Edited by Stephen Perkinson and Noa Turel, the beautifully illustrated Picturing Death 1200–1600 is an important addition to the body of work on visual representations of death in Europe during the Gothic and Renaissance periods. The sixteen chapters written largely by art historians are organized into four sections, with an introduction.
The Gothic and Renaissance periods are in many ways considered distinct in terms of the development of art, and in art historical and intellectual historical studies. However, as Perkinson and Turel note, the need to represent the fate of the individual post-mortem unites the four-hundred-year period and the multiple European countries assessed here. The visual media depicting death, dying, and conceptions of the afterlife also cover a wide range; incised tomb slabs, high-relief effigy sculpture, iconography, manuscript illustrations, paintings in chapels, and the symbolic design of ossuaries. Although death imagery is the overarching theme of the work, there are subthemes peppering the chapters, notably social status, gender, and religion (doctrinal theology and everyday understandings, Roman Catholic and Protestant). Accordingly, this book is a useful starting point for students and scholars of art, history, and the study of death.
The first section of the book, “Housing the Dead,” consists of five chapters. Robert Marcoux's chapter explores a selection of tomb effigies from France and focuses on what the memorial as a whole says about the person represented. Through the materials of construction, the location of the effigy, the inscriptions, and iconography, Marcoux argues that gothic memorials are more than an image or likeness of a dead person. Chapter 2 continues this theme with Henrike Christiane Lange providing a close reading of three visual representations (a fresco; a standing statue; and a gisant, which is a recumbent sculpture) of one man in a chapel in Padua, Enrico Scrovegni. Lange demonstrates how media, materials, and the location of the effigies, affect how the works can be understood individually and as a whole. In chapter 3, Xavier Dectot critically explores figures of mourners on tomb sculpture in Spain and Flanders, noting that while images of weepers shift over time, their importance to the social status of the deceased remains central. Chapter 4 returns to Italy as Judith Steinhoff examines gender in tomb imagery. Highlighting the vital role that women played in the religious education of the family, Steinhoff notes how it is mirrored in chapel images of praying women. Chapter 5 explores the chapels themselves as a visual representation of death and afterlife beliefs: Katherine Boivin's focus is on two-story charnel-house chapels in German-speaking Europe that were both ossuaries for dry human remains and a place for prayer for the soul of the deceased. The interdependence between the living and the dead, which is evident in all the chapters in this section, is played out in terms of the physical space of these unusual, and now largely, lost structures.
The theme of section two is mortal anxieties. In chapter 6, Brigit Ferguson discusses the Naumburg statues in Germany, explaining how these high-relief figures allowed for important spiritual contemplations of human mortality—due only to the financial support of the aristocrats they represent. The need for visual imagery to assist in making death and the afterlife present for the living is the theme of Jessica Barker's essay (chapter 7), which has an English context. However, Barker goes beyond visual imagery to include how engagements with tombs would rely on more than just looking, as soundscapes were also important in giving voice to the dead. In chapter 8, Johanna Scheel takes the concept of sight and sound in death to the English Disputation text, arguing that images of animated corpses not only visualized but verbalized hope for one's ultimate afterlife. In chapter 9, Fredrika H. Jacobs continues the theme of hope by critically examining the visual representations of the northern Italian miracle story of an infant resuscitation and the theological importance of infant baptism.
Section three focuses on the macabre, with Peter Bovemyer exploring a variety of dissection images from the 1300s (chapter 10). Bovemyer casts a critical eye on European depictions of human anatomy. Turel, in chapter 11, contemplates the English tiered transi tomb of Archbishop Chichele in relation to other visual representations of the dead, while Maja Dujakovic considers printed images in illustrated books (chapter 12). Her focus is on the danse macabre, as is Perkinson's in chapter 13, although here as memento mori motifs on luxury objects. The commonality of images of death segues into section four and moves the reader from Gothic to Renaissance imagery and more solidly into the realms of the theological with its the debates on the afterlife.
Chapters 14 and 15 examine imagery in theological treatises, which encourages the reader to think about their death and afterlife: Walter Melion uses a Catholic treatise with its stress on Purgatory after death, and Mary Silcox a Protestant one, which foregrounds the power of God alone to decide one's postmortem fate. In the final chapter, Alison Fleming explores how the impact of Reformation thinking also shifted the emphasis of Catholic martyrdom imagery from depicting didactic grisly events to imaging aesthetically more gentle connections between the physical and spiritual.
In providing a critical overview of death imagery in Europe from 1200 to 1600 through a variety of case studies, the book illustrates connections and comparisons, and pushes at current thought within the field. Drawing on examples from diverse geographical locations and various forms of visual media, the contributors engage with the earthly dynamics of visualizing death, the theological complexities within Christian traditions, and the vagaries of praxis over doxis. What ties the essays together is that, regardless of time and place, the need to “conceptualise, describe, and delineate the postmortem fate of the individual” (1) unites people regardless of theological or intellectual divides. However, if one is not an art historian, I would suggest keeping a smartphone to hand as there are some insider terms, and city names noted without countries; being able to look up subject specific language and easily locate places may help nonspecialist readers.
