Relief with Strigil Pilasters and a Vase Surmounted by a Cross, known as the Tomb of the Leper
Unknown · Twelfth century
A long marble slab, over two metres wide, is carved with pilasters filled with wavy strigil grooves framing a vase from which a cross rises. The vocabulary is that of late antique sarcophagi, which is why the relief was long dated to the eighth or ninth century; recent study by Christian Sapin has moved it to the twelfth, and it may have been part of a chancel screen. A Latin funerary inscription, added in the eleventh or twelfth century, addresses you directly: you who read this, listen, what I was you are, what I am you will be, remember me in your prayers, and correct yourself while you pray for me, before your own end comes.
The relief comes from the Benedictine abbey church of Saint-Denis, north of Paris. In the eighteenth century it stood with a similar relief, lost at the Revolution, in the Trinity chapel beside the nave. At some point, perhaps not before the fourteenth century, it became linked to the cult of Saint Ladre, the leper whom Christ was said to have healed when he came in person in 636 to consecrate the church, hence its popular name. It entered the Louvre in 1881.
Did You Know? The Louvre changed its dating of this stone in 2026, moving it forward by some four hundred years from the Carolingian period to the twelfth century.
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