Death shield
A death shield is a memorial plaque for a male deceased from the nobility or the bourgeoisie eligible for advice . Hanged in a church or chapel , it reminds of the dead in heraldic forms with coats of arms and inscriptions. The custom had its heyday in the 16th century and gradually disappeared over the next two hundred years. The epitaph , a grave monument made of wood or stone, took over its function.
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Origin and development
The custom of hanging a shield and helmet ( funeral helmet or death helmet ) of a deceased knight over the grave in the local church or chapel in his memory, which has been proven since the 12th century , is at the beginning of the development. At first it was the knight's real utility sign with his coat of arms painted on it. The Seedorfer Schild is particularly well known here. The few shields from the Middle Ages that exist today owe their preservation mostly to the fact that they were hung as death shields over the knight's grave. Later, replicas of wooden coats of arms, painted in the same way, were hung in the churches. The coat of arms in the middle left space for a circumferential inscription. With this, the knight's battle shield over his grave had become a death shield. Soon the shields were decorated with paintings and carvings in an increasingly artistic way. If necessary, the wood was covered with parchment or leather and primed. The simple coat of arms became the full coat of arms with helmet, helmet cover and crest , soon even sculpted.
In the late Gothic and Renaissance periods , the death shield was a flat disc made of wood, round or only rounded at the bottom, polygonal or, in the 16th century, rectangular. The inscription running around the coat of arms is usually one line. The name of the deceased, the date of his death, information about his social position and a blessing are written here. In the baroque period the death shield became more and more splendid. The focus was no longer on the coat of arms, but on the varied design of the frame and the decoration of the shield with ribbons, scrollwork and allegorical figures. The inscription is now in a rectangular or oval field within the composition.
Like burial in a church or in a cloister , hanging a death shield was a privilege originally reserved for the nobility, but later also for the citizens of the patriciate of a town. Members of an order of knights also had a right. Clergymen, on the other hand, were usually excluded. A woman's coat of arms occasionally appears on her husband's shield as an accessory. Not everyone entitled could afford a death shield, because the costs for the performing artists and a donation to the church were considerable.
The Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg has a large collection of death shields . In addition to the University Museum for Cultural History in the Landgrave Castle in Marburg , which shows shields from the 12th century, there are also examples from later centuries in the Elisabeth Church there , as the burial place of the Hessian landgraves . In Ulm Cathedral of urban patricians have received more than 100 dead shields.
Exhibitions
- Armed for eternity. Nuremberg Death Shields of the Late Middle Ages , an exhibition by the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg following the research project Beyond Care and Representation. Interdisciplinary development of the late medieval death shields in the Germanic National Museum .
literature
- Kurt Pilz: The death shield in Nuremberg and its German preliminary stages . In: Anzeiger des Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg. 1936/1939, ISSN 2510-4691 , pp. 57-112, ( online ).
- Erich Egg , Oswald Trapp : Death shields in Tyrol. In: Publications of the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum. 52, 1972, ISSN 0379-0231 , pp. 17-150, ( digital version (PDF; 107.7 MB) ).
- Albrecht Rieber: Death shields in Ulm Minster. In: Hans Eugen Specker, Reinhard Wortmann (Ed.): 600 years of Ulm Minster. Festschrift (= research on the history of the city of Ulm. 19). 2nd Edition. Kohlhammer, Ulm 1984, ISBN 3-17-008474-7 , pp. 330-376.
- Dieter H. Müller-Bruns: Heraldic peculiarities: death shields. In: Kleeblatt. Journal of Heraldry and Allied Sciences. 1/2012, pp. 42–51, ( online (PDF; 1.49 MB) ).
- Frank Matthias Kammel u. a. (Ed.): The Nuremberg shields of the deaths of the late Middle Ages in the Germanic National Museum : afterlife provision and representation of urban elites . 2 volumes. Publisher of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg 2019, ISBN 978-3-946217-20-6
Web links
- Bernhard Peter: death shields