The transi tomb is a type of church monument which depicts the deceased patron as a more or less decayed corpse or skeleton. It is a complex monument, a product of Christian views of the body as a place of sin and death, existing in opposition to the soul which is eternal and unspoiled. The need of society’s elite for public atonement is the result of ever-growing anxiety, which on one hand stemmed from the bubonic plague epidemic and wars. On the other, it originated from an accumulation of wealth, which didn’t allow for the (wealthy) deceased to achieve Heaven and eternal bliss. In this sense the transi tomb can be understood as a tool for high society’s repention in the face of God and as an embodiment of the need for prayers, which helped to ease the pain of the deceased’s soul in purgatory. The suffering of the soul in purgatory might be what the transi tomb is trying to depict symbolically. At the same time, public depiction of someone as nude in such a way also meant displaying likeness to the holy dead and especially to Christ entombed, who were previously the only depicted nude in the church space. In other genres of macabre art the focus lies on depicting Death as a destructing and unstoppable force, annihilating everything given or begotten in life. In the case of the transi tomb, there is no depiction of Death personified, but instead a portrait of an actual person as a corpse. The aim of the transi tomb is not only to moralise, to remind the viewer of the inevitability of death, but instead through listing the deceased’s former earthly achievements, reminding him of the vanity of anything gained in life, because everything is perishable in death. The meaning of transi tombs was changing through time. With humanism and individualism in the 16th and 17th century, the tomb no longer represents fearful hope of salvation, but an assured and a blissful belief in it.
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