Elements of the Funerary Monument of Valentine Balbiani
Germain Pilon (c. 1528-1590) · 1573
Valentine Balbiani reclines on one elbow in a richly embroidered gown, a small dog nestled beside her, a book open in her hand, as if she had merely paused in her reading. Below her, on a low relief, the same woman appears again as a withered corpse, her body stripped of flesh and finery. The contrast between the living lady and the dead one is the whole point: the monument shows both what she was and what all of us become. The marble carving of the lace, the pearls and the little dog is astonishingly fine.
Valentine Balbiani, born in Milan in 1518, was the wife of Rene de Birague, chancellor of France under Charles the Ninth. She died in 1572, and Germain Pilon, the greatest French sculptor of the later sixteenth century, carved her tomb the following year for the family chapel in the Paris church of Sainte-Catherine-du-Val-des-Ecoliers. The monument was dismantled at the Revolution, and its surviving elements are shown here. It is the female counterpart to Pilon's kneeling bronze of Birague himself, and one of the most moving tombs of the French Renaissance.
Did You Know? The sculptor carved the same woman twice on one tomb, once alive with her lapdog and once as a corpse.
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