Dog or Lion Cub

Dog or Lion Cub

The Tomb of Philippe Pot, grand seneschal of Burgundy, is always a big hit (Richelieu, room 210). The children bend down to peer at the faces of the mourners beneath the hoods, eight porters bearing the recumbent figure on their shoulders, each draped in a long black cape and holding the dead man’s quarters of nobility. They are not life sized, and for less-limber adults it would take too great an effort to bend down. A long epitaph runs along the edge of the white slab that holds the seneschal, helmeted, a tunic over his armor, his hands clasped in prayer. At his feet lies an emblematic animal, a dog or lion cub—we don’t know—or a dog that looks like a lion cub, promising at once loyalty and resurrection. Sculpted in the fifteenth century for the abbey of Cîteaux, the monument survived the French Revolution (unlike the abbey itself), and along with the Allégorie de la Mort from the Saints-Innocents Cemetery (Richelieu, room 212) in the neighboring room, it makes this walk through the northwest Cour Marly a tremendous memento mori for the edification of tourists.