Caring for Monuments in Early Modern Europe by Dr Jessica Barker FSA, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art at The Courtauld

Just as we are surrounded by monuments that are worn, broken, dirty, and defaced, so people in the past were required to confront the gradual material decay of public sculpture. Then, as now, slowing this process of deterioration could only be achieved through protective measures and regular maintenance. In this talk I will focus on the funerary monument to Robert Sherborn (d. 1536), an early sixteenth-century English bishop. While the alabaster monument itself is unremarkable in terms of its design, it is unique at this date in being accompanied by an extraordinarily detailed set of conservation instructions set down by Sherborn prior to his death, known as the Book of Ordinances. Sherborn’s account of material care and post-mortem anxieties allows us to consider broader attitudes to the physical deterioration of monuments in this period. It is no coincidence that some of the most detailed instructions in the Book of Ordinances relate to the care of Sherborn’s funerary effigy: a sculpture that depicted the material changelessness of the resurrected body, meaning that material deterioration posed a particular kind of challenge to the status of the image. Routine, ubiquitous, mundane, occasionally unskilled, maintenance work also rested in sophisticated assumptions about the vulnerable interdependence of material objects and human persons.