Représenter le passage dans l’au‑delà : les images de rites funéraires sur les tombeaux (xiii e‑xiv e siècles)

Abstract

The 13th century was a time of evolution in the conception of the afterlife, in which Purgatory took on greater importance, as well as the culmination of a process of liturgical unification and the development of individualised funeral monuments. This context favoured the emergence and dissemination of painted and sculpted representations of the rites accompanying agony and death on the tombs of several secular and religious elite members. They display a relatively standardised iconography that focuses on a few elements, in particular the absolution and elevatio animae, which both mark the passage from the world of the living to that of the dead. Based on a corpus of French, Italian and Spanish tombs from the 13th and 14th centuries, the paper traces the origins of this selectivity of images and the issues at stake. It also highlights the two-way influences between funerary art and hagiographic iconography, which reveal how porous was the boundary between the saint and the prestigious deceased in the Middle Ages.