Dijon without Mustard

After lunch in Dijon, David and I went up and down a street of little shops but couldn’t find any Dijon mustard in Dijon.

I had read about the tomb of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. I wanted to compare it to the grandiose plans of his son-in-law, Maximilian I of Hapsburg, which David and I saw in Innsbruck., with all those life-size figures (including Duke Charles himself) standing around like a bronze court.

We found the Duke of Burgundy’s tomb sculptures in the museum in Dijon, a marble sarcophagus held on the shoulders of life-size marble mourners. The hooded figures symbolized death with their bent shoulders and drooping drapery. These marble masterpieces of Medieval sculpture are very different from the militant figures in their bronze armor intended for Maximilian’s tomb.

The two monuments are not only use different materials – marble for the duke, bronze for the emperor – they illustrate the changing points of view as Europe moved from Medieval times towards the Renaissance. In Germany the work of Tilman Reimenschneider were all devoted to religious themes, statues of saints and altarpieces telling Bible stories. The duke’s sarcophagus conveys the Medieval attitude of death as the end of a powerful life, while Maximilian’s plan was wholly secular. Those bronze kings and dukes had nothing to do with religion. They were meant to perpetuate the image of Max as a powerful ruler.

In their time both Charles the Bold and Maximilian von Hapsburg were powerful men. Both men ordered elaborate tombs. Maximilian died in a far country and those figures planned for a big monument ended up in a dusty museum seldom seen even by Austrians. David and I were alone when we visited there.

Charles the Bold’s monument, intended for a cathedral, also ended up in a museum. Tourists – except for nuts like me – don’t go to museums. Tours to Burgundy go to vineyards.

Did David, at 13, get the significance of all this? I don’t know. He always responded enthusiastically to beautiful art.

Photos give us an approximation of what paintings are like, but nothing adequately portrays a statue. Last year a few small auxiliary figures from the Duke’s monument came on loan to the Meadows Museum in Dallas, but they gave only a hint of what the complete tomb is like.

Pictures never do justice to a statue. You must walk around it and enjoy how the artist uses his/her material, marble or bronze or wood, smooth or rough, incised with patterns or folded into drapery. It is like seeing someone’s photo on the internet and then meeting them in person. It is not just the face but the whole “body language” that shows you a person.

For David the trip was a totally new experience. I read dozens, perhaps hundreds of books and articles about Europe before our trip, and I thought I knew what to expect. Yet I was surprised and learned something everywhere we went. In Dijon I began to understand statuary, not just as beautiful art, but as expression of a particular time and culture.