Laudator Temporis Acti

Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), Tomb Sculpture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964), p. 56 (footnote omitted):

When — significantly, chiefly after the Black Death — Northern art attempted to represent the actual condition of "being dead," it solved the problem, not by replacing the effigy apparently endowed with everlasting life by that of a corpse, but by dramatically contrasting it with that of a corpse: the representacion au vif, viz., the image of the complete person (Erasmus' totus homo), arrayed as befits his state and dignity and unaffected by decay, was contrasted with the representacion de la mort (normally referred to as transi), viz., the image of the dead body covered — if at all — only with a shroud and either reduced to a skeleton or exhibiting the horrid traces of decomposition.

Id., p. 64 (footnotes omitted):

The moral significance of these grisly transis — often expressed by such inscriptions as "I was what you are; you will be what I am" or "Wretch, why are you proud? You are nothing but ashes and will, like me, be the food of worms" — is, of course, that of a memento mori (a notion eloquently expressed by the term "representation de la mort"), and some of them occur singly rather than in contrastive juxtaposition with a representation au vif. Apart from the tombstone of Jacques Germain just mentioned, this is also true of one of the earliest recorded instances, the monument of a nobleman named Francis de La Sarra (d. 1562) which can still be seen in the church of La Sarraz some ten miles north of Lausanne (figs. 257, 258). Watched over by members of his family in full dress, he is represented as he was supposed to look after several years in the grave: long worms slither in and out of the body, and the face is covered by toads in such a manner that two of their heads replace the eyes in a macabre anticipation of the effects achieved, more than two hundred years later, by Giuseppe Arcimboldo when he constructed human heads out of sea creatures or vegetables.

As a late-fifteenth-century instance of an isolated transi we may adduce another mayor of Straubing in Lower Bavaria, Johannes Gmainer (d. 1482; fig. 259), whose red marble tomb shows him as an almost skeletonized cadaver, as violently attacked by vermin as is the body of Francis of La Sarra and addressing the beholder as follows: "Sum speculum vitae, Johannes Gmainer, et rite / Tales vos eritis, fueram quandoque quod estis" ("In me behold the looking glass of life: / Such you will be, for I was what you are"). Yet — such is human nature — the mayor's armorial bearings are proudly displayed at the skeleton's feet; and a gentleman named Felix Ueblher, whose image en transi, dated 1509, can be admired in St. Nicholas at Merano (fig. 260), was even careful to inform posterity that he had been ennobled and allowed a coat of arms by Emperor Frederick III.

Id., figs. 257-260: Hat tip: Eric Thomson.