Cadaver monument

A cadaver monument or transi is a type of funerary monument to deceased persons featuring a sculpted tomb effigy of a skeleton, emaciated or decomposing dead body, with closed eyes. It was particularly characteristic of the Late Middle Ages when they were designed to remind viewers of the transience and vanity of mortal life, and the eternity and desirability of the Christian after-life. The format is in stark contrast to gisants, which are always recumbent, in full dress, with open eyes and hands clasped and raised in prayer. Cadaver monuments first appear in the 1380s and remained popular for 200 years. Often interpreted (in a theory popularised by the historians Helen M. Roe and John Aberth but still widely debated), as a form of memento mori or adaption of the motif of "The Three Living and the Three Dead", they show the human body's "transition" from life to decomposition, highlighting the contrast between worldly riches and elegance and the degradation of death. Over the centuries the depictions became more realistic and gruesome, while the early tendency to line the tombs with moralising inscriptions on the vanities of life was abandoned. The format reaching a peak in the late 16th century, with the more extreme effigies depicting putrefied corpses outside of the funerary monument context, and taking center stage as stand-alone sculptures. A depiction of a rotting cadaver in art (as opposed to a skeleton) is called a transi. However, the term "cadaver monument" can really be applied to other varieties of monuments, e.g. with skeletons or with the deceased completely wrapped in a shroud. In the "double-decker" monuments, in Erwin Panofsky's phrase, a sculpted stone bier displays on the top level the recumbent effigy (or gisant) of a living person, where they may be life-sized and sometimes represented kneeling in prayer, and in dramatic contrast as a rotting cadaver on the bottom level, often shrouded and sometimes in company of worms and other flesh-eating wildlife.