Thread by @culturaltutor

This is the Cadaver Tomb of René de Chalon, created nearly 500 years ago.

But why would somebody make something like this?

Well, it wasn't unusual. People in Europe at that time were obsessed by the macabre....

This statue, designed by the sculptor Ligier Richier in France in the early 1540s, is perhaps the greatest example of the "transi".

This was a type of funerary art in which the deceased person was memorialised as a rotten corpse; a visceral reminder of life's transience.

An earlier example is the transi - or cadaver monument - of the English nobleman John FitzAlan in Arundel.

This style was popular in England: above lay one sculpture as they appeared in life, and one below as in death. A clear reminder of the fate of all physical beings.

During the 15th century they were popular right across Northern Europe - and some of them were truly terrifying.

Like the transi of a Belgian doctor and canon called Guillaume Lefranchois, from 1446, which with its flesh-eating worms and blank gaze is a work of real horror.

While the cadaver monument of Jean de Sachy, Alderman of Amiens, from 1644, makes the religious purpose of the transi more clear.

It was intended as a reminder to place importance not on the physical and the material - which must decay - but on the spiritual, which is eternal.

While here are some 15th century funerary sculptures from the church of St Edmund's Church, Fenny Bentley, in England.

Far from the viscerality of Ligier Richier or the religious symbolism of Jean de Sachy, this is a more austere reminder, captivating in its sombre simplicity.

But where did this trend of cadaver tombs come from?

Funerary art is as old as human civilisation, with every society across the world creating memorials of some kind.

But why this Medieval fascination with depicting the departed in such a visceral and gruesome way?

We need to rewind the clock.

The year is 1351; the Black Death has just swept through Europe, laying waste to the continent and killing a huge part of its population.

The socio-economic implications were colossal; so too the cultural, artistic, and spiritual consequences.

This devastating plague brought death closer to home than ever before. For although mortality was more fragile in Medieval society than ours, the Black Death was a catastrophe of almost inconceivable magnitude.

Society nearly broke down as the streets were filled with victims.

And so death entered the collective imagination of the continent; people became deeply aware of their fragile mortality.

The Danse Macabre was born, an artistic allegory for death in which skeletons were shown leading figures from all walks of life to the grave.

The interesting thing about the Danse Macabre is its relative humour. For though it could be rather serious and frightening, it also possessed an undercurrent of dark comedy.

The notion itself - of dancing skeletons - speaks to a certain irreverent familiarity with death.

The defining work of this fascination with mortality was the Ars Moriendi, which translates to the "Art of Dying", published in the early 1400s.

It was a literal guide to dying well, complete with suggested questions, recommended behaviour, consolations, and illustrations.

It was a document which surely seemed necessary in the aftermath of the plague. With death so likely people needed to know how to die the right way.

Woodcut illustrations were made for the Ars Moriendi, and the printing press allowed their distribution all over Europe.

And so this awareness of death became something like a cultural phenomenon.

The Ars Moriendi, the Danse Macabre; both were manifestations of that same changed view of life in contrast with its certain end.

Art and literature across Europe reflected this awakening.

One of its most remarkable interpretations was this stained glass window in Bern Minster, Switzerland, created in 1519.

By the mid-16th century the Middle Ages had passed into the Renaissance; but that Northern European fascination with death remained.

The Danse Macabre became a broader allegory; skeletons as representatives of death were depicted calling one and all to their life's conclusion.

Even centuries after the Black Death itself had passed, the Danse Macabre did not go away.

There were many more plagues, after all, and the Danse Macabre was a traditional method of dealing with it in art, of offering a mix of comfort and understanding, of calming fears.

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), one of the great Northern painters, was also inspired by this morbid curiosity.

In a series of woodcuts from 1526, sometimes called the Alphabet of Death, skeletons appear as omnipresent figures among the living:

And shortly after Holbein's life came Brueghel the Elder (1525-1569). His Triumph of Death, painted in 1562, reads like a total summation not only of the original plague two hundred years before, but of Europe's culturally-inherited mindset; a continental trauma.

And so it was a short artistic leap from the Danse Macabre to the cadaver monuments.

But the cadaver monuments in particular seem to indicate a level of profound spiritual awareness, a genuine realisation of life's fragility; the artistic culmination of this whole movement.

And the Italian Renaissance had a highly specific impact on these Northern funerary tombs.

Leonardo da Vinci's pioneering anatomical experiments and "écorché" - detailed drawings of human muscles and bones - allowed Northern sculptors to go from this:

To this.

Earlier Medieval depictions of corpses had been stylistic, as above. But thanks to Leonardo's anatomical experiments and to the lifelike advances of Italian sculpture in general, cadaver monuments soon became terrifyingly accurate and much more expressive.

Eventually this cultural fascination with death and its visceral depiction in art faded away, to be replaced by a more subtle form of memento mori - the vanitas.

This was the motif of a skull, usually present without explanation in paintings, particularly Still Lifes:

But the Danse Macabre would return again in times of great catastrophe such as war, plague, or famine.

As in the Skull Chapel of St. Bartholomew's Church, Poland, built in the late 1700s with skeletons of victims of all the above disasters, including the Thirty Years' War.

So the cadaver tombs and the Danse Macabre originate in the Black Death; proof of art's socio-cultural context, and that art is always more than mere aesthetics.

But art may pass beyond its context and into the universal; can we learn from these reminders of life's fragility?