King Childebert I
Unknown · 1239-1244
A crowned king nearly two metres tall stands with a gentle smile, a sceptre in his hand, dressed in a long tunic and a mantle that falls in soft folds. He is Childebert the First, son of Clovis, who died in 558, but nothing about him is Merovingian: the swaying pose, the delicate face and the natural drapery are pure Parisian Gothic of the 1240s, close to the sculpture of the Sainte-Chapelle and Reims. Traces of paint survive, and the feet were remade at the end of the eighteenth century. The statue is a retrospective portrait, an image of a founder made seven centuries after his death.
Childebert founded the abbey that became Saint-Germain-des-Pres in Paris, and the monks placed this statue between 1239 and 1244 on the central pier of the door of their new refectory. The abbey became national property at the Revolution, the refectory was turned into a gunpowder store in 1793 and burned in August 1794. The statue had already been taken to the Petits-Augustins depot in 1792, where Alexandre Lenoir built his Museum of French Monuments. It stayed there after the museum closed in 1816 and was transferred to the Louvre in 1850 and 1851.
Did You Know? The statue escaped the fire that destroyed its refectory in 1794 only because it had been carted off two years earlier.
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