Starting out from the two famous sepulchral monuments of the Dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold (d. 1404) and John the Fearless (d. 1419) in Dijon, this article examines the function of the anonymous companions of the funeral procession immortalized in stone, who are standing around the tomb, the so called ›pleurants‹. Rather than conceiving of the portrayed as timeless personifications of mourning, the article aims at identifying them – by comparison with contemporary instructions on proper behaviour of mourners and by interpretation of contemporary normative forms of the expression of feelings – as exempla that provide guidance and instruction on how to deal with the death of the ruler.

The invention of depicting figures participating in an event — nameless bystanders, beholders, and onlookers — marks an important change in the ways artists addressed the beholder of the artworks themselves. This shift speaks to a significant transformation of the relationship between images and their audience. The public in the picture acts as mediator between times, persons, and contents. The contributions of this volume describe this moment from a diachronic and transcultural perspective, while each of them focuses on a specific group of works revealing a new moment in this history. They explore the cultural contexts of the political and religious public, and relate the rise of the public in the picture to the rise of perspectival representation (Panofsky’s space-box and Kemp’s Chronotopos).