The thirty-seven alabaster figures—most of them roughly sixteen inches tall—that visited the superbly expanded and renovated Virginia Museum of Fine Arts this spring have now completed their second of three years on the road. Having never before been seen as a complete grouping outside of France, in early 2010 the sculptures left Dijon’s Musée des Beaux-Arts for a seven-stop American tour that began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and concluded in Richmond. From there they have proceeded to Bruges and now Berlin, two cities added after their voyage began. Organized by the French Regional American Museum Exchange (FRAME) and curated by the Musée des Beaux-Arts’s Sophie Jugie and the Dallas Museum of Art’s Heather MacDonald, The Mourners: Tomb Sculpture from the Court of Burgundy has been much acclaimed, winning the Association of Art Museum Curators’s 2011 award for most outstanding small exhibition.

The statues were commissioned for the tomb of John the Fearless (d. 1419), the second Valois duke of Burgundy. His monument was closely modeled on that of his father, Philip the Bold (d. 1404); both were installed at the heart of the Chartreuse de Champmol, the Carthusian complex built on the outskirts of Dijon in the late fourteenth century. The tombs (both cenotaphs, as the remains were interred below) dominated the chancel of the church until the Revolution, when they became property of the state. After disassembly and partial destruction, in the 1820s the restored monuments were installed in the Salle des Gardes of the museum in Dijon—one of the oldest in France, having opened to the public in 1799. They have been the nucleus of that collection and of Dijon’s Burgundian identity ever since.

While the first tomb, which was begun by 1384, has always been attributed chiefly to the renowned Claus Sluter, its early planning was actually directed by Sluter’s master, Jean de Marville, and most of the figures were carved by Claus de Werve after Sluter’s death in 1405 or 1406. Little work appears to have been done on the second tomb before 1443, when Jean de la Huerta took charge at the behest of Philip the Good, son of John the Fearless. It was completed by Antoine Le Moiturier and installed at Champmol in 1470—after the deaths of both John and Philip. The statues constituting The Mourners are therefore mainly from the third quarter of the fifteenth century, in explicit emulation of precedents carved a half-century earlier. Each tomb presented a gisant of the duke, with that of John the Fearless accompanied by a gisant of his wife, Margaret of Bavaria. Modern reconstructions of the effigies incorporate several original fragments, including hands, helmets, and attending lions of the dukes.

But the foundation of the tombs’ fame has always been the foundation of the tombs themselves: the mourners occupying a marble arcade below the slab. Freestanding rather than in relief (more typical for earlier mourning figures), their interaction with the arcade and each other wrapped the tombs with life. Individuals read, sing, weep, converse, console, and ponder. Their ordering suggests more procession than emblem: choirboys lead, followed by deacons, a bishop, cantors, monks, and secular mourners. On the tombs they are arranged so that end meets beginning in a perpetual circulation of grief, tribute, and memory.

The weave of the figures through the shadows, light, and alternating enclosure of the arcade is integral to their powerful effect, but the arcade has stayed in Dijon. So what is gained by seeing the mourners on their own? Above all, their isolation from the dynamic unity of the tomb highlights countless subtleties and distinctions among the figures. In Richmond they were displayed individually in two long rows, each along one wall of an oblong gallery dedicated entirely to them. To study one figure or row was to turn one’s back on their counterparts across the way—not a problem, especially considering that they are never visible all at once on the tomb. The arrangement and directional lighting emphasized the presentation of these carvings as carvings, as objects aligned for individual scrutiny. The approach and effect were different in New York, where the figures converged in diminutive yet majestic parade along a single narrow platform dramatically centered in the Met’s grand Medieval Hall.

Both arrangements—and presumably those at all the venues—encouraged contemplation of the figures as individuals. Sluter and his shop have long been considered pioneers of psychological depth in sculpture, most famously among the prophets on the Well of Moses completed at Champmol a few years before the tomb of Philip the Bold. Like the mourners, Sluter’s prophets played a literally supporting role, in their case beneath a towering Calvary group rather than a sepulchral slab. But whereas the highly varied garb and faces of the six life-size prophets underscore unique meanings of their respective texts, the diminutive, similarly robed mourners are anonymous and wholly defined by a shared role. Yet they too resolve as characters, ranging from young and inquisitive (fig. no. 58) to old and distressed (fig. no. 63). (The mourners are generously illustrated in Jugie’s intelligent, useful catalogue and at www.mourners.org, which provides high-resolution images for three-dimensional viewing. Within the traditional numbering, 1–40 are from the tomb of Philip and 41–80 from the tomb of John.) Another revelation of seeing the mourners like this is in the array of dispositions among bodies—upright, stooped, shifting weight, turning, striding, perhaps even swaying. And freed from the arcade, their concentration of detail emerges as never before. The same individuation lavished on their faces, for example, is equally present on hands (knuckles and fingernails, such as those of fig. no. 50); fabrics (with different weights and textures); and accoutrements like the belt and purse of fig. no. 74 or the prayer beads alternately dangling, caressed, and coiling.

The books clutched by individual mourners draw special attention. Some still have traces of the polychromy and gilding applied to accessory elements of the figures, whose collective stony palette is more subdued than that of the more naturalistically painted effigies above. The first two books in the procession, held by the bishop (fig. no. 45) and adjacent cantor (fig. no. 46), initiate an almost musical variation in tone; the first holds his fully open but dropped to his hip as he looks upward, while the second holds his shut under his arm. Another cantor sings from his open book as his neighbor, a Carthusian monk, marks his page with a thumb. The next (fig. no. 50) reads ahead of a page kept by his thumb, as if comparing two passages. Some mourners carry their books in pouches: one (fig. no. 51) unconsciously holds his aside while he weeps; another (fig. no. 63) thrusts his forth demonstratively and points to it. Dramatically, fig. no. 78 raises his closed book with a fully cloaked hand—a blend of reticence and display somehow in tune with his half-hidden face and open-palmed signal to his neighbor.

The recurrence of books would have reflected the esteem for manuscripts at the Burgundian and other Valois courts. It also embodies the scripture, liturgy, and prayer that would accompany the souls of the entombed. But the striking range of interaction with them as texts and objects also reveals the mind of an artist seeking vitality within a sequence of figures that could easily have looked rote and static. Like a few Netherlandish painters of his generation and countless others to follow in the seventeenth century, Sluter and his colleagues understood that depicted books can create singular kinds of narrative absorption and dilation within a still image. A figure reading, pausing from reading, or even simply holding a book bears untold volumes of implicit time.

Along with the unusual proximity and lighting that reveal the objects’ endless nuances, the exhibition has also allowed for a vastly expanded viewership. FRAME reported over 500,000 visitors to the U.S. venues of the exhibition after it closed in Richmond. The decision to send the mourners of John the Fearless on this long excursion was occasioned by a major renovation of the Musée des Beaux-Arts. (The mourners for Philip were also removed from their arcade for cleaning, photography, and temporary display in Dijon as individual figures.) One anticipated benefit of the travelling exhibition is publicity for their museum, which will reintroduce the figures and the rest of its important collection in new ways when it reopens next year. Likewise, this international tour has made the mourners deeply charismatic delegates of Dijon itself. In one of the prefaces to the catalogue, the mayor of Dijon notes that he, like his predecessors, “never miss[es] an opportunity to bring the city’s most prestigious visitors to admire the tombs.” Recognizing the profound connection between these monuments and their home, the remark prompts us to think again about the historically novel things that museums are now inspired and able to do in our world. It is strange, illuminating, and very moving to encounter this intimate cortege forming and re-forming for different communities as it proceeds patiently back toward the resting place it was made to animate.