Dijon, abbey church of the Chartreuse de Champmol, 1410-1792; Dijon, former Benedictine abbey church of St Bénigne, 1792-93; damage, dismantling and storage in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, 1793-1819; remnant after the restoration of the tomb, 1819-23; ...; private collection, Belgium, c. 1900; ...; art market, Brussels, 1995; private collection, Ghent, 1995-2023; their sale, Bruges (Rob Michiels Auctions), 15 December 2023, no. 1013 to the dealer Sam Fogg, London, 2023-25; from whom purchased for the museum as a gift of H.B. van der Ven, The Hague, 2025

Object number: BK-2025-8

Credit line: Gift of H.B. van der Ven, The Hague

Circa 1397, the Haarlem sculptor Claes Sluter (c. 1350/60-1406) and his team started work on the impressive tomb for Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (1342-1404), with its renowned procession of sculpted pleurants, or mourners. After Sluter’s death in 1406, the tomb was completed by his nephew Claux van de Werve (c. 1370-1439), who remained faithful to the master’s concept and style. A surviving remnant of that ducal tomb, one of the most important funerary ensembles from the late Middle Ages, is this delicate Gothic baldachin, which once formed part of the arcature lining the tomb’s perimeter. The arcade formed the architectural decor for the funeral procession of alabaster mourners symbolically escorting the deceased to his final resting place. With great plasticity and naturalism, Sluter breathed new life into the traditional funerary theme of statically depicted weepers, making this the most striking and innovative aspect of this spectacular tomb. This spaciousness and depth were achieved in part through an ingenious staggering of elements in the series of baldachin arches surmounting the figures: a conjoined double baldachin repeatedly alternating with a diagonally placed, deeper-lying single baldachin.

The present arcature segment belongs to the latter baldachin type. It is a historically layered example of Gothic funerary micro-architecture, composed of two diagonally placed pointed arches with openwork trefoil motifs surmounted by an à jour-carved frieze of delicate, interlinked lancet arches lending the object an exceptionally airy character. The whole rests on a slender, diagonally placed colonette in the middle. Two more massive, clustered pillars – actually arising from the projecting double arches – were then added on either side, likewise positioned at an angle, thus creating a new Gothic niche. Circa 1826, not long after the tomb’s restoration, the piece was mounted in this form onto a moulded marble base and rear panel likely made by Louis Marion de Semur, a local sculptor involved in the tomb’s restoration.

Up until the French Revolution, the tombs of Philip the Bold and his son John the Fearless in the abbey church of Champmol remained in a reasonably complete state. After the suppression of the monasteries and the confiscation of their furnishings in 1789-90, however, both tombs were moved to the former Benedictine abbey church of St Bénigne in Dijon in 1792. Overseen by the sculptor Claude-François Attiret (1728-1804), this painstaking enterprise was completed by the end of July, with both tombs rebuilt in their new designated locations, where they stood only for a brief time. One year later, they were denounced as symbols of feudalism under the Ancien Régime, with the sculptures damaged beyond recognition the following day and the tombs themselves ultimately dismantled. An inventory from September 1794 listing the tomb remnants housed in the former ducal palace in Dijon revealed, along with other objects, the presence of ‘a large quantity of pieces of Gothic architecture serving to frame all the small Carthusians placed under these tombs and sculpted with great delicacy’. These likely also included elements of the arcature segment now acquired by the museum. All remnants were kept in storage up until the initiative to restore the tombs.

During the tomb’s restoration in the years 1819-26, five original arcature segments were deemed unusable due to their damaged state. The Rijksmuseum baldachin was most recently discovered (and at this time unpublished), with the remaining four respectively preserved in: the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Mayer van den Bergh Museum, Antwerp; the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon; and the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York.¹¹F. Baron, S. Jugie and B. Lafay, Les tombeaux des ducs de Bourgogne: Creation, destruction, restauration, Paris 2009, appendix 2, nos. 7, 8, 9, 10. The Rochester and Amsterdam segments are most complete and moreover identical in assembly and mounting. In addition, both are furnished with a similar handwritten label, affixed to the bottom of the baldachin’s base. Judging by the handwriting, the two baldachins must have been held in the same collection around 1900.

Frits Scholten, 2026
This entry was first published as a ‘Recent Acquisition’ in The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 74 (2026) no. 1, pp. 67-69 (no. 1)

Literature
Unpublished
Most recent literature on tombs and restoration:
Susie Nash, ‘The two tombs of Philip the Bold’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 82 (2019), pp. 1-111
Joan A. Holladay and Susan L. Ward, Gothic Sculpture in America, III: The Museums of New York and Pennsylvania, New York 2016 (Publications of the International Center of Medieval Art, vol. 6), no. 94
Sophie Jugie, The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy, New Haven/London 2010, pp. 118, 119
Françoise Baron, Sophie Jugie and Benoît Lafay, Les tombeaux des ducs de Bourgogne: Creation, destruction, restauration, Paris 2009

F. Scholten, 2026, 'workshop of Claus Sluter and Louis Marion de Semur, Segment of the Arcature of the Tomb of Philip the Bold, DijonFrance, c. 1387 - c. 1398', in Acquisitions Published in the Rijksmuseum Bulletin, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200896835