BRASSES, called also monumental brasses and sepulchral brasses. From the 13th to the 18th century a certain method of decorating graves of European dignitaries consisted of in laying the horizontal upper stone slab with a thick plate of metal called latten, a species of hard brass. The metal had incised inscriptions (epitaphs), usually on the border. The main. decoration of the metal, however, consisted of an engraved depiction of the person interned, giving a minute graphic depiction of the cos tume, armor, etc., the deceased wore on state occasions. Connoisseurs and antiquarians are greatly indebted to these metal engravings for the accurate knowledge they convey as to the costume during the different historical periods of leading members of society.
Experts classify brasses under the follow ing denominations: Monastic brasses, palimp sest brasses, bedstead brasses, heart brasses, canopies, etc. As their terms imply, the en graved depictions consist of the following classes: Monks, friars, abbotts, priors, esses are on the monastic monuments. Some brasses have been inverted, after years of usage, and the effigy of a later interred person has been engraved on the opposite surface.
These are palimpsests. "Bedstead"' brasses are those dedicated to women who died in child birth, and depict a bedstead, also the infant. Some brasses are shaped in the form of a conventional heart; they commemorate the in terment of the deceased's heart alone. Certain brasses frame thein rn a °tabeacle° or canopy supported slender shafts.
Monumental brasses, so common in the dif ferent periods, have since suffered at the hands of fanatics and ignorant mobs, so much so as to be already extinct almost in France and rare in Germany. English churches, with records of 150,000, recently had but 4,000 surviving and these rapidly disappearing.
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