Tombs of Philip the Bold and John the Fearless
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Transcript
Inside the Musée des Beaux-Arts, the ducal tombs preserve one of Burgundy’s greatest statements of court culture.
Philip the Bold and John the Fearless commissioned elaborate funerary monuments featuring processions of mourners known as pleurants. The original tombs were made for the Chartreuse de Champmol outside Dijon and were later moved after the monastery’s disruption.
The sculpture is political as well as devotional. A dynasty that governed scattered territories needed ceremony to make power feel coherent.
John the Fearless was assassinated in 1419 during the Armagnac-Burgundian civil conflict, one of the crises that helped destabilise France during the Hundred Years’ War.
The carved mourners look grief-stricken. Their craftsmanship also communicates that this was a family able to commission grief at extraordinary expense.