A MYSTERIOUS WORK AND A CASE OF FORMAL TRANSMIGRATION

In the early forties, Jean de Rouen sculpted a spectacular Depositio in the city of Coimbra. Even if the recent historiography claims to integrate this artwork in the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre from the monastic church of Santa Cruz (currently in the Museu Nacional de Machado de Castro — MNMC, no E 109), the historical testimonies neglect this presence. In fact, since 1540, until the last years of the 19th century, there are no references to the monumental Entombment in Santa Cruz. These gaps have provoked my concern, and made me attempt to find more information about the historical fortune of this artwork. My goal is to compare the monumental group from Coimbra with some similar works built in French territory between the end of the 15th century and the first half of the 16th, and confront it with other sources of visual influence, as the tableaux vivant created in the (liturgical) theatres of the mysteries (common in Normandy at that time), and verify the historical fortune of this particular sculptural group. Key-words: João de Ruão, The Entombment of Christ, sculpture, Machado de Castro National Museum


A short-lived devotion
In Portugal, there were no abundant monumental (or real-size) entombments made in stone. It was in France, particularly from the second quarter of the 15 th century -the inaugural entombment in France (Langres Chathedral) dates from 1420 (Karsallah, 2006: 2016) -, that these representations flourished (Karsallah informs that in France there were nearly 460 specimens), showing the tragedy of Christ's death and his burial, when his sacred body was enclosed in the (holy) tomb.
Still, the large-scale sculptural representations of the Entombment were not long-lasting, even in France, where they began to disappear at the end of the 16 th century, because, supposedly, they went out of fashion.
If the French sensitivity was quite brief (despite the impact of these works), its length in Portugal was even briefer. The reasons that lie behind the ephemerality of such an emotive, lively and powerful stone picture are still to be clarified, in the context of liturgical or devotional alterations.
We can still imagine other explanatory hypotheses for this circumstance, tied to the relationship between the sculptural Entombments and other sources of visual influence, as the tableaux vivant created in the theatres of mysteries (Fig. 1). In fact, these theatres began to weaken in the late 16 th century, more or less at the same time as the sculptural representations of the Depositios lost strength.
The late medieval sculptural representation of the Depositio Christi, which stimulated devotion  Mysteries were represented in the cathedral square -like in 1508, when the entrance of Louis XII -and despite the works that were taking place in the church portal (Gosselin, 1868).
These public performative representations (first within the churches and then on the street) were experienced by the common people who joined the mysteries through the perception and with their own bodies. The public took part in these theatres, performances or games (ludus), sharing the stage, and surrendering themselves, with their physiques and souls, to the mystery that, therefore, is humanized and materialized. These The late medieval theatres (Fig. 4) (Rebello, 1977: 35) In fact, these performances helped to install and improve a visual culture that was According to Laura Weigert, these theatres cross with visual or plastic arts. If the visual arts influenced the theatres, the theatres also influenced visual arts, increasing the difficulty to separate their creative practices from the spectacle and psychological responses (Mâle, 1915;Kemodle, 1944;Weigert, 2015). So, designers, painters, illuminators and sculptors Original in Portuguese: 'certo é que tal cerimónia há mais de um século era conhecida entre nós, como se depreende de uma alusão que o rei D. 3 Duarte lhe faz no Leal Conselheiro (capítulo 97) e permite confirmá-lo o remate do Auto da Alma vicentino, representado nos Paços da Ribeira, em Lisboa, na noite de endoenças do ano de 1518. E haverá também que retroceder à primeira metade do século XV para encontrar vestígios directos de uma das composições dramáticas mais frequentes na liturgia medieval: o Planctus, ou Pranto de Nossa Senhora, que, dotado inicialmente de autonomia, passou mais tarde a integrar-se nos "mistérios" sobre a Paixão de Cristo'. 111 digitAR -Revista Digital de Arqueologia, Arquitectura e Artes | número 7 (2020)    Coimbra's sculptural group shows the serenity which was common in the French entombments until the first quarter of the 16 th century (Fig. 18)   worth in its stonework. The altars are decorated with gilded woodcarving' (Barbosa, 1886: 408). 7 After these considerations, Inácio de Vilhena Barbosa celebrates the pulpit and the royal tombs, as well as other places of the monastery, without mentioning the Entombment.
The same forgetfulness revealed Albrecht Haupt, who does not remark the holy burial of Santa Cruz in his book dedicated to the architecture of the renaissance in Portugal (Haupt, 1924(Haupt, [1890).
In conclusion, the sculptured Entombment does not appear in the city's historical guides published during the 19 th century that notice the importance of the portal, the royal tombs, the pulpit, the chapel of St. Theotonius and of St.
Michael (with allusions to its stone altarpiece), the cloisters, sanctuary, library and sometimes dorms, churchyard and the fence with its gardens. This is very disturbing. After all, to where this artwork was made? If it was carved for the Holy Sepulchre chapel, would it have been inscribed in the altarpiece we can see today in that space?
António Nogueira Gonçalves tells us that the Depositio did not reach the Museum directly from the Sepulcher Chapel. Nevertheless, the historian has failed to state the sources used for this declaration (Gonçalves, 1984(Gonçalves, [1964: 158).

Comparing images
In a crypto-historical effort, I was able to gather two photographs of the burial of Christ assembled in Santa Cruz in the 19 th century. The  Castro, opened in 1913(Gouveia, 1980. This is a great enigma that stimulates further investigation.

Finally
After having already written and published about this marvellous labour from Jean de Rouen, I am confronting myself with this set of worries that instigated me to review this artwork, which proves that art history needs to be continually renewed, as long as we do it without looking at the contents between quotation marks. This means that the revision of certain statements, the re-reading of the sources, starting from their first places, and the comparison with other visual Even so, it is certain that if this ("French") work of Jean de Rouen was forgotten, or erased by the chroniclers, and then by the memorialists and historians from de 19 th century, it did not pass unhurt to other looks, that received it almost immediately to the day in which it was born, extending it through other works that, after this, have settle other places.
To conclude this paper, it is necessary to remember another Depositio from Coimbra (Fig.  21)