The 15th-century European humanism and fascination with the culture and art of antiquity which inspired artistic circles in Italy brought about a growing interest in the human as a unique individual striving to emphasise his human fame and achievements, an eagerness to reinforce transient appearance and, generally, memory extending beyond death. This resulted in the development of modern visual decorations of tombs both in Italy and in countries lying north of the Alps. The tomb was to carry a message designed in a specific way. A model work of sepulchral visual art refers in its programme to three fundamental elements (layers), sometimes intrinsically interconnected. The so-called retrospective layer presents the commemorated human, informing us who he was in his lifetime, what he achieved and what he looked like. In the layer referred to as transitus, it speaks of death being the transition from earthly life to eternity. And in the last, known as prospective, it presents the image of what awaits the deceased in the eternal life (as expected by the bereft). Everything is portrayed in the language of art, in line with the current style, temperament and education of the artist, preferences of the commissioner, etc. The artistic composition was complemented with plaques bearing inscriptions.

The most 'prestigious' tombstones in Kraków were those brought from Nuremberg where they were mass produced by the multi-generation Vischer workshop, and stones made from red Hungarian marble and white limestone on the spot by Italian masters Francesco Fiorentino, Bartolommeo Berrecci and Giovanni Cini from Siena, Giovani Maria Padovano, and others.

The tomb of John Albert by Francesco Fiorentino, the Renaissance work in Poland, is an example of symbiosis of the Renaissance niche derived from the work of Bernardo Rosselino and the late Gothic figure of the king and chapel architecture.

The construction of the royal chapel was a true breakthrough in the development of modern art. It was designed and constructed as the first work of fully Renaissance architecture and sculpture in Poland, inspired by Neoplatonic philosophy and the work of leading artists of the mature Italian Renaissance, notably Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Italian artists, mostly from Florence and Venice, applied solutions that were innovative in Poland: domed chapels (Sigismund, Tomicki) and architectural tombs, figural sculpture and ornamentation hailing from Antiquity (including grotesque). Also iconographic programmes received new forms. Although it is the Sigismund Chapel - a work of Bartolommeo Berrecci - that is the most important, the architectural solutions used in it and this type of tomb became the object of numerous copies and a model for a series of Renaissance and mannerist episcopal mausoleums to Piotr Tomicki, Samuel Maciejowski, Andrzej Zebrzydowski, and Filip Padniewski erected in the cathedral to replace earlier Gothic chapels. Wawel's Chapel of Bishop Piotr Tomicki, where Berrecci initiated a more modest type of memorial structure (missing the drum at the base of the dome and with more restrained decoration), was imitated just as frequently. Equally extraordinary were the nearly identical tombs of bishops Piotr Tomicki (1532-1535) and Piotr Gamrat (1545-1547, a work of Padovano), the latter modelled on the former and implementing the model of the antique aedicula, as well as, among the earlier ones, that of Bishop Jan Konarski (1521) which combines a traditional pulpit type with 'modern' Italian ornamentation.