Cadaver tomb

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Beneath Masaccio's fresco of the Trinity painted in 1425-28 in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, is a painted representation of a cadaver tomb

A cadaver tomb (or "memento mori tomb", Latin for "reminder of death") is a church monument or tomb featuring an effigy in the form of a decomposing body.

This often resembles a carved stone bunk-bed with the deceased shown alive or soon after death on the top level (life-sized and sometimes kneeling in prayer) and as a rotting cadaver on the bottom level, often shrouded and sometimes complete with worms and other flesh eating wildlife. The term can also be used for a monument that shows only the cadaver without the live person. The sculpture is intended as an allegory of how transient earthly glory is, since it depicts what we all finally become. A depiction of a rotting cadaver in art (as opposed to a skeleton) is called a transi. A classic exemple is the "Transi de René de Chalons" by Ligier Richier, in the St Etienne in Bar-le-Duc, France.[1]

Beginning in the second half of the 14th century, cadaver tombs were a departure, in monumental architecture, from the usual practice of showing merely an effigy of the person as they were in life.

These tombs were made only for high-ranking nobles, usually royalty or bishops or abbots, because one had to be rich to afford to have one made, and powerful enough to be allotted space for one in a church. The tombs for royalty were often double tombs, for both a king and queen. Some of the finest examples are those of the French kings in Basilica of St. Denis just outside Paris.

[edit] English Cadaver Monuments

Cadaver monuments can be seen in many English cathedrals and some parish churches. The earliest surviving one is in Lincoln Cathedral in Lincolnshire. It is to Bishop Richard Fleming who founded Lincoln College, Oxford and died in 1431. Canterbury Cathedral houses the well-known cadaver monument to Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury (1414 - 1443).

The monument prepared for John Wakeman remains in Tewkesbury Abbey. Wakeman was abbot of Tewkesbury from 1531 to 1539. When the abbey was dissolved, he retired, and later became 1st Bishop of Gloucester. He prepared the tomb for himself, with vermin crawling on his carved skeletal corpse, but never used it. He was buried, instead, at Forthampton.