Ligier Richier

• 1. Introduction

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  Ligier Richier carved a standing corpse that holds its own heart. That sculpture, made from stone quarried near his hometown, still stands in a church in Bar-le-Duc today. It depicts René of Châlon, Prince of Orange, who died on the 15th of July 1544. The figure is flayed, its skin stripped away, its skeletal arm raised and its hand clutching the heart as if offering it to the sky. It is one of the most arresting objects of French Renaissance sculpture, and the man who made it remains surprisingly obscure.

• 2. Stone and Technique

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  The limestone available from quarries around Saint-Mihiel and Sorcy had a particular character that Richier recognized early. It was pale, soft, and fine-grained, with few veins running through it. Those qualities made it workable in ways that harder stone resisted.

  Richier developed new polishing techniques over the course of his career. Through these methods, he could give the finished limestone a surface that resembled marble. For a sculptor working far from the great quarries of Italy, this was a practical solution with an aesthetic payoff: the local stone, correctly handled, could achieve a visual richness that the region could not otherwise afford.

  He also worked in wood on occasion, but limestone was his preferred medium. The Meuse region stone he used for his most celebrated group, the "Groupe de la Passion", appears throughout his major commissions. That group consists of thirteen life-size figures and can be found in the Church of St. Etienne. It is also known as the "Pamoison de la Vierge", or Swoon of the Virgin, with the Virgin fainting and supported by St John. The "Transi de Rene de Chalon" in Bar-le-Duc stands 1 metre 74 centimetres high, made from Sorcy stone specifically.

• 3. The Language of the Passion

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  Among French artists of his period, Richier produced an unusually concentrated body of work linked to the Passion of Christ. The subjects he returned to again and again were calvaries, pietas, and the "mise au tombeau", meaning a depiction of the entombment.

  He executed calvaries for the parish church in Briey and for Saint-Etienne's church in Bar-le-Duc. The famous "mise au tombeau" he made for the Saint-Mihiel church of Saint-Etienne stands as one of his defining achievements. A pieta went to a church in Etain. A depiction of the Virgin Mary fainting was made for Saint-Michel's church in Saint-Mihiel. Works also spread to neighbouring villages and towns throughout Lorraine.

  Richier's funerary work sits alongside these devotional subjects. He produced a sculpture for the tomb of Philippa de Gueldres, widow of Duke Rene II of Lorraine, in Pont-a-Mousson, where she died in 1547. The macabre "Transi de Rene de Chalon" belongs to this funerary tradition too, described as an exercise in "ecorche", meaning a depiction of the flayed or anatomized body. Works attributed to him also appear in the Church of St. Pierre in Bar-le-Duc and in the Louvre.

• 4. Patronage and Reform

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  From 1530 onward, Richier worked under the protection of Antoine, Duke of Lorraine. The Duke commissioned his work and provided the kind of institutional backing that made a long career of ambitious sculpture possible in a provincial town.

  But the religious landscape of Lorraine was shifting. In 1560, Richier joined others living in Saint-Mihiel in petitioning the Duke of Lorraine for the right to practice the reformed Protestant religion. The petition failed.

  Four years later, in 1564, Richier left Saint-Mihiel. He joined his daughter Bernadine in Geneva, Switzerland. She had married Pierre Godart, a fellow Protestant who had already left Lorraine because of his religious beliefs. Richier remained in Geneva until his death in 1567, never returning to the region or the stone he had worked for most of his life. Some researchers believe he was born in Dragonville near Commercy, though evidence also points to Saint-Mihiel itself as his birthplace. The people of Saint-Mihiel and its immediate neighbourhood carry the name "Sammiellois". The exact year of his birth is not known.