Allegory of Death, known as La Mort Saint-Innocent
Unknown · c. 1520-1530
A standing corpse, more than a metre tall, carved in pale alabaster: skin shrunk over the bones, belly hollow, the face a grinning mask between life and skeleton. The verses carved on the statue speak in his voice, in French: there is no living being, however full of skill, however strong in resistance, whom I do not strike with my dart, to give the worms their food; pray God for the departed. The figure is Death itself, carved in the Ile-de-France around 1520 to 1530, at the very moment when Italian Renaissance forms were arriving in Paris, yet still entirely medieval in its message.
He stood in the middle of the cemetery of the Innocents in Paris, in a small wooden shelter, in the burial ground where Parisians also came to see a painted Dance of Death on the arcades. When the cemetery was closed on 1 December 1780, the statue moved to the church of Saint-Gervais in 1786, then in 1788 to Notre-Dame, where Louis-Pierre Deseine completed it and gave it a bronze finish. It passed through the Petits-Augustins depot and Alexandre Lenoir's Museum of French Monuments before reaching the Louvre in 1866.
Did You Know? The statue greeted mourners for two and a half centuries from the centre of the largest cemetery in Paris, the Innocents, before the graveyard was closed for good in 1780.
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