The Transi Tomb and the 'Genius' of Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Funerary Sculpture

161 The transi tomb and the genius of sixteenthcentury Netherlandish funerary sculpture Marisa Anne Bass On the frontispiece of Thomas Fuller’s 1651 Abel redevivus, or, the dead yet speaking, a funerary monument framed by a cypress grove and surmounted by a pediment of books encloses a set of lively remains (fig. 1).1 A skeleton, reclining with agitated stillness atop his tomb, gives voice to the line from Horace’s Epistles that Desiderius Erasmus made famous – ‘death is the ultimate boundary of things’ – and in doing so, defies the poet’s very words.2 The message of the title page echoes that of the book as a whole: the dead are speaking still through the volumes that they spoke and penned while alive.3 Fuller’s multi-authored compendium champions the memory of leading Reformers from the past by recounting the narratives of their good works, writings, and pious deaths.4 In his epistle to the reader, Fuller compares his treatise to an ancient funerary monument in Palestine ‘consisting of seven Pedestals, and on them as many Pyramids, under the bottoms whereof their Bodies lye buried, whilest their tops serve (even to this day) for Seamarkes to direct Marriners’.5 Likewise, the pyramid of tomes that adorn the tomb on the frontispiece embody the learned spirits of Fuller’s reformist ‘Heroes’, which will serve to ‘guide and conduct’ his readers on their own course of life. Perpetuity and exemplarity beyond the grave provide a corresponding topos for many of the laudatory poems that conclude the treatise’s chapters. ‘His present worth is still alive’, writes the biographer of the sixteenth-century Lutheran Friedrich Myconius, praising the ‘golden minde’ of a man who aspired ever to heaven and ‘by whose examples we may learne to thrive in grace’.6 Yet while a poem honoring the ‘present worth’ of the deceased implies no corresponding resurrection of the body, the image on the frontispiece is more ambiguous. As the skeleton speaks, he seems also to revive like his counterparts in medieval images of the danse macabre, bending his legs and shuffling his feet against the straw mat below him.7 A discomfort with this implied enlivenment may well have motivated the inclusion of the inscription at the base of the tomb, borrowed from Persius’s Satires, which sardonically mocks the endeavor to reanimate the dead through the recitation of their words and deeds: Now does the tombstone not press more lightly on his bones?/ Now does posterity not commend him with their applause?/ Now do not violets spring from his tomb and from his blessed ashes?8 Detail fig. 3 162 Marisa Anne Bass 1 Robert Vaughan, frontispiece of Abel redevivus, engraving, Thomas Fuller, Abel redevivus, or, the dead yet speaking (London: John Stafford, 1651) (photo: Beinecke Library, Yale University) The answer to all these questions is decidedly ‘no’. Only the words of the deceased – the products of their golden minds – continue to resound in the world of the living. The dead themselves, however vividly remembered, remain as dead as ever. To represent death is to make present an absence. No genre of art engages more productively, or problematically, with this paradox than the funerary monument. Across the early modern period, tomb monuments underwent radical transformations in form and style that reflected a growing transnational dialogue in the art of sculpture across Europe, as well as cross-pollination from other media. At the same time, established local and regional traditions in memorial sculpture were adapted and reimagined. Fuller’s frontispiece owes a debt to a prominent subgenre in the funerary The transi tomb and the genius of sixteenth-century Netherlandish funerary sculpture monuments of northern Europe, one defined by the representation of a dead body transitioning through the state of decay to skeletonization, and fittingly known as the transi tomb. The transi first emerged in the fourteenth century but enjoyed a long afterlife well into Fuller’s day, particularly in France, England, the Netherlands, and the German-speaking lands.9 The genre’s most dramatic development and rethinking nonetheless took place beginning in the early sixteenth century. The iconic putrefying corpses of the late-medieval transi became variously more gruesome and more idealized in this period. Shed, more often than not, were the insistent moralizing inscriptions on the vanity of life that attended these figures in earlier monuments.10 Their place within the construct of funerary monuments that housed them likewise shifted in prominence, sometimes taking center stage and sometimes ceding place to other elements of the sculptural program.11 The Renaissance transformation of the transi has been described as one from emblematic anti-figure to embodied portrait of a corpse, from negative memento mori to the positive promise of resurrection, from medieval denial of self to the glorification of the individual.12 Implicit, yet overlooked, in all these teleological accounts is an attendant history of sculptural experiment. To enliven the mortified body through lifeless stone required as much skill as ingenuity on the sculptor’s part, and all the more so when navigating between tradition and innovation in the monument’s overall design. Likewise, the viewer’s anticipated appreciation of that ingenuity was to some measure the point, even alongside the traditional political, spiritual, and memorial functions that these monuments continued to serve for their commissioners. The impetus for change in sixteenth-century transi design derived as much from the revival of ancient funerary precedents as it did from mounting Reformation debate over the relative status of word and image in devotional practice. Fuller’s frontispiece, one century after the fact, tellingly places the mortified body between these two poles. While the framework of the monument derives from the models of ancient Palestine, its internal iconography renders the separation of body and spirit (as word) with a programmatic post-Reformation directness. The Renaissance transis, although increasingly self-aware, were never quite so straightforward. Their newness was constituted less by any one decisive formal shift than by a shift in conversation, one as much about memoria as it was about the elevation of the sculptor’s art in contemporary discourse. This essay focuses on the life of the transi tomb in the funerary sculpture and humanist writing of the sixteenth-century Low Countries. It highlights the discussions that happened around a handful of innovative monuments from the period, namely those that combine transis with accompanying genii: the spirited figures derived from Roman antiquity that are – at least on first glance – their most unlikely companions. Far from signaling the emergence of a mere classical motif in the vocabulary of Netherlandish sculpture, the genii engage in essential dialogue with the sculpted transis around which they move, gesture, and embody emotional response. Even more so than the statuettes of mourners on the late-medieval tombs of the Burgundian Low Countries, the genii serve to activate and enliven the 163 164 Marisa Anne Bass recumbent bodies that they frame, transforming in turn the viewer’s relation to the transis themselves.13 The departed soul of the deceased cannot be summoned back, but the living spirit of local sculptural invention endures in its place. Invention and wondrous skill In March 1516, a procession held in Brussels honoring the deceased King Ferdinand II of Aragon marked the launch of the genius in the funerary art of the Low Countries. Two accounts of the ceremony survive, one written in French and the other in Latin, but only the latter makes specific mention of the spirited sculptures adorning the ceremony’s centerpiece: an ephemeral chariot designed by the Netherlandish artist Jan Gossart and his patron Philip of Burgundy.14 Tellingly, the author of the Latin account was the humanist Gerard Geldenhouwer, secretary to Philip and a scholar deeply invested in asserting the genius of his homeland: The effigies of nude genii on the sides of the chariot were fashioned through the invention [inventione] and wondrous skill [arte] of Jan Gossart, a most famous painter, and the Apelles of our age. Everything there was of art or beauty – in the banners, chariot, arms, insignia, and military standards – he had invented with encouragement and continual help from my singular patron Philip of Burgundy, commander of the sea, who in this matter (as in everything) is superhuman in ingenuity [ingenio].15 This text has been cited in past scholarship for its laudatory mention of Gossart, whose pioneering paintings of mythological nudes arose at Philip’s court in dialogue with Geldenhouwer’s own endeavors to champion the study of local antiquity.16 Yet its greater significance lies with Geldenhouwer’s choice of language, which was as unprecedented in the Netherlandish context as Gossart’s representations of classicizing bodies, architecture, and ornament. Geldenhouwer employs the word ingenium to describe the superhuman talent shown by his patron in aiding with the design of the chariot’s heraldic imagery, and which spoke by extension to Philip’s innate virtues as a Burgundian nobleman. Yet the genii he attributes solely to the inventio and ars of the artist himself. In doing so, he not only justifies Gossart’s recognition as a second Apelles but also highlights what he considered the most notable feature of the chariot’s design. Of course, all of Geldenhouwer’s phrasing had precedent in earlier Italian humanist discourse on the arts, and that is precisely why he uses it now in reference to his own countrymen.17 He opens the treatise by commending his dedicatee, the future Charles V, for celebrating his grandfather’s funeral according to ‘the pious institutions’ of biblical and Roman antiquity, and humbly asks him to accept his own reciprocal labor in committing the event to posterity.18 At the conclusion of his text, Geldenhouwer complains that doing so in Latin proved no easy task; all the ‘barbarous vocabulary’ associated with Burgundian ceremonial practice, which he was compelled to reference in parentheticals throughout, thwarted his effort to celebrate The transi tomb and the genius of sixteenth-century Netherlandish funerary sculpture the funeral’s revival of ancient tradition in classically sentient prose.19 But not so with Gossart’s chariot, which pleased him as much for the artist’s knowledge of antique form – acquired during the latter’s famed visit to Rome seven years earlier – as for the ease with which he could describe this local creation with the language of the venerable past. Geldenhouwer even goes on to highlight that the armorial trappings and laurels of the accompanying horsemen, which the payment records affirm Gossart also designed, were ‘just as one sees in the monuments of antiquity’.20 Yet it was above all Gossart’s nude effigies that allowed Geldenhouwer to speak of genius, inventio, and ingenium in the same breath, and to bring together all three terms for the first time in the history of writing on Netherlandish art. These separate but related concepts were very much in flux at the time, and it is worth dwelling on their significance for a moment. Inventio, for instance, did not yet equate with the modern notion of invention as an ex-nihilo discovery.21 When Geldenhouwer writes of Gossart ‘inventing’ design elements standard to ancient triumphal ceremony, he is emphasizing that the innovation lies in the context of their use rather than with the individual motifs themselves. The genii were new to the Low Countries, however long and manifold their prior history. In classical antiquity, the term genius could refer to the spirit of a particular place or region, the embodiment of the spirit and natural inclinations of an individual, or a cosmic god who controlled the destiny of each member of humankind.22 In ancient Roman funerary sculpture, the genius snuffing out a torch signified the extinguishing of the spirit in its transition from the world of the living to the realm of sleep (Somnus) and death (Thanatos).23 Yet sculpted Renaissance genii, from the fifteenth century onwards, began to exhibit a liveliness that belied any strictly thanatotic association and brought them closer to what the Italians termed spiritelli: embodiments of the vital spirit whose animation reflected back on the ingenuity of their creators.24 The psychopompic genius and the genius of artistic invention may have had conceptually distinct roots, yet the two shared an increasing affinity in their representation.25 The tandem rise of the word ingenium in Renaissance humanist discourse was not incidental to these developments.26 Borrowed from the Roman rhetorical tradition, ingenium generally referred in contemporary discussions of art and its patronage to a person’s natural talent, wit, or creativity – just as Geldenhouwer employs it with reference to Philip. Yet by the early sixteenth century, genius and ingenium were sometimes used interchangeably to refer to an individual’s singular spirit and capacity for invention. Pico della Mirandola speaks in his treatise On Imitation (15121513) of following one’s ‘own genius and natural propensity’, and throughout Erasmus’s eminent dialogue The Ciceronian (1528), the Netherlandish humanist employs both terms in reference to innate natural ability.27 Thinking back to the frontispiece of Fuller’s Abel redevivus, it is no accident that its designer (likely Fuller himself) chose the Horatian line ‘death is the ultimate boundary of things’ for the skeleton’s speech-act. Erasmus, well over a hundred years earlier, had borrowed that same line to disingenuously defend his personal emblem of Terminus against critics who took its accompanying motto, ‘I yield to none’, as a consummate assertion 165 166 Marisa Anne Bass of arrogance.28 In mounting a clever rebuttal against his dissenters, Erasmus only proved his point again: in ingenuity, he yielded to none. ‘Erasmus had his owne Genius as well as Cicero,’ writes William Bedell in his biography of the humanist within Fuller’s treatise, alluding to the very dialogue in which Erasmus did his part to endow that word with new meaning.29 It follows that the genii of Renaissance funerary sculpture occupied a more complex and polysemous space of reference than their ancient counterparts, one in which concepts of divine spirit and spirited invention intermingled. As such, they should be distinguished from the other framing figures that emerged in the new formal vocabulary of early modern monuments. In Erwin Panofsky’s classic study, he singles out the presence of Virtues at the four corners of Renaissance tombs as ‘character witnesses’ who heralded the rise of classical revival in funerary design.30 Although genii played a similar intermediary part in the monuments they inhabit, Geldenhouwer’s text reveals that they also offered an opportunity for a more targeted discourse about the cultural renaissance within his local milieu. The revival of antiquity in the program of Ferdinand’s funeral signaled the resurgent genius of the Netherlands at large, and it was sculpture – not painting – that provided the means. Geldenhouwer refers to Gossart as ‘a most famous painter’, but he never once in his extant writings described the latter’s paintings with equivalent rhetoric.31 Gossart’s sculpted genii, however ephemeral, embodied the new spirit of their cultural moment rising up amidst mourning for a ruler past. Death’s rivaling hand Like the thanatotic genius, the transi embodied the crossing over from the earthly to the celestial realm, yet the latter’s place in northern artistic tradition was far less liminal. Its best-known iteration was the double-decker tomb, a format long popular among the nobility. In these monuments, the representation of an individual’s gisant was positioned above the transi body on a tiered bier. According to Ernst Kantorowicz’s canonical two-body principle, the juxtaposition of a ruler’s living effigy with his remains – both in sculpture and funerary ceremony itself – served to simultaneously represent the triumph of death and the triumph over death, the passing away of one king and the continuation of his line through his successor.32 Hans Belting has gone the farthest to revise Kantorowicz’s two-body construct, arguing that the increasing sixteenth-century aestheticizing of the corpse meant that the transi shed its status as anti-representation and became not an emblem of death but instead a veristic depiction of a dead body.33 He has traced this transformative moment to the tomb of King Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne (1515-1531) in Saint Denis, the work of the Florentine Giusti brothers; this is a seminal funerary monument both in its mingling of Italian and northern visual models and in its stunning transi figures, who are utterly dead yet exempted from the more gruesome signs of worms and decomposing flesh (figs. 2, 3).34 The history of funerary ceremony in early sixteenth-century France likewise reveals a union of traditional memorialization with a new interest in rituals derived from antiquity.35 167 The transi tomb and the genius of sixteenth-century Netherlandish funerary sculpture 2 Antonio and Giovanni Giusti, Tomb of King Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne, 1515-1531, Carrara marble, Basilique de Saint-Denis, France (photo: Patrick Cadet / Centre des monuments nationaux) 3 Detail fig. 2 (photo: Pascal Lemaître / Centre des monuments nationaux) 168 Marisa Anne Bass Belting argues, however, that it is in the actual experience of the monument – rather than its ceremonial antecedents – through which the paradox of representation becomes most evident. A crucial text that Belting does not mention, the first written response and praise of the tomb at Saint Denis, nuances this argument. In 1532, just following the monument’s completion, the Netherlandish humanist Janus Secundus handed down a remarkable firsthand description of its design in his Itinerarium: a literary record of his travels through the southern Netherlands and France that same year.36 A medalist as well as a poet, Secundus’s larger oeuvre reveals a keen interest in mastering the art of sculpture and the depiction of likeness, which doubtless informed his interest in the sculptural virtuosity of monuments on a larger scale.37 Secundus composes his Itinerarium artfully so that it not only culminates with the tomb of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany but also situates the monument within a historical progression of funerary sculpture in northern Europe. Early in the text, Secundus mentions a transi from a (presumably) older tomb monument, which he encountered in the convent of Saint Waltrude in Mons. A surviving transi today in Boussu, near Mons, has a striking affinity with Secundus’s description.38 The sculpture offers a useful visual counterpart to the passage, regardless of whether it is the actual work that he saw (fig. 4): In the sanctuary of these virgins we observed a tomb not without artifice, in which lies a sculpted image of a man dead and already beginning to putrefy, the sight of which might well rouse a fit of vomiting. However, it taught much by its substance [re] and pleased by its skill [arte].39 4 Artist unknown, Transi tomb, c. 1526-1550, Baumberger limestone, Église Saint-Géry, Boussu, Belgium (photo: Katrien van Acker / KIK-IRPA, Brussels) Although Secundus emphasizes the revulsion that viewing this transi might incite, he means this in no way as a critique, since he goes on to refer to the sculpture’s edifying potential and pleasurable artistry. Indeed, his reference to the monument’s ‘substance’ and ‘skill’ suggests a simultaneous response to the transi figure as a meaningful reminder of the body’s material The transi tomb and the genius of sixteenth-century Netherlandish funerary sculpture ephemerality and as an admirable example of veristic sculpture. For Secundus, it is a work that both conveys a didactic message and engages the eye, and in which the one manner of response does not preclude the other. Likewise, there is a certain cleverness to the way that Secundus employs the double negative ‘not without artifice’ (non inartificosum) in the context of describing a sculpted body that is not alive, but which nonetheless strives to convince us that it is. As Secundus suggests, a figuration of death vivid enough to elicit a physical response in its viewers is neither without art nor entirely without life. The transi in Mons meaningfully prefigures Secundus’s verses dedicated to his encounter with the tomb of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany later in the Itinerarium. Secundus dwells on the monument at length, discussing its narrative reliefs, the Virtues seated at its four corners, and of course, the figures of the king and queen kneeling in prayer at its summit. Yet his poem culminates not with the monument’s embodiment of royal power but instead with a vivid description of the transis in its lower register (fig. 3): In the middle of the monument, situated in a low cavern,/ lie the bodies joined together in death,/ and those whom living stones make lively at the summit of the tomb,/ now succumb to the withering of death./ Skin hangs loose; eyes are shut in darkened recesses;/ hair mournfully grows thin:/ and the slender hand, and the attenuated fingers, and the limbs,/ and whatever ravaging of time death can inflict in life,/ rigid death’s rivaling hand brings together./ Both Life and Death stand fixed in one place. It is certain indeed that the whole [work] prides itself on this likeness,/ and its art does not demand foreign skill./ The marble pales; feeble death assails its color/ and falls silent; the dead have unlearned how to speak.40 By closing his poem with these lines, Secundus implies that the transi bodies are the lynchpin to understanding and appreciating the entire tomb. Immediately following the poem, Secundus goes on to remark that the sculpture could only be by the hand of an Italian artist, and explains that he had been told it was the work of a Florentine.41 Indeed, in his first mention of the Saint Denis tomb, he evokes the wonders of Roman antiquity and the ancient pyramids as points of reference immediately called to mind by the monument. Nonetheless, Secundus’s concluding verses quoted above suggest that the transi figures did ‘not demand foreign skill’ to exert their force, thereby acknowledging their descent from local northern models in contrast to the imported Italianate elements included elsewhere in its design. This statement resonates with Secundus’s admiring account of the Mons transi earlier in the text. Yet far more so than in his description of the Mons tomb, Secundus here directly addresses the tension between eternity and ephemerality in stone. Death is figured as a kind of artist whose hand competes with the creative force of Life. Secundus dwells on the representation of the spirit slowly evacuating the transi bodies through the evidence of thinning hair, withering limbs, pale skin, and finally the absence of voice. And he plays upon the paradoxical nature of the transi body, describing how the marble 169 170 Marisa Anne Bass 5 Various artists, Tomb of Margaret of Austria, 1516-1532, alabaster and Carrara marble, Église Saint-Nicolas-de-Tolentin, Brou, France (photo: Ethan Matt Kavaler) – as if itself alive – is assailed by death’s pallor. Marble’s life-giving potential in the sculptor’s hand is met by the mortifying powers of the subject into which it has been carved. Secundus gives voice back to the pale stone through the written word, exercising his own poetic ingenium to convey the artistry and sculptural invention embodied in the transis at Saint Denis, and to single them out as part of the creative tradition to which he himself belonged. Like Geldenhouwer before him, Secundus found the means to champion northern artistic invention in a sculpture embodying the spirit at the threshold between life and death. And indeed, it seems prescient that he did so just as work was concluding on the greatest contemporary funerary complex of the sixteenth-century Low Countries, one in which genii and transis were finally and provocatively combined. The representation of Death The burial chapel at Brou (1516-1532) – commissioned by the Netherlandish regent Margaret of Austria for herself, her husband Philibert of Savoy, and his mother Margaret of Bourbon – is among the best-documented monuments of the early modern period and a landmark in the history of funerary sculpture (fig. 5).42 A seminal debate about style and innovation shaped its design. As the sources reveal, Margaret contemplated the adoption of an antique mode for the chapel, only to decide in favor of the modern Gothic style that ultimately came to define its complex decorative program. The humanist Jean Lemaire de Belges, an early collaborator on the project, had advocated strongly for the first option, working with the French artist Jean Perréal and the French sculptor Michel Colombe to produce designs inspired by ancient and Italianate models. Margaret, in taking an active role in the chapel’s decorative program, emerges as a patron interested in engaging with the developments in the nearby courtly ambit of France, but also concerned to distinguish Brou as a unique and magnificent monument in its own right.43 As Matt Kavaler has convincingly shown, Margaret’s ultimate choice for the Renaissance Gothic mode was not retardant but instead on the forefront of design innovation in the sixteenth-century Netherlands.44 Most relevant here, however, is not the architectural ornamentation but rather the tomb of Philibert at its center, which in many ways encapsulates the debates that informed the Brou chapel’s construction as a whole (fig. 6). Although Philibert’s tomb and that of Margaret adhere to a doubledecker format, they give preeminence to the upper effigies over the bodies below by tightly enclosing the latter within wide columns of rich Gothic ornament. As a result, the experience of the viewer is that the transis are more sensed than viscerally felt. Shrouded by shadow and low to the ground, they hardly command immediate attention. Nor would they have roused the kind of reaction Secundus imagined in looking at the Mons sculpture. Portrayed in peaceful slumber rather than gruesome decomposition, these transis break still more radically with medieval tradition than those of the Saint Denis tomb (fig. 7). Despite the originality of the Brou sculptures, Panofsky took as representative the language used to describe them in the 1526 contract with The transi tomb and the genius of sixteenth-century Netherlandish funerary sculpture 171 172 Marisa Anne Bass 6 Conrad Meit and others, Tomb of Philibert of Savoy, 1516-1532, alabaster and Carrara marble, Église Saint-Nicolas-de-Tolentin, Brou, France (photo: Ethan Matt Kavaler) 7 Detail fig. 5 (photo: Ethan Matt Kavaler) their maker, Conrad Meit, a German sculptor active at the Netherlandish court who was a contemporary and friend of Gossart.45 The effigy of Philibert is described in Meit’s contract as ‘the figure and representation to the life’ (la figure et representacion au vif); its counterpart below is referred to as ‘the figure of Death’ (la figure de la Mort), and in Margaret’s case, as ‘the representation (representacion) of Death’.46 While the capitalization of the word ‘Death’ in the language of the contract suggests these figures are more allegorical than true likenesses, Meit leaves no doubt that they are representations of the deceased Philibert and Margaret, as their individualized facial features mirror those of the gisants above. He thus maintains the core structure of two juxtaposed and interrelated bodies that characterized earlier double-decker tombs, even if the balance between them has shifted. Secundus’s evocative description of the Saint Denis tomb The transi tomb and the genius of sixteenth-century Netherlandish funerary sculpture as a site where ‘Life and Death stand fixed in one place’ resonates to no small degree with these monuments as well. More unusual still are the spirited genii who are especially prominent on Philibert’s tomb, due to its lack of canopy. They strongly recall the description that Geldenhouwer handed down of the 1516 triumphal chariot; indeed, they may index a productive exchange between Meit and Gossart concerning the renascent embodiment of antiquity, a dialogue evidenced elsewhere in their oeuvres.47 Meit put his genii to work displaying Philibert’s arms and insignia, and they animate the tomb far more than any other feature of its design (more so, for instance, than the smaller figures of Virtues embedded in the columns below). Standing fully in the round and bathed in light from the choir windows, these ‘infants’ (enffans) – as the contract describes them – are wonderfully carved with protruding bellies, chubby limbs, and varied lively poses.48 That the contract refers to them as enffans rather than genii signifies little, as the scribe (in difference to a humanist like Geldenhouwer) presumably felt little investment in these nuances.49 Situated each above one of the Gothic columns that frames the lower ‘figure of Death’, Meit’s genii engage in a dialectic not only between life and death but also between the antique and Gothic styles that Margaret weighed in the chapel’s design. Even their very materiality plays a role in this exchange, as the effigies and transis carved of alabaster subtly contrast with the genii, sculpted from Carrara marble that was imported at great cost for the project.50 Here at the center of the monumental complex, a conversation is ever unfolding on the subject of sculptural invention, in which Renaissance Gothic ornament and the enlivened classical body face off in lively contest. Here lifeless stone, endowed with spirit and voice, speaks both to the ingenium of Margaret as patron and to the particular genius of northern artistry manifest in the chapel’s execution. Yet Margaret’s efforts to make her burial site both a pious memorial and a monument of unparalleled invention were not without controversy as the Reformation loomed larger. An oration delivered at her funeral in 1531 by the humanist Johannes Faber mounts a vehement defense against the emerging Protestant critique of costly funerary monuments like those at Brou and offers effusive praise for Margaret’s ‘admirable ingenium, as a woman who chose to cultivate the arts of peace rather than war.51 Faber begins by railing against those ‘who have condemned tombs, monuments, and funerary ceremonies’, and who teach instead – so he claims – ‘that the bodies of the deceased who are faithful to Christ should not be entombed in consecrated ground but devoured by animals and beasts’.52 He goes on to cite a mountain of biblical references to funerary devotion that counters these views, and concludes by referring to Brou specifically: And so it should not be thought a vulgar mark of eternal salvation, that at so early a time and before her own death, the most illustrious and distinguished lady Margaret chose these locales for her own tomb, which she had constructed beforehand at her own cost and directly in eternal praise of almighty God.53 173 174 Marisa Anne Bass Faber’s defense, in emphasizing the spiritual function of the chapel, turns a blind eye to a central problem in the eyes of Reformation critics. All the lavish attention to materials and design – not to mention the evocation of classical form in a Christian context – made Margaret’s chapel as much a potential target as the fact that she took an active role in its commission. For Faber, Margaret’s investment in the peaceable arts not only served her salvation but also expressed the true faith and culture of the region she had governed. But was that enough? While neither Margaret nor Faber conceded to controversy, others were more equivocal. One notable result of the Reformation debate surrounding tombs was a heightened emphasis on resurrection in the context of funerary sculpture, which had implications for the relation between the represented corpse and embodied spirit.54 The little-known monument 8 Artist unknown, Tomb of Pierre d’Herbais, c. 1548, Sint-Martinus Kerk, Pepingen, Belgium (photo: Ethan Matt Kavaler) 175 The transi tomb and the genius of sixteenth-century Netherlandish funerary sculpture of Pierre d’Herbais at Pepingen (c. 1548) – which shows d’Herbais, an official of the Habsburg government under Emperor Charles V, kneeling in prayer with his wife and family member Jacob d’Herbais – is a striking counterpoint to the innovations at Brou (fig. 8).55 No longer a proper double-decker tomb, it includes only a single transi that lies recumbent below the kneeling figures, one which presents not a likeness of a specific deceased individual but instead a universal representacion de la Mort. The figure of the Lord in the pediment, holding an orb and looking upwards towards the heavens, evokes the hope of resurrection; both the transi and the enlivened genii who populate the framework of the monument further allude to the promise of eternal life, as do the depictions of rising phoenixes in the spandrels (figs. 9, 10).56 Indeed, these are genii of a more traditional kind, far less in dialogue with sculptural ingenium than they 9 Detail fig. 8 (photo: Ethan Matt Kavaler) 10 Detail fig. 8 (photo: Ethan Matt Kavaler) 176 Marisa Anne Bass are classical embodiments of the departed spirit. Accordingly, there is no evidence that Pierre d’Herbais was sentient of the contemporary humanist discourse circulating in the upper echelons of the Netherlandish court, or that such interests actively informed his tomb’s design. By contrast, the Netherlandish monument that brings together the learned interests and experiment of the earlier sixteenth century is an enigmatic tomb in Vianen (c. 1542-1556) honoring Reinoud III van Brederode and his wife, Philippote van der Marck (fig. 11).57 The Utrecht-based sculptor Colijn de Nole executed the monument using distinctly northern materials: Baumberger limestone from Germany and Avender stone from northern France. Its design has been attributed to the Netherlandish artist Jan van Scorel, who is documented to have collaborated with Reinoud and the brother of Janus Secundus on the construction of dikes in the region of Zijpe.58 Through both Scorel and Secundus, Reinoud would have been exposed to the interests of local humanists and the emerging revival of ancient models among artists like Gossart, Meit, and Scorel himself. Tellingly, the latter had planned to name the polder resulting from the dikes at Zijpe ‘the New Rome’ (nova Roma). The funerary monument that Reinoud commissioned for himself and his wife reflects his ambitions as a figure immersed in the imperial functioning of the Habsburg-Burgundian realm, and his awareness of the tombs at Brou in particular. Reinoud was a member of one of the established noble families of Holland, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and chamberlain to Emperor Charles V. A contemporary chronicle of the Brederode family emphasizes that Reinoud ‘commissioned the tomb while still alive’, and thus – like Margaret of Austria at Brou – played an active role in the design of his own memorial.59 Charles V had visited Vianen in August 1540 as Reinoud’s guest; the honor of his presence in the small town surely made an impact on his chamberlain and may well have fueled his desire for a tomb befitting his status in the emperor’s regime.60 Vianen was the target of systemized Calvinist iconoclasm on 25 September 1566, and although Reinoud’s own son Hendrik van Brederode permitted the images in the church to be destroyed, he exempted his family’s chapel from the iconoclasts’ blows.61 Only the sculpted altarpiece that accompanied the tomb has suffered harshly over time; its central subject, now almost entirely obscured, was most likely the Resurrection of Christ.62 Reinoud and his wife lie recumbent, as if sleeping, on top of the monument (fig. 12). Delicate folds enshroud their bodies, and plump cushions support their heads. Traces of polychromy indicate that their lips were once red and their hair highlighted in gold.63 At either end stand spirited figures with fluttering robes and laurel crowns, who together grasp the base of a torch adorned with grotesque ornament (fig. 13). They perch on tiptoe atop a base decorated with coats of arms on its outer-facing side and profile busts on the side facing the effigies. Each appears in counterpoint to its partner, their arms crossing symmetrically, one with an open mouth and the other closed. Their depiction recalls the genius as a liminal spirit navigating between the extinguished soul and the hope of eternal life – the latter signified by the still-burning flames they hold. At the same time, their bodies are not those of enffans but of youthful angels, which seem 177 The transi tomb and the genius of sixteenth-century Netherlandish funerary sculpture 11 Colijn de Nole, Tomb of Reinoud III van Brederode and Philippote van der Marck, c. 1542-1556, Baumberger limestone and Avender stone, Grote Kerk, Vianen, Netherlands (photo: Ethan Matt Kavaler) 12 and 13 Detail fig. 11 (photo: author) 178 Marisa Anne Bass 14 Maarten van Heemskerck, St. Luke Painting the Virgin, 1534, oil on panel, 168 x 235 cm, Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum (photo: Margareta Svensson) designed to bridge classical and Christian iconography.64 More than anything, they resemble the angelic genius in Maarten van Heemskerck’s celebrated and closely contemporary Saint Luke painting the Virgin (1534), who at once illuminates Saint Luke’s divine sitters and helps inspire his painterly invention (fig. 14).65 Produced just as Heemskerck left the Low Countries for his famed sojourn in Italy, the painting evokes the classical past that he aspired to revive more fully in the art of his native land.66 That he pursued this aspiration through the tradition of representing the patron saint of Netherlandish artists is all the more meaningful. Heemskerck’s genius figure need not have been the direct inspiration for the figures on the Brederode tomb. Regardless, the comparison serves to show their parallel attempt to negotiate between different notions of the past and representations of the heavenly spirit. Less complex are the four chubby nudes kneeling in the corners of the Vianen monument, who are unmistakably represented as genii both in form and function (fig. 15). They are closely akin to Meit’s figures in the Brou chapel and, like their counterparts there, serve to present the armorial shields of Reinoud and Philippote’s families. With their other hand, each decisively snuffs out a torch. Whereas the spirited figures above them seem to ascend towards the celestial realm, the corner genii are still suspended in the mortal world, their expressions wrought with the consternation of mourning. Grotesque herms on either side of the pediments, and between these two groups, visualize the boundary between heaven to earth; as the herms gasp out breath from their nude torsos, their lower bodies are extinguished by encroaching acanthus leaves (fig. 16). Finally, beneath the sleeping effigies and their host of genii lies a single transi that is among the most remarkable representations of death from the sixteenth century. This figure not only resembles the Boussu transi discussed above but also calls to mind Secundus’s clever double 179 The transi tomb and the genius of sixteenth-century Netherlandish funerary sculpture 15 Detail fig. 11 (photo: author) 16 Detail fig. 11 (photo: author) 180 Marisa Anne Bass 17 and 18 Detail fig. 11 (photo: author) negative to describe a sculpted corpse that is ‘not without artifice’ (fig. 17).67 As in the tomb at Pepingen, the single transi lies in relation to the two recumbent effigies of Reinoud and Philippote above, no longer an individualized portrait but instead an embodiment de la Mort.68 Four pilasters decorated in grotesque relief (the other small columns are a later addition) connect the transi’s abode to the realm of the genii above. Like its more gruesome antecedents, the transi’s body is ransacked by flesh-eating worms, which creep about its limbs and out of its nostril; the worms were at one point polychromed in gold and would have caught the eye still more sharply. Rotting flesh and sinews cling to the bones, such that the wrinkled forehead registers terror and agony (fig. 18). The transi’s hands clench against the straw mat on which it lies, and its open mouth seems to let forth a terrifying scream that reverberates against the imagined cries of the genii poised on the slab above. Visible inside the chest cavity are shriveled organs that appear to be a heart, liver, kidney, and spleen (fig. 19). Their presence seems difficult to reconcile with the body’s state of decay, but soft tissue can linger in the body for some time depending on the burial conditions, and the sculpture may well be at pains to evoke a corpse already several weeks old.69 Yet irrespective of its anatomical accuracy, the transi registers within the monument both as a representation of a decaying corpse and as a dead body struggling to resurrect itself, to reignite the pulsing of its own heart, and to transform marble back into flesh. 181 The transi tomb and the genius of sixteenth-century Netherlandish funerary sculpture 19 Detail fig. 11 (photo: author) The ingenuity of De Nole’s tomb at Vianen lies in the unity of its program, which employs the visual rhetoric of enlivenment to resolve the relationship between the traditional double-decker schema and its newer antique interventions. It is a tomb that asserts its own genius even more strongly than those at Brou, as expressed both through northern materials and through its play with northern monumental tradition. No longer requiring the animation of the poet’s voice, the dead themselves have learned again how to speak. Conclusion The funerary monuments of the early modern Netherlands have been most often discussed in terms of the self-fashioning of their noble commissioners, whose motivations for adopting new styles and designs have been seen as commensurate with their desire to shape their spiritual and worldly legacies. This article has endeavored not to replace but to 182 Marisa Anne Bass expand these interpretations from a focus on individual ambitions to those of the region at large. The perceived agency of these tombs as monuments embodying the efflorescence of art in the Low Countries, attested as much in contemporary humanist writing as by the works themselves, suggests that sculpture did not play second fiddle to painting. Rather, the medium was central to claims for local innovation in the period. The interplay between genii and transis in the tombs explored here is just one example of the dialectic between classical revival and regional tradition that defines so much of sixteenth-century Netherlandish art. In their sculptors’ efforts to give form to an unrepresentable concept – the life-giving spirit and power of ingenious invention – they stand out within a memorial genre long concerned with the separation between body and soul. The possibility that Geldenhouwer recognized in Gossart’s effigies of nude genii was thus realized through monuments built to last over the succeeding decades, in which even the most paradoxical representacions de la Mort gave voice to the genius of the land that bore them. Notes 1 In writing this essay, I am especially grateful to Matt Kavaler, Alexander Marr, Margreet and Hans Kluit, the NKJ editors, and anonymous readers – and for the opportunity to present an initial draft at the 2015 Netherlandish Sculpture symposium in Toronto. All translations are my own. 2 Horace, Epistulae, 1.16.79: ‘mors ultima linea rerum est’. On Erasmus, see below, 165-166. 3 Fuller’s frontispiece is not pure literary fantasy. The extant monument to Thomas Bodley in Oxford’s Merton College, designed by Nicholas Stone (c. 1612), shows its subject framed by similar stacks of books, as is fitting for the man who re-founded the university library (accordingly known as the Bodleian) in the wake of the Reformation. See Blair 1976. 4 On Fuller, see Bailey 1874. On the tradition of the literary epitaph in England, see Newstok 2009. 5 Fuller 1651, A2v. For the history of emblematic title pages in English books, see Corbett & Lightbown 1979, esp. 1-47. For the resonance of funerary monuments in the art and drama of 17thcentury England, see also Neill 1997, esp. 305-353. 6 Fuller 1651, 141. 7 Binski 1996; Gertsman 2010. 8 ‘Nunc levior cippus non imprimit ossa?/ Laudat posteritas, nunc non e manibus illis/ Nunc non e tumulo fortunaque favilla nascuntur viola?’. Adapted from Persius, Saturae, 1.37-39. 9 For a heavily damaged English tomb, finished sometime after 1561, which closely resembles Fuller’s frontispiece in its design and central skeleton, see Llewellyn 1991, 116, fig. 86. 10 Petrucci 1998, 76-77. 11 A seminal example of the former is the 1547 cenotaph of Réne de Châlon in the Church of Saint-Étienne in Bar-le-Duc, France, sculpted by Ligier Richier, which represents the young prince of Orange as a standing transi dramatically holding up his own heart. 12 s’ Jacob 1954, esp. 45-66; Panofsky 1964, 63-66; Cohen 1973; Binski 1996, 139-152; Belting 2002. 13 On the mourning figures of Burgundian tombs, see Jugie 2010. 14 Rémy du Puys, the author of the vernacular account, speaks only of ‘all manner of ancient poetics’ in the chariot’s decorative program. See du Puys 1516, C1: ‘Dessus gisoit le chariot en forme d’ung chaffault royal ascavoir estroit par le bas qui ses largissoit en montant au tour de creuses esmoulures, ausquelles estoient entretailleez, par moult bel et grant artifice, touttes antiquitez poeticques avecque specifications dicelles, escriptes en grosse lettre d’or’. See also Bass 2016, 57-58. 15 Geldenhouwer 1516, 3v; Geldenhouwer 1901, 209-210: ‘In currus lateribus effigiati genii nudi, inventione et arte mirifica Joannis Malbodii, pictoris clarissimi: ac nostri saeculi Apellis. Is quicquid in vexillis, curru, armis, insignibus, militaribus signis erat artis pulchritudinisve invenerat, adhortante 16 17 18 19 20 et subinde iuvante eum unico patrono meo Philippo Burgundo, maris praefecto, qui hac in re (ut in omni) ingenio supra humanum est’. Bass 2016, passim. Baxandall 1971, 15-17 and passim. Geldenhouwer 1516, 1v; Geldenhouwer 1901, 206: ‘Legimus in sacris utriusque Testamenti historiis, illustrissime rex Carole, filios patrum ac maiorum suorum corpora magna cura terrae mandasse. Legimus et in prophanis literis, qua exequiarum pompa populus Romanus divorum Caesaris dictatoris et Octavii Augusti corpora cremaverit, reliquias collegerit, in mausoleis condiderit. Quare celsitudo tua, ne a piis maiorum degeneraret institutis, magnifico apparatu et instrumento, funeralia Catholici Hispaniarum regis Ferdonandi, avi sui materni celebravit. At ego, minimi inter famulos tuos nominis, haec funeralia literis utcunque commendavi, ut cunctis claresceret, quam pius in vivos mortuosque parentes existas’. Geldenhouwer 1516, 5v; Geldenhouwer 1901, 214: ‘Eiusmodi res est, quae ob barbara vocabula et longum ordinem vix Latine scribi possit’. Geldenhouwer 1516, 3v; Geldenhouwer 1901, 210: ‘Currum tam magnifice adornatum trahebant quatuor equi candoris eximii phalerati ornatique holosericis, auro et argento. Aurigae equis insidebant quatuor, armati, lauros gestantes, in morem Romanorum triumphantium, ut videre est in vetustatis monumentis’. For the payment document, see Weidema & Koopstra 2012, 14-15, no. 6. 183 The transi tomb and the genius of sixteenth-century Netherlandish funerary sculpture 21 Marr & Keller 2014, with additional literature. 22 Nitzsche 1975. 23 Hartmann 1969. 24 s’ Jacob 1954, 196-198; Brann 2002; Dempsey 2001, esp. 1-61; Pfisterer 2002, 111-171; Basalti 2013, 78-87. 25 For discussion of the artistic genius in relation to Neo-Platonism and Michelangelo’s drawings, see Van den Doel 2008, esp. 193-204. 26 Zilsel 1972; Kemp 1989; Klein 1996; Christian 2006; Lewis 2014. See also Emison 2004, 321-348, for a valuable historiography of the term in arthistorical scholarship. 27 DellaNeva 2007, 22-23: ‘genium propensionemque naturae eorum quisque sequebatur’. Erasmus 1974-, vol. 26, passim; Erasmus 1969-, vol. 1.2, 581-710. 28 For Erasmus’s discussion of the Horatian motto in relation to his personal emblem of Terminus, see Erasmus 1906-1958, vol. 7, 430-432 (esp. 432), no. 2018; and Erasmus 1974-, 240-245 (esp. 244), no. 2018 (1 August 1528, to Alfonso de Valdés). On the Terminus emblem itself, see Panofsky 1969, 214-216, and Wind 1937. 29 Fuller 1651, 73. Tellingly, Erasmus (despite having eschewed association with the Reformist cause while alive) receives the longest encomium in Fuller’s work, directly following the chapter devoted to Martin Luther himself. See further discussion in Dodds 2009, 182-183. 30 Panofsky 1964, 73-76. 31 Significantly, the only other extended description that Geldenhouwer wrote on one of Gossart’s works was on a series of sculpted terracotta busts that the latter polychromed, and which were displayed in Philip of Burgundy’s palace. See Bass 2016, 77-80. 32 Kantorowicz 1957, esp. 419-437. See also Giesey 1960. 33 Belting 2002, 49-52. On death and embodiment more generally, see also Belting 2011. 34 Blunt 1999, 17-19; Zerner 2003, 374; Blunk 2007. 35 Lemaire de Belges 2001; Brown 2002; Fontaine 2002. For the larger concern with ancient tradition at the court of Louis XII, see Hochner 2006. 36 On Secundus’s Itinerarium and its publication history, including the poet’s own revisions to the text, see Martyn 1993 and Martyn 1998. See also Sénéchal 1993. 37 Goossens 1970; Bass 2016, 103-104. 38 Capouillez 2006. 39 Secundus 2007, 110: ‘In aede harum 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 virginum sepulchrum animadvertimus non inartificosum in quo sculpta mortui et iam putrescentis hominis imago iacet, ea specie quae vel vomitum possit excitare. Plurimum autem et re docuit et arte oblectavit’. Secundus 2007, 126-128: ‘In medio monumenti humilem sortita cavernam,/ Amborum leto corpora fusa iacent,/ Et tumuli quae viva virent in vertice saxa/ Arida iam morti succubuere suae./ Pendet laxa cutis, latebris clauduntur opacis/ Lumina, rarescit triste capillitium:/ Exilisque manus, tenuataque crura manusque/ Quidquid et in vitam mors cariosa potest,/ Contulit in saxum rigidae manus aemula morti,/ Fictaque stant uno Vitaque Morsque loco. Scilicet hoc certe in simulachro integra superbit,/ Arsque peregrinam non sibi poscit opem./ Expallet Marmor, Mors hunc petit aegra colorem,/ Conticet; examines dedidicere loqui’. Secundus 2007, 130: ‘Opus hoc tam insigne non nisi Italica manu nasci potuisse credendum putavimus. Id quod mox didicimus Florentini nimirum esse’. See Kavaler 2004 and Kavaler 2012, esp. 14-17, 76-78, 190-192, both with prior literature. On Margaret’s patronage, see Eichberger 2002. On this term, see Kavaler 2012, 1-45 and passim. Panofsky 1964, 56-66. On Meit, see especially cat. Munich 2006. Bruchet 1927, 242, no. 152 (14 April 1526). Ainsworth 2010, 16-19; Ainsworth 2014; Bass 2016, 104-105. Cat. Munich 2006, 132-137, no. 18. Similar elisions between bambini and spiritelli occur in contracts and inventory references from the Italian context. See, for instance, Dempsey 2001, 16. It is worth recalling as well that the vernacular counterpart to Geldenhouwer’s description of Ferdinand’s funeral also omitted reference of the genii. See note 14 above. For the dialectic between alabaster and marble in Netherlandish sculpture, see Lipińska 2015. Faber 1531, B2v: ‘Etenim arma tractare, bella gerere mulierem, indecorum iudicavit, didiceratque maiores suos ad arma numquam nisi cum pacis artibus (…) o ingenium mulieris admirable, o prudentiam singularem, o terras tali gubernatrice beatas (…)’ Faber 1531, A4r: ‘Fuerunt etiam (…) qui sepulchra, monumenta, pompas 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 funebres damnarunt, Christi fidelium denique defunctorum corpora, non modo consecratis terris non tumulanda, sed feris et bestiis dilanianda (…)’ Faber 1531, C2v: ‘Signum itaque non vulgare putandum est salvationis aeternae, quod tam praematuro tempore et ante diem mortis suae, illustrissima et honestissima domina Margaretha, sui corporis sepulturam, in hisce locis elegit, quae suis propriis impensis antea, et iamdudum in perpetuam laudem omnipotentis dei (…) extruxerat’. Cohen 1973, 170-181; Hurtig 1982; Scholten 2003, 15-19. See Cochez 1992, 27-29, where the monument is attributed either to Colijn de Nole or Jan Mone. If anything, the latter attribution seems more plausible. One might also understand Cornelis Floris’s tomb for Christian III at Roskilde and the Sonderborg tomb in Denmark (c. 1565), also by a Netherlandish artist, along these same lines; the latter explicitly situates the transi below a sculpted relief of the Resurrected Christ. See Johannsen 2010. De Meyere 2010; Brink 2013; Roding & Hijman 2013. Faries 1972, 277-296. Leydis 1957, 118: ‘Als hy oudt was ontrent LXVI iaeren sterff hy te Bruessel (…) ende worden van daer gebracht binnen Vianen, al waer hy by syn huysvrouwe begraeven leyt int coor aen de noortsyde van thoochcoor onder syn sepultre dye hy by syn leven doen maicken hadde’. Van Erp 2010, 159: ‘Donderdag na Assumptio Mariae reed Zijne Keizerijke Majesteit weer de stad uit naar Vianen. ’s Middags at hij bij de Heer van Brederode’. Van Hulzen 1995, 63. Brink 2013, 141. Whether the polychromy is original to the 16th century cannot be verified. The canopy and gate that now surround the monument were a 17th-century addition, and it is possible that polychromy was also added to the sculptures at that stage. On the recent restoration of the monument, see Terwen 2015. At least in a rhetorical context, this slippage was not unproblematic. In a 1572 oration delivered in Rome, Antoine Muret complained of orators who ‘reject words peculiar to the Christian religion and substitute for them others verging upon the sacrilegious (…) not Angelos but genios’. See Scott 1910, 111. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, inv. no. os I-134. See Grosshans 1980, 109-116, no. 18. 184 66 It is significant that Gossart, as Heemskerck’s important Netherlandish precursor, had revived the Eastern Orthodox legend of St. Luke in a painting from a decade earlier, in which an angel -- according to that legend -- is shown directly guiding the saint’s hand. See Marisa Anne Bass cat. 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