142. Adam, south-side of the transept,
Notre-Dame Cathedral, Paris (France), c. 1260.

Polychrome stone, h: 200 cm.

Musée national du Moyen Âge – Thermes

et hôtel de Cluny, Paris (France).

 

 

Gothic Tomb Sculpture

 

Sculpting arts increasingly focused on tomb sculpture, which offered a new and receptive field. Sculpture for church monuments was lost in mannerisms and a lack of expression, but the art revived when it began to leave behind the typical and search for individual expression and realistic depiction. The beginnings of sculpted portrait art go back to the first half of the fourteenth century. A major developmental factor was the creation of tombs and effigies, which were at first made of stone or metal plates, but later lay on the lids of sometimes richly decorated sarcophagi. England in particular took to tomb sculpture, since church buildings with their smaller sized portals offered little opportunity for sculpture to blossom. The magnificent tombs of English lords and ladies, which were most likely built during their lifetimes, communicated a proud self-esteem and consciousness of status to later generations. In the period following, this self-love, this fastidious standing out from the masses remained characteristic for all English art, in which portrait sculpture and portrait painting played a major role. The monuments of King Henry VII in Westminster Abbey; Canterbury Cathedral’s sculpture of Edward Plantagenet, son of Edward III, who was also known as the “Black Prince” and executed as a young man; and the effigy of Richard de Beauchamp, thirteenth Earl of Warwick, were, however, created in collaboration with Italian and Dutch artists.

 

Gothic sculpture in Germany had a predominantly feminine character, which may be explained by the effusive adoration of women during chivalric times and the associated cult of Mary, which lasted far into the fifteenth century and shaped all German sculpture. It even re-emerged at the end of the nineteenth century when, for a few years, it served as a model to an age, the art and fashion of which were unproductive and exhausted, stumbling from one imitation to the next.