This past weekend, I visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to view The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy. The Mourners is a series of small alabaster sculptures, most of them Carthusian monks, in various postures of bereavement, from the ambiently distressed, to the moonily melancholic, to the tombly ceremonious, to the quartzly content. The monks drape in robe and cowl, a tour de force of fold, with those mourners completely covered most affecting. Heads bowed, anonymous, their hoods like some great truncated probosces, they present as an image of death, but not death the grim reaper; rather fraternal death, brother death, necessary and inevitable, but perhaps clumsy, untimely and unintentional death as well. As if death had gotten a bad rap and were all too conscious of his image as the rapacious monster of life; and here, with a book instead of a scythe, he walks with us in somber, quiet, chagrined solidarity. Cowls number 51, 52, and 53 shed tears and wring hands; 59, 61, 72, 77, and 78 flash a bit of cheek, beard, or even full face in deep recess, revealing shadowy individuality but namelessness as well. What has this exhibit to do with Poland? Almost nothing.
The printed illustrated catalog, of course, in these post-modern times, emphasizes how these artifacts display the wealth and power of the Dukes of Burgundy, how the lavish ritual of their funerals and the sumptuousness of their ducal seat and final resting place in Dijon were intended to establish their primacy in the imagination of their people and their guests. Aristocratic propaganda. Only secondarily, even as an afterthought, an epiphenomenon, do these displays express beauty and genuine emotion. Sad in its way, but true enough. For the powers that be and would be, art has predominantly ulterior motives. Always has. But again, what does this have to do with Poland?
I’ve begun rereading Norman Davies’s history of Poland and flipped ahead to the 1370s to see if there were any connections between these ambitious Dukes of Burgundy and the end of the Piast dynasty in Poland. One almost coincidence: “From the technical point of view, their claims in the female succession were inferior to those either of Wladyslaw Bialy of Gniewkow, who was a monk in Dijon in Burgundy, or of Ziemowit III, Prince of Mazovia” (I, p. 102, my italics) That is to say, the model for one of those grieving good brothers might have been Wladyslaw. His dates put him in Dijon during the reign of Philip the Bold, the first of these Burgundian Dukes, and one under whose tomb the alabaster monks perambulate. Imagine this minor Polish duke, though in the royal line, so distraught at the death of his beloved duchesse (true fact) that he retired from life and power to the cloister to pray and mourn for the world and to express and model for us the proper attitude toward it. Such a story, of a single individual of the noblest motives, would redeem the entire exhibit, would it not? We could ignore the Dukes, John the Fearless and Philip the Good—who was probably not so good—and mourn our own mortality and that of our loved ones with these good monks and Wladyslaw. Unfortunately, further research revealed nothing of the sort. Wladyslaw has a story, and it is not uninteresting, but it is not redemptive, and has little to do with the Burgundian Dukes, though he returned to Dijon to die in 1388.
If I were a fiction writer like Henryk Siekiewicz, dramatic, romantic, alive to the pageantry of national consciousness, I could work with this, make something of Wladyslaw. But forsooth, I’m a historian, and while I believe one of those sad monks had such a story to redeem the exhibit—no. 71? (sweet hat)—I don’t know it and can’t tell it.
