Cadaver monument

It was particularly characteristic of the Late Middle Ages[2] when they were designed as a memento mori to remind viewers of the transience and vanity of mortal life compared to the eternity and desirability of the Christian after-life.

[5] In a still widely debated theory popularized by the historians Helen M. Roe and John Aberth,[6] cadaver monuments are often interpreted as a form of memento mori or adaption of the motif of "The Three Living and the Three Dead".

The morbid art form reached its peak in the late 16th century, with more extreme effigies depicting putrefied corpses outside of the funerary monument context, and taking centre stage as stand-alone sculptures.

[12] In Christian funerary art, cadaver monuments were a dramatic departure from the usual practice of depicting the deceased as they were in life, for example recumbent but with hands together in prayer, or even as dynamic military figures drawing their swords, such as the 13th- and 14th-century effigies surviving in the Temple Church, London.

Kathleen Cohen's study of five French ecclesiastics who commissioned transi monuments determined that common to all of them was a successful worldliness that seemed almost to demand a shocking display of transient mortality.

The French kings Louis XII, Francis I and Henry II were doubly portrayed, as couples both as living effigies and as naked cadavers, in their double double-decker monuments in the Basilica of Saint-Denis near Paris.

One of the earliest and anatomically convincing examples is the gaunt cadaver effigy of the medieval physician Guillaume de Harsigny (d. 1393) at Laon.

A revival of the form occurred in the Renaissance, as testified by the two examples to Louis XII and his wife Anne of Brittany at Saint-Denis, and of Queen Catherine de' Medici who commissioned a cadaver monument for her husband Henry II.

[21] One of the best known examples of this tradition is the monumental limestone slab known as "The Modest Man", dedicated to Thomas Ronan (d. 1554), and his wife Johanna Tyrry (d. 1569), now situated in the Triskel Christchurch in Cork.

These may merely be sculptural elements removed from more elaborate now lost monuments, as is the case with the stone of Sir Edmond Goldyng and his wife Elizabeth Fleming, which in the early part of the 16th century was built into the churchyard wall of St. Peter's Church of Ireland, Drogheda.