Last Judgement with a Kneeling Nun Presented by Saint John the Baptist
Unknown · 1425-1450
Christ sits in judgement at the top of the relief while the dead rise from their graves below, and to one side a nun kneels in prayer, presented to the Judge by Saint John the Baptist, her patron and intercessor. The stone still carries much of its painted colour. Along the bottom runs an epitaph in Gothic letters: in the year 1424, on the eighth of October, died Dame Jehanne, nun and long prioress of this house, who lies here with Dame Mehault, pray for their souls. The relief is both a picture of the end of the world and a very personal tombstone.
It was carved in Artois in the second quarter of the fifteenth century for the Benedictine abbey of Etrun near Arras, as the funerary monument of two of its nuns. The abbey was sold in 1793 and demolished the next year, and the relief was found around 1922 built into the wall of a house in the village. It passed to an Arras dealer, was located in Germany after the Second World War and returned to France by the art recovery commission, and in 1951 the state placed it in the Louvre's custody.
Did You Know? For more than a century this Last Judgement served as an ordinary building stone in the wall of a village house.
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