[Illustration: Fig. 355.--Tomb of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, in the Church of Marburg, Hesse (Thirteenth Century). She is represented upon her death-bed, and the angels are offering her soul to Jesus, who is blessing it, and to the Virgin. To the right are Duke Louis with the cross of the Crusades, St. John the Evangelist, the special protector of St. Elizabeth, St. Catherine, and St. Peter; to the left, St. John the Baptist, St. Mary Magdalene, and a bishop. It was before this bas-relief that the pilgrims knelt in prayer, and their knees have worn hollows into the pavement around it.] Burials above ground again came into vogue after the eleventh century, and from that epoch dates the development of funeral art in the Middle Ages. At first, the tombs, even of the highest personages, consisted only of a plain block of stone or marble, varying in shape, placed upon the ground, or, as was more often the case, raised upon short columns. In the twelfth century we meet with a new kind of monument: tombs in the form of square altars, or altar-tables, with the image of the deceased in relief or cut out on their upper surface. These tombs were in general use throughout the Middle Ages (Fig. 355), and were combined, subsequent to the thirteenth century, with another mode based on quite a different principle. As, in spite of the decrees of the councils, the churches were still full of graves, it was sought to make the tombs erected in them as little cumbersome as possible; and hence arose the custom of placing tablets or sculptures upon the walls, at a certain elevation above the ground, betokening the presence of a coffin in the vault beneath. There were, besides, the flat tombs, the pompous epitaphs on which were effaced by the footsteps of those who walked over them. These were in vogue from the time of Philip Augustus, and the use of them did not die out till the reign of Louis XIV., especially in the northern provinces of France. [Illustration: Fig. 356.--Tomb in the Church of St. Waudru, at Mons, of Adelaide or Alice, Countess of Hainault, who died in 1168. This tomb is of stone, devoid of all decoration, with a triangular top in the shape of a cross. (Twelfth Century.)]