A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

parishes had the right of burial at the Innocents, the old dead had to be continually disinterred and their tombstones sold to make room for the new. Skulls and bones piled up under the cloister arches were an attraction for the curious, and bleak proof of ultimate leveling. Shops of all kinds found room in and around the cloister; prostitutes solicited there, alchemists found a market place, gallants made it a rendezvous, dogs wandered in and out. Parisians came to tour the charnel houses, watch burials and disinterments, gaze at the murals, and read the verses. They listened to daylong sermons and shuddered as the Dead One blowing his horn entered from the Rue St. Denis leading his procession of awful dancers. Art followed the lugubrious. The crown of thorns, rarely pictured before, became a realistic instrument of pain drawing blood in the paintings of the second half of the century. The Virgin acquired seven sorrows, ranging from the flight into Egypt to the Pietà—the limp dead body of her son lying across her knees. Claus Sluter, sculptor to the Duke of Burgundy, made the first known Pietà in France in 1390 for the convent of Champmol at Dijon.