Term with the Figure of a Bearded Man
Unknown · 1546
A bearded man emerges from a tapering pillar, his body dissolving into architecture below the chest. Figures of this kind are called terms, after Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries, and Renaissance architects loved to use them instead of columns. This one is made not of stone but of fired clay, more than a metre high, and it was designed to stand in a niche high on the outside of a building. Look at the vigorous modelling of the beard and the muscular torso, made to read from a distance.
The term comes from the chateau of Oiron in Poitou, built from 1510 for Artus Gouffier and completed by his son Claude Gouffier, a great collector and Master of the Horse to Henry the Second. It was one of ten terracotta terms that filled the niches of the buttresses on the first floor of the north wing, built between 1544 and 1546; four others survive in an American private collection. In 1879 Gabrielle Fillon, daughter of the antiquarian Benjamin Fillon, gave it to the ceramics museum at Sevres, which deposited it at the Louvre in 1935.
Did You Know? Ten of these clay giants once stared down from the facade of Oiron; this is the only one left in a French public collection.
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