How were political art works able to mediate between rival interests, to enhance the power and presence of rulers while buttressing the competing rights and privileges of their subjects? And in what ways did sculpture address these problems that painting could not? The carved mantelpiece dedicated to Charles V in Bruges is a revealing example that derives its agency partly from rituals designed to reconcile these conflicting demands.

The mantelpiece, with its life-size statues encroaching on communal space, could induce a series of performances by beholders, structured by memories of previous social and political practices. Such monuments might best be explored through notions of performativity, of collective acts both executed and retraced that regulated power relationships. Their spatial, plastic, and material properties are all essential to its efficacy in shaping beliefs and framing public interaction.

Matt Kavaler is director, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria College in the University of Toronto