It certainly fits all the clichés for what a Plantagenet king should look like - a crown, a beard and sort of noble looking.
This is one of his tombs - the one at Fontevraud, where his body is buried. The one at Rouen is where they buried his heart. The tomb at Charroux contains his brain.I suppose over time we will collect the full set - but that does mean running the risk of getting lost in Rouen. Again.
Simon
4 comments:
I always thought he looked like Anthony Hopkins. ;)
I've always wondered how these four "gisants" in the abbey church in Fontevraud survived at all, closer to us through the ravages of the Revolution, and later when the compound was a prison!
Really as far as what the Lionheart looked like there are plenty of portrayals to satisfy all tastes - Frankie Howerd, Peter Ustinov, Richard Harris, Sean Connery, and Patrick Stewart to name but a few. I suspect that CHM may have the right of it. By now I would certainly have expected the effigy to have needed as 'nose job'.
John
I'd forgotten it was Anthony Hopkins in the film - I haven't seen it for many a year (ever since I helped build a set for The Lion in Winter on stage in 198something). I will have to seek it out, because I don't have a mental picture of Richard as a slightly stocky Welshman.......
The gisants are in remarkable condition. Where they are situated now is a best guess situation, because (I read somewhere, probably in the really inetresting museum at the Abbay itself) they were moved when the church beacme a prison and the bodies disinterred and destroyed.
I am amazed, looking at the face, that what I see is what a king really should look like. I don't know if that opinion is informed by actors being made to look like the statue, or Richard had a really good stylist............
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