The Central European Tombs Race: Gender and its Discontents

During the second half of the sixteenth-century, the rulers of central Europe engaged in a highly competitive tombs race, vying with each other to construct the most magnificent and daunting funerary monuments. Several of these tombs were gendered in ways that helped define appropriate male and female identities and might address tensions between the sexes. Representations of the virtues on tombs were female and dutifully enhanced the reputation of the male ruler. The increasingly popular caryatid physically supported the bier or entablature and registered as visually subservient to the male ruler. With the contested prominence of women at European courts — wives and mistresses — these conventions could signal the suppression of a troublesome female presence. Or they might be employed by women themselves to disarm fears and suspicions that they had risen above their proper place. Male rulers often emphasized their martial prowess. Their tombs might be decorated with battle reliefs, and some monuments replaced the conventional female virtues with statues of Roman warriors. Notions of gender and bodily presence suggest categories of tomb sculpture not envisioned in previous scholarship.

Matt Kavaler is the Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies and Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto. He studies northern European art of the early modern period across media. He is the author of Pieter Bruegel, Parables of Order and Enterprise (1999) and Renaissance Gothic, Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe 1470-1540 (2012). He has written on notions of embodiment, performative engagement, affective piety, ornament and aesthetics, Bruegel and ideology, the politics of court sculpture, and the stunning revival of Late Gothic architecture in the early modern period. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège and is a member of the Royal Academy of Archeology of Belgium. His book on Netherlandish sculpture ofthe sixteenth century is in press