hour-glass, as if the deceased were addressing God in the words of the Psalmist (Psalm xxxix. 5, Latin Vulgate version): "Ecce mensurabiles posuisti dies meos et substantia mea tanquam nihilum ante te." 99 The statue is still to be seen in the Church of Saint-Pierre, at Barle-Duc.100 In the sepulchral monument (which formerly existed at Joinville, Haute Marne), erected in 1552, in memory of Claude de Lorraine, first Duke of Guise, his corpse and that of his wife, Antoinette de Bourbon, were represented by Ligier Richier, on a sarcophagus, as they would have appeared after embalming. Henry Maudsley (Religion and Realities, London, 1918, p. 8) quotes the following tale from an apocryphal collection of supposed sayings of Jesus Christ:“ As He and His disciples went along the road they came on the stinking body of a putrefying dog. His disciples turned away their faces in disgust, but Jesus, looking steadily at the rotten carcase, bade them observe the beauty of the white and pearly teeth and learn the moral." I suppose that this memento mori story is of Mediaeval origin, and due to the orthodox Christian religious teaching of the Mediaeval monasteries. In connexion with gisant sepulchral figures a reviewer of this book in the Lancet refers to certain monuments in England representing the dead as clothed in a shroud: one in the south choir ambulatory of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, the work of the statuary, Nicholas Stone, the elder (1586-1647), in memory of the poet and dean of St. Paul's, Dr. John Donne (1573–1631)—also interesting as being the only monument in the Cathedral which was uninjured by the "great fire" of London (1666)-and four figures in Maidstone Parish Church (formerly the church of the College of All Saints), representing two John Astleys, father and son, with their wives, standing in their shrouds. 29 Cf. Paul Richer, L'Art et la Médecine, Paris, 1902, p. 521. 100 See Paul Denis, Ligier Richier, Paris, 1911, Pl. 29 and Pl. 30, and Jules Guiart, op. cit. D. Italian Renaissance Ideas, and Later. The "Triumph of Death" Designs. The "Memento Mori" Subject continued, especially in regard to the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries. We now come to the very different subject of the Renaissance designs of the "Triumph of Death" and of "Fame triumphing over Death," after Petrarch's Trionfi. The poems of Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), who helped greatly in the revival of classical learning (the Italian Renaissance), had a great influence on art, notably his Trionfi 101 (first printed in 1470). According to Petrarch's arrangement in his Trionfi "Amor vincit mundum Tempus vincit famam Divinitas seu Eternitas omnia vincit." One cannot be astonished at Italian and other artists and craftsmen of the Renaissance period eagerly seizing on this theme to obtain subjects for their designs in preference to always keeping to the narrow limits of orthodox Mediaeval Church subjects, such as, "The Tale of the Three Dead and the Three Living," and 101 See Pétrarque, ses Études d'Art, son influence sur les Artistes, l'Illustration de ses Écrits, by Prince d'Essling and Eugène Müntz, Paris, 1902. See also The Triumphs of Francesco Petrarch, translated by H. Boyd, with notes upon the illustrations (which are from original Renaissance designs) by Sir Sidney Colvin, London, 1906; also the Catalogue of Early Italian Engravings in the British Museum, by A. M. Hind and Sir Sidney Colvin, London, 1910, pp. 10-16 and pp. 115-121. the Ars Moriendi. The authors of the Catalogue of Early Italian Engravings in the British Museum 102 write 66 of "No theme outside the Stories of Scripture gave more frequent employment to artists and craftsmen of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries than Petrarch's famous series poems, the Trionfi. It is found treated alike in illumination, in tapestry, in the painted decoration of marriage-chests and birth-trays, in pottery and enamel, in relief-sculptures of bronze, marble, or ivory, in engravings whether on metal or on wood. About the second quarter of the fifteenth century the scheme and character of such designs became curiously fixed and uniform, within certain narrow limits of variation. In telling of the successive Triumphs of Love, of Chastity, of Death, of Fame, of Time, and of Eternity, Petrarch himself only in one instance, that of Love, brings before us one of the powers personified and riding on a chariot accompanied by attendant figures. But artists almost unanimously, without regard to the text, personify all six powers, mount each on a chariot, and escort its march with various figures or groups of figures, some of which may, in particular instances, be suggested by passages in the poem itself, but others are quite freely invented." This is not the place to discuss the influence of Petrarch's Trionfi on the poetry and literature of the world, but we may here point out that to some extent two English epitaphs, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, illustrate the long and wide-reaching influence in the literary world of the idea of the succession of triumphs (Fame over Death, Time over Fame, Eternity over all things), expressed by Petrarch. The first is the famous epitaph, probably by William Browne (1591-1643)-though often ascribed to Ben Jonson-on Sir Philip Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke ("Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother"-who died in 1621): "Underneath this sable hearse Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. 102 Op. cit., 1910, p. 10. The other is the epitaph by Aaron Hill (1685-1750) on his wife (who died in 1731), with the lines: "But ere mankind a wife more perfect see, Eternity, O Time! shall bury thee." The triumphal car of Death was generally represented as a heavy oxen-drawn vehicle, beneath the wheels of which human beings of both sexes, of all ages, and of all ranks are being crushed to death-in fact, a kind of "Juggernaut car," according to the popular use of that Far too many paintings, tapestries, miniatures from manuscripts, drawings, prints, &c., of the "Triumph of Death," after Petrarch's Trionfi, exist to be described in this connexion. term. In the Victoria and Albert Museum is the facsimile 103 of an ivory plaque (Fig. 20), probably the panel of a casket, of North Italian work, about 1480, representing a "Triumphal Car of Death," after Petrarch's idea. A car, in the shape of a large oblong box on wheels, with four skeletons hand-in-hand carved on its side, is drawn along by two bullocks with rings in their noses. On the ground a number of bodies are lying, over which the wheels are rolling, including a king, a pope, a priest, and many others, male and female, young and old. A Florentine fifteenth-century marriage-coffer in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) has representations in relief of the Triumphs of Love, Chastity, and Death, after Petrarch. At the Royal Palace of Madrid, in Hampton Court, and in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), are splendid early sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries with 103 See A Descriptive Catalogue of the Fictile Ivories in the South Kensington Museum, by J. O. Westwood, London, 1876, p. 324. See also Prince d'Essling and E. Müntz, op. cit., p. 179. An original of this kind is in the Cathedral of Gratz in Styria. |