From Passing to Tomb: Images from the Hungarian Angevin Legendary

The image cycles of the Hungarian Angevin Legendary, a luxurious Bolognese codex ordered by King Charles Robert ca. 1330, regularly end with the burial of the deceased saint. There is usually no written sources of these representations, or, if the legend describes this event, it is depicted with significant differences. The prototype of them is the legend of the Death of the Virgin, represented in the manuscript as an independent cycle: important elements are the peaceful death, the burial and the miracles of the relics. The coming death is often announced by Christ or an angel. The saint bids farewell to his beloved and receives the sacraments. One of the most frequent and stereotypical scene is the burial. The compositional arrangement of the burial scenes is quite standard, nevertheless, the details may vary. Following the death and burial scenes, a translatio can be depicted in order to stress the present location of the relics. Miracles at the tombs are represented in the legends of Ladislas, Emeric, Stanislas, Martin, and Mary Magdalene. All of them are related to the Hungarian court. This suggests that beside the universal rhetoric function of these episodes, signaling the end of each cycle, a most specific message is encoded in the final part of some of the legends, underlining their local importance.