Marie of France by Evergates Theodore;

Author:Evergates, Theodore;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Constructing Memory

The earliest pictorial image of Marie was a statuette on the tomb of her second son, Count Thibaut III, commissioned most likely within a decade of his death by his widow, Countess Blanche (1201–22).4 His metalwork tomb stood next to Henry the Liberal’s glittering gold, silver, and enamel tomb located in the nave of the comital chapel. The two effigy tombs shared similar dimensions but presented entirely different iconographical programs. Henry’s effigy lay within his tomb, visible through four arches on either side, making him in essence a relic within a reliquary that celebrated his deeds, with celestial references to the sun and Christian prophets to match his outsized persona.5 Thibaut’s effigy, by contrast, rested on top of his tomb, whose four closed arches on either side contained statuettes of his closest relatives: his father and mother, his older brother Henry II and his sisters, his son and daughter, his mother’s brother (the king of Navarre), and at either end of the tomb, the kings of France and England.6 As the earliest example of a “tomb of kinship,” it located Thibaut in reference to his familial ties that justified his collateral succession as count of Champagne against the claims of his brother’s daughters born overseas.

Standing out from the silver statuettes on Thibaut’s tomb were the gilded bronze statuettes of Marie and Henry the Liberal. Henry’s statuette is inscribed: “Here is Henry, Thibaut, your father who had this church built.”7 Marie’s inscription reads: “Countess Marie; I am mother of the counts [Henry II and Thibaut III], I ask Christ to be with you.”8 A sketch of her statuette, made shortly before the tomb was destroyed, shows a stylized Marie with a hat and flowing garments, seated in an ample chair.9 If the tomb was completed before 1215, and more likely before 1209, her sculpted image might well have been made by someone who had seen her before 1198. Thibaut’s tomb with its statuettes survived in St-Étienne for almost six hundred years, until it was dismantled and melted down in January 1794 in the aftermath of the French Revolution.10 Whether a visitor to St-Étienne in those intervening centuries would have known anything more about Marie beyond her inscription is doubtful.

A slightly later depiction of Marie is a color painting in a manuscript of the scribe Guiot, which contains the earliest extant collection of romances by Chrétien de Troyes (ca. 1225–ca. 1250). It bears such a strong resemblance to the tomb statuette that it seems to have been modeled on it. The tomb statuette has Marie seated, with her left hand relaxed in her lap, her right hand pointing upward, and her face looking straight ahead to the viewer visiting the chapel. The painting in Guiot’s manuscript has her seated with her right hand raised and pointing to her open left hand, as if she were commanding Chrétien to write Lancelot—as he claims she did—while her face is turned to the right, as if she were speaking to the poet (who is absent from the scene).

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