'Reinhildis Has Died': Ascension and Enlivenment on a Twelfth-Century Tomb

From the time of their first appearance at the end of the eleventh century, medieval funerary effigies have presented their viewers with a strikingly uniform set of compositional conventions. The sculptural representation of the frontal body carved in relief on a rectangular slab is found so consistently among effigies of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries that this formula has become very nearly synonymous with the term “effigy” itself. The standard compositional type had already appeared in the bronze effigy of Rudolf of Swabia in Merseburg Cathedral (c.1080–1084), the earliest surviving effigy known to medieval art, and would be repeated for the tombs of the Nellenburg dukes of Schaffhausen (c.1105–1110), the Ottonian abbesses of Quedlinburg (c.1129), and the Merovingian kings from Saint-Germain-des-Pres in Paris (c.1150, now installed at Saint-Denis), to name just a few prominent examples. Each of these sculptures shows its subject dressed in different costume and holding different attributes as ...