Andrew Murray

Abstract

In late medieval Europe, veils signified mourning by covering either images or bodies. During Lent, they were draped over religious images in an iconoclastic gesture that marked Christ’s suffering and death, setting the stage for their dramatic unveiling on Good Friday to enact his resurrection. Similarly, mourners wore black robes that covered their heads and bodies during funerals. Though these two practices have been studied separately, this paper examines them together by comparing two sets of images: depictions of the veiled Christ in scenes of the Mocking, and representations of mourners, especially those on the tomb of Louis of Laval in his book of hours. I argue that Lenten veiling, funerary robes, and images of the veiled Christ all perform a state of ‘deanimation’, a suspended condition between life and death. Veiling enacts this by treating bodies like images (through iconoclastic concealment) and images like bodies (by presenting them as suffering). Building on studies by Amy Knight Powell and Noa Turel, I adopt the term ‘deanimation’ to show how these visual performances draw on Pauline image theology: the idea of Christ as both body and image, and the Church as his body awaiting transformation into his image at the Last Judgement. This theological framework also helps explain the hierarchical distinctions expressed through mourning robes, which have previously been described as a ‘liminal’ form of dress. Given the Church is a collective body, its images do not ‘constitute’ bodies, to draw on frameworks analysed in the introduction to this collection, as though images and bodies were clearly distinct. The ‘deanimate’ body, whether individual or collective, is rather both body and image, articulating mourning for the dead in being bodies that do not yet conform to the image of Christ.

Keywords: veiling, deanimation, animation, deposition, Mocking of Christ, mourners, tomb sculpture, liminality, death, Louis of Laval, Philip the Bold, Saint Paul, anti-Semitism, Moses

Full text: Picturing Bodies_3_Murray

DOI: 10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2025w03

Biographical note 
Andrew Murray is a lecturer in the history of art at The Open University, UK. He specialises in the art and ceremony of late medieval France and Valois Burgundy (c.1350–1520). He researches how authority – cultural, legal, and political – is manifested in visual culture, paying particular attention to the representation and performance of emotions and virtues. The historical aspect of this research has investigated the rhetoric of the common good and justice and how such rhetoric is evident in tomb sculpture, funerary ritual, ducal ordinances, and courtly literature. His sociological research is in the history of emotions, and particularly the work of Johan Huizinga.