ABSTRACT
T o see the fifteenth-century tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele in Canterbury Cathedral is to gaze upon the very image of death. On the upper level of the tomb, on a great stone slab, lies the archbishop decked out in all the robes and regalia of his state. However, just below it, in what seems an ornate coffin with open, traceried, Gothic windows, appears the archbishop again in quite a different aspect. Except for the pudding haircut, which was the fashion of the times, the discreetly naked cadaver lying on its shroud could be our contemporary: pale, still, emaciated, the bony flesh drawn tightly over the shrunken form, the eyes hollow, the cheeks sunken, the mouth open from the shock of being dead. From an age not known for its realistic portraiture of the living, it seems that the medieval sculptor of this tomb is giving us a privileged glimpse into the grave. Such a portrait of death is duplicated on nearly 200 other tombs throughout northern Europe from the end of the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. (It was never adopted in Mediterranean countries, perhaps because there the real corpse was already on display during funerary ceremonies.) Why did our forebears portray themselves so graphically in death and display the result to posterity for all time?
