Sculptural Conversion

Positioned in a semi-circle around a tomb-like altar on which rests the supine Christ, twelve biblical figures participate in one of the seven corporeal works of mercy – the burial of their dead (Fig. 3.1). Lifelike in their bodily and emotive expressions, these heavily draped, winged, and armoured figures – portraying the Virgin Mary, John the Evangelist, Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, the Three Maries, the Angels of the Resurrection, and the three sleeping soldiers – solicit the viewer to witness the dead body of Christ in tangible time and space. Together, the life-size polychrome statues form a sculptural group, Compianto sul Cristo morto (Lamentation over the Dead Christ). The monumental composition is kept in a brick-vaulted chapel inside the church of Santa Maria della Scala in Moncalieri, a town just outside Turin. The sculptures are framed against a pastel-coloured wall and an ornamental iron gate, which is not how they were exhibited initially, namely without any barriers. Between the early fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, hundreds of such large-scale works made of various materials were displayed in parish, monastic, hospital, and cemetery churches across Europe. In this chapter, I examine several of these groups – they come from sites in France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain – and I propose that their formal, iconographic, and contextual characteristics reveal how local artists and patrons adopted different artistic traditions and devotional practices for their making. In contrast to previous scholarship that has, for the most part, categorised the Sepulchre groups into distinct regional works, I argue that they belonged to the same artistic phenomenon that made Christ's burial a site of multifold processes of conversion, the first of which is sculptural.

Two bearded attendants stand atop a rugged base on either side of Christ's tomb in Moncalieri (Fig. 3.2). The attendants are slightly hunched forward because they hold onto the edges of the shroud with which they transported Christ from the Cross.