awareness of the retrospective fact that at the time of Morosinis
rule, the Venetians were still in charge of Constantinople after its conquest in the Fourth
Crusade, thus evoking hopes for a newly unified Christian world. More importantly,
however, it is crucial to keep in mind the Venetian political structure of this period, which
stressed the values of a unified civitas and the corporate diffusion of authority (Pincus
49). Thus a clear parallel is established between Christs egalitarian transmission of law,
confirmed by the ceremonial row of orants, and the Doges mode of governance.

Figure 1: Tomb of Doge Marino Morosini

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Although Panofskys view of medieval art appears essentially antiquated, some of his
arguments nevertheless deserve continuing attention, one being his claim about the
Renaissance tendency towards decompartmentalization, defined as a tendency to
abolish all those barriers which had kept things apart (but also in order) during the
Middle Ages and thus to produce an apparently and often really chaotic fusion of art,
religion, scholarship, science and technology (67). At first sight, the pre-Renaissance
Morosini tomb seems to contradict this claim, incorporating as it does a perhaps not
chaotic, but certainly eclectic fusion of religious, aesthetic and political claims. However,
it is important to keep in mind that on the surface, the tomb indeed does express a purely
religious visual statement, establishing its secondary meanings only implicitly, within a
very specific cultural context in which its wider claims could be appropriately
interpreted. In my opinion, it is precisely this shift from a predominantly implicit to an
overwhelmingly explicit formulation of multiple visual messages that characterizes the
shift from the medieval to the Renaissance period. Thus the growing usage of classical or
pagan elements in tomb design should not be seen as merely an aesthetic rediscovery, but
the appropriation of a vocabulary required for the expression of increasingly precise
statements which was simply not available in the Christian visual lexis.

In contrast to traditional aesthetic judgements of Morosinis tomb, Donatellos tomb of

Pope John XXIII (d. 1419) in Florence is considered one of the major monuments of the
fifteenth century (McHam 146) and a Renaissance masterpiece. A brief interpretation of
the monument based on McHams article will illustrate the extent to which the language
of tomb design had evolved in the 150 years separating the two tombs. The most striking

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difference is the complexity of Johns tomb, which consists of a base with three niches
holding the three theological virtues, Faith, Charity and Hope, a section displaying Johns
family as well as the papal coats-of-arms, an inscribed sarcophagus, a bronze effigy of
the deceased and finally a marble lunette displaying the Madonna and child, all covered
by a luxurious canopy. Further adding to the extravagance of the tomb is its
unprecedented location in the baptistery of Florence, its complete incorporation into the
building further stressed through a tight integration into the space between two
supporting columns. The only explicitly Christian element on the entire tomb, the
Madonna with child, ultimately also reveals a rather un-Christian arrogance: as McHam
notes, the convention in this period was to portray the deceased commending to Mary
with his patron saint, their absence implying the certainty in his salvation (157).

Before drawing any conclusions from the tomb design, it is necessary to take into account
the political background of its construction: considering the extravagance of the
monument, it is somewhat surprising to find out that John died a broken man
(McHam 146), having been forced to abdicate the papacy and later imprisoned, only to
spend his last years as a cardinal. Johns failed papacy was a consequence of dynastic
struggles involving a large number of European royalty, and his posthumous glory must
be seen in the light of Florences and particularly the Medicis continued opposition to the
legitimacy of his forced abdication. This example shows the accuracy of Binskis remark
that in seeing tombs as primarily the sphere of a medium of art, namely sculpture,
Panofsky severed the link between them and their audience, and so lost sight of their
essentially instrumental character. (72) At the same time, it shows the extent to which

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the humanist argument of the individualization of tombs in the Renaissance period must
be taken with reservations. While a superficial analysis of Johns tomb would inevitably
lead to the conclusion that its design bears witness to the increased interest in individual
achievement, an awareness of the wider historical context (which has only been alluded
to here) results in a much more complex picture of the tomb as an intersection of
numerous collective claims. The very presence of a multiplicity of visual statements on
the grave indicates that the individual is in fact conceived in accordance with the
previously quoted view by Bloch, as a combination of elements whose survival beyond
physical death is expressed through their silent presence on the tomb.

Figure 2: Donatello's tomb of Pope John XXIII

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What has thus been argued is that despite their obvious aesthetic differences, the creators
of both the Morosini and the John XXIII tombs have used the medium of grave
monuments to express politicized messages about the survival of the collective. Although
the traditional distinction between prospective and retrospective approaches to
commemoration appears too simplistic, the conceptual similarities between the two
tombs should not deceive us into ignoring their profound differences. The Morosini tomb
aims to achieve its effect by manipulating a religious imagery that cannot be situated
along the axis past/future, but is conceived of as existing in a sacred beyond. It does not
contain an explicit reference to either the Venetian state or the Doge himself, functioning
within a context in which the state is assumed to be an expression of an eternal sacred
order. Thus it can be seen as an essentially symbolic form of communication, referring
through conceptual correspondence rather than through direct denotation or visual
resemblance. The John XXIII tomb simultaneously communicates on several conceptual
levels, including the proto-psychological idea of the Virtues, the familial and official
coats-of-arms as denotations of particular collectivities, the effigy as a direct
representation of a particular moment in time and the Madonna with child as an
expression of a sacred beyond that is, however, linked more closely to the specific
moment of the deceaseds salvation than to the idea of an eternal order. Although its
references are still partly veiled in a symbolic language, the tomb moves closer to the
realm of representation, mapping out a precise conception of the elements that have made
up the individual during his life in this world.

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Conclusion

Discussing his hypothesis of a conceptual shift within Latin Christianity from a binary to
a ternary system, Le Goff describes it as one of historys essential mechanisms, the
mechanism by which mental frameworks and logical tools are transformed. (221)
Holding on to the previously expressed reservations towards this theory, the question
emerges whether the externalization and formalization of death discussed in this essay
may be seen as one such mechanism, or at least a symptom of a wider shift within
Western European culture of this period. The emergence of the flamboyant funerary style,
the legalistic colonisation of the afterlife in the form of Purgatory, the creation of an
elaborate style of tombstone design they all seem to be pointing in the direction of a
growing assertion of a particular vision of the world expressed through material means.
Judging the relative significance of such a shift inevitably involves a degree of
speculation regarding the mentalits underlying the surviving written accounts or
remnants of material culture. A possible method through which such speculation may be
provided with a degree of credibility is a comparison with anthropological studies of
similar cultural phenomena and processes utilized in one part of this essay. Another
possibility the one used by Le Goff is to assume a kind of structuralist position
according to which all cultures operate through a limited number of conceptual
possibilities, and then seek out the one most likely corresponding to the culture in
question.

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There are certainly further meta-historical methodologies that could be added to the two
mentioned possibilities. I would, however, like to return to the guideline expressed at the
beginning of the essay, the attempt to take into account what medieval people themselves
thought about the issue in question. And here one is faced with a certain paradox when
discussing the possibility of major conceptual shifts, namely the question of the extent to
which it is desirable to take into account what the agents of this shift thought about the
matter. Should we try to emulate the assumed conceptual frameworks of the cultures we
are studying or rather aim to present them through an objective, scientific language,
assuming something like that even exists? Is it enough to say that the Middle Ages
thought in terms of correspondences rather than causation, or should we ourselves try to
abandon our belief in causation? In our case, concretely, the suggested shift towards an
objectified culture is something to which modern Western culture is heir, including the
very idea of historiography as an objective portrayal of the past. These are important
questions that will remain unanswered here, indicating the inevitable limitations of the
main hypothesis of this essay.

Nevertheless, an attempt has been made to contribute towards an approach towards

medieval history that allows for, if nothing else, a more multidimensional picture of this
period to be formed, an approach that consciously sets itself off against the humanist
paradigm. The section on rituals has aimed to incorporate anthropological insights that
allow for an analysis distinct from crude instrumentalist approaches as well the currently
predominant reliance on Van Gennep. The discussion of belief is essentially a reflection
upon Le Goffs seminal work, expressing an agreement with his stress on the

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fundamental significance of the invention of Purgatory, yet stopping short of accepting

his discovery of historys metaphysical true face. Furthermore it has attempted to
enrich his logocentric narrative by pointing to the insufficiently studied role of illustration
in Purgatorys rise to prominence. Finally, the analysis of tombstone design has looked
into the evolution of its visual language, paying particular attention to limiting the
significance of the disproportionate stress on the individualism of the Renaissance. The
insights presented in the essay are far from conclusive, being conceived as possible
starting points for a more systematic approach to the topic.

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