What Is the Body Resting On? A Structure Built for One Occasion

The object is a raised stand on which a coffin rests during a funeral or a period of lying in state, and it ranges from a plain draped box to an architectural construction several storeys high filling a church. The elaborate versions were built for one occasion, using timber, plaster, canvas and paint to imitate marble and bronze, lit by hundreds of candles, and carrying sculpture, painted panels, inscriptions and heraldry composed for that specific person. They were dismantled within days. What survives is therefore almost entirely drawings, engravings and written descriptions rather than the objects themselves.

The structures did several things beyond supporting a coffin:

• •Raising the coffin so a large congregation could see it
• •Making a visual focus in a building not designed around one
• •Carrying imagery about the dead person's achievements and virtues
• •Displaying the wealth and standing of whoever paid
• •Providing something to describe in the printed account afterwards
• •Marking an absent body, where burial happened elsewhere

Commissions of this kind attracted leading architects and artists, which is surprising for something built to be destroyed and makes sense given who the funerals were for. Designs survive by major figures of the Italian baroque and by court architects across Europe, and the engravings published afterwards circulated internationally and influenced permanent architecture. The work was well paid, extremely fast, and a chance to build something unconstrained by cost of materials or by permanence, since plaster and paint could imitate anything. Several architects are known chiefly from such designs, and the genre is studied as a distinct form of architecture built to be temporary.

Because the structures were destroyed, the printed accounts published afterwards became the object that lasted, and those books are a genre in themselves. A funeral of any importance produced a volume describing the ceremony, listing who attended and in what order, reproducing the inscriptions and reproducing the design in engravings, and such volumes were distributed as diplomatic gifts and collected. They are now the principal source for what was built, and they are not neutral, since the account was commissioned by the same people who commissioned the structure and presents the ceremony as it was intended to be understood rather than as it happened.

A closely related structure serves where the body is absent and the distinction is worth having. An empty one is used in a memorial for somebody buried elsewhere or never recovered, and it functions as a focus for a ceremony without any remains present. Military memorial services use them. The empty tomb standing in Whitehall in London is a monument of that kind rather than this, being permanent, but the principle is the same. Some traditions use a permanent structure kept in the church and brought out for every funeral, covered with a black cloth, which is a practical arrangement quite unlike the one-occasion versions and is what most parish churches actually had.

A raised stand supporting a coffin could be a plain draped box or an architectural construction several storeys high, built from timber, plaster and paint imitating marble, lit by hundreds of candles and destroyed within days. Leading architects designed them and the published engravings circulated widely, which is why the designs survive and the objects do not. An empty one serves where no body is present.