International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2005 Abstracts

The sculptural program of the Grand' Salle in the palace in Paris, erected by Philip IV between about 1301 and 1313, is well known. Over-life-sized figures of the rulers of France, beginning with the mythical Pharamond and continuing up to the predecessor of the reigning king, were adossed to the piers of this most public space of the palace. Recent work has investigated both the arrangement of the kings (Uwe Bennert) and their place in allaying Philip's insecurities (Elizabeth A. R. Brown). At the simplest level, Philip's self-fashioning and self-presentation in terms of his predecessors served to legitimize his rule as king. This paper will place the genealogical cycle in a number of contexts -- both physical and historical -- to propose a more specific reading of the GrandSalle cycle. I will relate the cycle to both Philip's renovations to other parts of the palace, discussed so eloquently by Michael Davis, and to the other major sculptural cycle in the palace, the apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle. I will also propose a possible source for Philip's cycle, the series of papal portraits in the churches of St. Peter's and St. Paul's outside the Walls in Rome, which I feel confident Philip would have known through discussions with the Roman artists he employed. The results of these three inquiries allow me to propose that Philip's difficulties with Boniface VIII in exactly these years played into the design of the Grand' Salle cycle and Philip's understanding of it. This dispute had to do, among other things, with the appropriateness of the pope having himself represented so frequently. In addition to addressing sources and contexts, this paper also considers the ways in which the various audiences -- including the king himself -- might have read the cycle and understood how it conditioned the activities that took place on the floor below.