Abstract :
Two late fifteenth-century rood-screen panels in Sparham church, near Norwich, display images of
corpses that are apparently unique in surviving medieval art. One is painted with two standing
corpses dressed in finery, the other with a corpse arising from a tomb within a church, with a font to
one side. Both panels are notable for their surviving inscriptions, and others now lost. Together, these
works constitute one of the most significant English contributions to the genre of death imagery, yet
their uniqueness and artistic importance has not been recognized to date. Using a range of medieval
and antiquarian sources, this article aims to provide a comprehensive account of the Sparham
panels’ physical and historical context, iconography and meaning. The strong possibility that they
functioned as a ‘surrogate sepulchral monument’ is discussed at the end of the paper.
