effigies An effigy is a likeness or image, usually sculpted, and usually of a person, which is distinguished by its capacity to substitute for the individual it represents. Effigies commonly have a symbolic resonance, as in the case of Uncle Sam or Guy Fawkes; they do not necessarily differ from portraits in how they are produced, or even how they appear, but in their function and use. While the term ‘effigy’ (from Latin: effingere, to fashion) may, broadly speaking, refer to any likeness, it has come to be applied most consistently to likenesses produced in connection with death — whether carved tomb sculptures or painted representations of the deceased.

The effigies of antiquity were created to perpetuate the memory of the deceased as he or she looked while alive. The earliest known tomb effigy is that of King Djoser (c.2686–13 bce), found in the worship chamber of an Egyptian pyramid. Such Egyptian portraits were intended to house the soul after death, and to identify it as it travelled through the realm of the dead. The most lifelike effigies of the ancient world were those fashioned by the Etruscans of the sixth and fifth centuries bce; their mortuary art features full-scale effigies of the deceased — sometimes an individual, sometimes a married couple — taking their ease, recumbent on a casket cover. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans memorialized their dead in the form of full-scale recumbent effigies. This form of mortuary art reappeared in the eleventh century, in Germany, in bronze grave slabs. Among the oldest of these is a grave slab at Merseburg Cathedral, which dates to 1080. At the wealthy Quedlinburg monastery, grave slabs dating to the mid twelfth century preserve the appearance and costume of three abesses. The oldest recumbent effigy in England is thought to be that of Abbot Crispin, who died in 1117 and was buried in the cloisters at Westminster Abbey. It was cut from stone imported from Tournai, a dark limestone, commonly called black marble.

Throughout Europe, effigial sculpture showed a gradual evolution, where low relief carving gave way to increasingly higher relief, and rigid poses to greater naturalism and more realistic detail. This was particularly the case in England, where effigial sculpture was to attain its highest stage of development. Representative examples are the effigies of thirteenth-century ecclesiastical figures in Ely Cathedral; the effigy of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of England, shown holding a devotional book, in the church of Fontevrault Abbey; and the mail-clad, crossed-legged knights entombed in cathedrals, abbeys, and parish churches throughout England. The stones used were the black ‘marble’ of Tournai, the dark brown or gray ‘marble’ of domestic Purbeck, and, in the case of the queen's effigy, a pale limestone, which, because it could be quarried in blocks rather than slabs, gave masons a freer hand in creating projecting surfaces.

Effigies carved from true marble were a French innovation. The earliest known example is that of Isabella of Aragon, the first queen of Philip III of France, who died in 1271 and was buried in Saint Denis Abbey. Her effigy was completed in 1275, a decade or so after Louis IX commissioned the carving of effigies of all the rulers who had preceded him, going back to the seventh century, to be kept in the abbey. Since their likenesses had not been preserved, the effigies were symbolic. By the mid fourteenth century, French monarchs and others, as concerned about their image as any modern politician, had their effigies fashioned while they were alive.

Bronze effigies were cast, and brass effigies were engraved or cut, and while commoners' effigies often served as church pavement, those of people of higher station were lifted up onto tomb covers. Subsequently, the tombs themselves were raised — mounted on the backs of carved lions, for example, and, later, on short columns. The elevation of the effigy created problems. Comparatively flat figures were barely visible from below. In Italy, where wall tombs predominated, effigies were tilted to enhance visibility — an unsatisfactory solution that left the images in a seemingly precarious position. In Italy, as elsewhere, the problem was solved as the comparatively flat figure evolved into one that was three-dimensional. The figure, freed from the slab, took on the dimensions of sculpture. In the fourteenth century, by which time churches were becoming cluttered with tombs, recumbent effigies were often made to stand up and commence a new life, as statues. In Bamberg Cathedral, to cite one example, the effigy of Pope Clement II, carved around 1240, was separated from the tomb lid and set up, vertically, against a pier. A number of later tomb effigies appear to have been specifically designed for vertical attachment.

As effigial art rounded out in form and swelled in ostentation, it began to assume a homilitic function: below the effigy of the living person, shown in his or her splendid attire, lay the same body, now shown in a state of decomposition or reduced to a skeleton. An early example is the mid-fifteenth-century tomb of John Fitzalan, in which Fitzalan is shown, his head on a pillow, his hands folded in prayer, lying above a Gothic cage containing his cadaver. A curious, latter-day French example dating to the second half of the sixteenth century depicts an aristocratic woman, Valentine Balbiani, reclining, reading, her cheek resting on her hand and a lapdog at her side, above a low-relief of her corpse, whose skull rests on the same pillows on which her effigy rests its elbow. Following the Council of Trent (1545–63), Catholic reformers began to inveigh against grandiose effigies, with a resultant hiatus in their production. The recess did not last long. Many tombs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries exhibit hyperactive effigies, such as Louis–Francois Roubiliac's monument — completed in 1761 — in Westminster Abbey, showing Joseph Nightingale trying to shield his wife from a dart about to be flung by Death. More dramatic yet is the tomb of General William Hargrave, also in Westminster Abbey, by Louis–Francois Roubiliac, in which the deceased is shown breaking free of his cerements, apparently already confident of his salvation.

Effigies, of course, had a life outside the church. Those crafted of straw of other materials were thrashed or burned to vent public fury, as when a guilty party managed to escape from his captors, or, famously, to celebrate the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot. Effigies of Guy Fawkes, a conspirator in a plot to blow up Parliament and King James I on November 5, 1604, are still burned in England on November 5. In the latter half of the twentieth century, effigies representing Uncle Sam have been burned at various times in various countries, providing not only a means of venting emotions, but good film footage as well. It is the capacity of the effigy to substitute for the individual it represents that accounts for its long history of use in a funereal context as well as in the more popular contexts of Guy Fawkes Day, for example, or in the practices of the vodun religion.

Claudia Swan

See also funeral practices; idols; religion and the body; sculpture.