Head of French King

The object that I have chosen is a limestone head that was once part of a sculpture of a king. The head, which dates back to the middle of the 12^th century, was originally part of the exterior of the French Church of Saint-Denis, near Paris. This famous church is where almost all of the French kings have been buried, and it remains in existence today.

I chose this object because I believe it parallels the ideas and workings of medieval poets and poetry. We have seen in the poems of Sedulius Scottus and Ermoldus Nigellus how poets would often effusively praise their patrons, who might be bishops or kings. This honoring of one’s superior could lend the poet a favored status or ensure continued patronage. Similarly, the limestone object is crafted in the likeness of a king, perhaps at the behest of a French monarch. Here, too, an artist may have crafted the sculpture with the hope of currying his patron’s favor. This is even more plausible when we consider the information that the Harvard Art Museum has provided: the sculpture once formed a set of statues that illustrated the divine right of the French monarchs. Thus, the sculpture was a grand statement of the power of the artist’s ruler.

One more parallel that I would like to point out between medieval poets and this medieval limestone head is that the face represents a movement toward natural depictions of the human body (as the Harvard Art Museum points out, although it is clear from the first glance that, excluding the hair, a well-crafted human form is staring back at you). While one might argue that this aspect of the object diverges from the fanciful imaginations of the poets we have read, I believe that the lifelike sculpture recalls the realistic Greco-Roman statues of antiquity. Such a return to the past is similar to the classical metaphors, mythologies, and invocations present in medieval poetry, which raises an intriguing point: we often regard the rebirth of the classics in the Renaissance as a distinct period from the Middle Ages, but this sculpture and the poetry that we have read suggest that the classics never truly went away.