Germain Pilon

Germain Pilon, a sculptor's son, had been employed at the age of twenty on the decoration of the tomb of King Francis I at Saint-Denis.

His earlier work clearly shows an Italian influence, but eventually he had developed a more distinctively French expression by fusing elements from classical art, Gothic sculpture, and Michelangelo with the Fontainebleau adaptation of Mannerism, a style characterized by subjective conceptions, studied elegance, and virtuoso artifice.

Pilon's best-known works are funerary sculptures for Henry II.

It is a custom of the period for men of high estate to assign their remains to more than one burial site—often one for the body, one for the heart, and one for the entrails.

Pilon's monument for the heart of Henry II (circa 1561; Louvre) consists of three marble Graces of great elegance supporting an urn.

It is perhaps based on a design by Primaticcio.

Bernard Palissy, a French Huguenot potter and writer known equally for his religious activities and his ceramics, had begun as a glass painter but had later become associated with a type of lead-glazed earthenware sometimes called rustic ware or Palissy ware.

The patronage of such an influential noble soon as the constable de Montmorency had brought Palissy into fame at the French court, and although he was an avowed Protestant, he was protected by these nobles from the ordinances of the parliament of Bordeaux when, in 1562, the property of all the Protestants in this district had been seized.

Palissy's workshops and kilns had been destroyed, but he himself had been saved, and, by the interposition of the all-powerful constable, he was appointed inventor of rustic pottery to the king and Queen Mother Catherine de Medici; about 1563, under royal protection, he had been allowed to establish a fresh pottery works in Paris in the vicinity of the royal palace of the Louvre.

Palissy’s mainly oval or round dishes and simple vessels, decorated with plants and animals or scenes from myth and allegory, are made by pressing the clay into a mold and later modeling it or applying relief ornament.

He builds a grotto for Catherine in the garden of the Tuileries in 1570.

French portraitist François Clouet, who had succeeded his father, Jean, as Painter and Valet to the King's Bedchamber, paints Lady at her Bath and a full-length portrait of Charles IX around 1570.

For the principal tomb of Henry II and Catherine de Médicis at Saint-Denis (1563–70), the sculptor Germain Pilon had been given responsibility for the kneeling bronze figures on top of this monument (depicting the king and queen alive and praying) the moving and realistic recumbent figures of the queen and king in death at the center, and the four Virtues at the corners of the monument, the construction of which is supervised by Francesco Primaticcio (who sculpted the four corner figures; Catherine de' Medici is reported to have fainted at the sight of these figures.)

Most important, however, are the seminude, marble gisants, or figures of the royal pair recumbent in death.

Considered by some to be Pilon’s most sublime achievement, the gisants are a Renaissance idealization of a Gothic convention and possess a depth of emotion that Pilon perhaps never again attains.

Germain Pilon, sculptor royal from 1568, and appointed controller of the mint in 1572, has contributed to French medal casting a distinguished series of bronze medallions in 1575.

Pilon has had a successful career as a portraitist, his finest work in the genre being the kneeling figure of Cardinal René de Birague (1583–85; Louvre).