Saint James as a Pilgrim
Unknown · 1485-1500
Saint James the Greater stands dressed as one of his own pilgrims, the travellers who walked across France and Spain to his shrine at Compostela, with the broad hat and staff of the road. The statue is a little over a metre tall and carved in Burgundian limestone at the end of the fifteenth century. Look at the plinth: on the left side of the base, folds of a robe are still visible where a small kneeling donor once appeared at the saint's feet. The name carved on the plinth, Jaquotin le Hourt, is his, one of the rare cases where the person who paid for a village statue is known to us.
The statue had a strange rediscovery. In 1912 Maurice Guillot de Juilly found the upper part in the attic of an old house at La Chaume-Pertuisot, a hamlet of Semur-en-Auxois in the Cote-d'Or. A few months later a local inhabitant turned up the base among some rubble, and the two pieces were reunited. The Louvre bought the statue from its finder in 1916, using funds from the bequest of Arthur Pernolet.
Did You Know? The saint's body was found in an attic and his feet in a heap of rubble a few months later.
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