Thread by @sepoltuario

As promised @LauraMorreale, a tweet about effigial tombs in #medieval and #Renaissance #Florence /1

Some of what follows can be found in "The Sepulchralization of Renaissance Florence" in @MIP_medpub Memorializing the Middle Classes in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

degruyter.com/document/doi/1… /2

In Purgatorio 12.16-21, #Dante describes effigial tombs:
Come, perché di lor memoria sia,
sovra i sepolti le tombe terragne
portan segnato quel ch’elli eran pria,

onde lì molte volte si ripiagne
per la puntura de la rimembranza,
che solo a’ pïi dà de le calcagne /3

And as to give the dead memorial,
We trace on many an earthly sepulcher
Figures that may their living forms recall,

The sight of which will very often stir
Men to lament them, memory being still
Piety's sharpest, or its only, spur. [D. Sayers] /4 #medievaltwitter

Longfellow and Sayers got it right translating calcagne as "spur", for Dante is wittily referencing the golden spurs awarded to knights and worn in perpetuity in their gravestone portraits, like this one of Biordo degli Ubertini @santacroceopera dantelab.dartmouth.edu/reader /5

Floor slabs with portraits of the deceased were relatively rare in Florentine churches, typically reserved for saints, the beatified, high-ranking clerics, doctors of law and medicine, and individuals buried at public expense, like Leonardo Bruni, Chancellor of #Florence /6

Much more common were the hundreds of floor slabs decorated only with coats of arms and inscriptions as found throughout Florence starting in the late 13th and early 14th centuries #medievaltwitter /7

On especially extraordinary tomb was that installed for Leonardo Tedaldi and his wife @santacroceopera in the later 15th century, seen here in an old aerial-view black-and-white photograph /8

Around the base of the fourth pier that separates the left aisle from the nave of Santa Croce, members of the Tedaldi family installed tombs between ca. 1357 and 1474 #medievaltwitter #RenTwitter /9

While Tedaldi kinsmen installed tombs across the city and beyond in various churches, including the Badia Fiorentina shown here, Santa Croce held the largest number of Tedaldi monuments, at least six in all. iupress.org/9780253355676/… /10

That this grave belonged to the Tedaldi is made clear by the painted, if faded, coat of arms on the pier above it, as well as its proximity to the tombs of Leonardo’s great-great grandparents on the south and west faces of the pier @santacroceopera. /11

According to a Santa Croce inventory of tombs, known as a sepoltuario, the pier also held a funeral banner and three shields, certainly decorated with Tedaldi heraldry and carried in Tedaldi funeral processions. (Check out our @Wikipedia entry! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepoltuar… /12

We've collaborated with @florenceasitwas to create a model that helps us experience the tomb much better than any single photograph can. See it in #3D, #VR or #AR skfb.ly/ooANp via @sketchfab /13

In the later fifteenth century, the cloth merchant Leonardo di Papi Tedaldi decided that he did not want to join ancestors in any of his ancestors' tombs and instead hired Antonio Rossellino to sculpt an extraordinary cover for a new tomb at right, finished by 1474 /14

Effigies on Florentine tombs are rare, and those of couples even more so: they were typically reserved for important clerics like the English bishop John Catrik @santacroceopera, shown as if on their funeral biers. /15