#claude dorron

[chicot-premier]

The public honours accorded to the mignons included the erection of magnificent tombs in the church of Saint Paul in the Marais, of which we possess both detailed descriptions and images...A contract for two tombs, dated 12 July 1578, stipulated that six blocks of marble were to be supplied to the noted sculptor Germain Pilon, through the royal secretary Claude Dorron; the work was to be completed before the last day of December, for three monuments, lavishly executed in black and white marble, were surmounted by life-sized statues of the deceased, Pilon being particularly renowned for his ability to create realistic images. Included in what amounted to an early guide-book to Paris, the tombs became one of the city’s ‘sights’. They also figured regularly as a stop along the way of the penitential processions that the king would organise in the later years of his reign. On the other hand, given their prominence, the tombs also functioned as a material focus for criticism of the king, and in particular for the extravagance, as it was claimed, of his spending on his favourites and for the excessive character of his grief. As such, Pilon’s monuments were to stand for no longer than a decade: L’Estoile records that they were destroyed by an angry Parisian mob on 2 January 1589, following the assassinations of the Duke and the Cardinal of Guise. Only months later, the king himself would fall victim to the assassin’s knife. The criticism that found a focus in the tombs can be seen, moreover, as prolonging that provoked by the funeral ceremonies themselves: in the presence of the whole court, whose mourn publicly for any of his subjects.

Gary Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture, pp. 143-46