Rather than a 'what is this thing?' I'm going for a 'who is this?' post.
This statue in the medieval church of Saint Martin in Prissac is clearly old and looked like it had potential to be interesting. I reckoned it was 17th century, but couldn't immediately identify the saint.
It turns out to be 15th century, so contemporary with much of the church decor, and represents Sainte Radegonde. She's a very common female saint to be featured in these parts, so I should have noticed that this nun was wearing a crown and guessed who she was. The statue has had quite a life but has been treasured in this church for centuries. Radegonde was a popular saint at the French Court, especially during the Hundred Years War, as Poitiers remained loyal to the French King and there are sites dedicated to her in several places from Tours to Poitiers. Charles VII was particularly attached to her cult and named his eldest daughter after her.
The statue was made by an unknown artist from stone and painted. She was restored in 2017. Anyone who knew her from before this date will barely recognise her. She used to be multicoloured, and I suspect, spent quite a few decades being mistaken for the Virgin Mary (due to the crown).
She came to the attention of the Regional Curator for Historic Monuments in the course of a major restoration project focused on the wall paintings in the church, which started in 2013. At that time she was in a very degraded state and restoration was recommended, although she was outside the scope of the original project.
Luckily, there was a qualified sculpture conservator, Delphine Bienvenut, who came from the village. The statue was sent to her workshop in Tours.
Sainte Radegonde de Poitiers was a Thuringian princess who married a Frankish king in 536. She died in Poitiers in 587 at the age of about 67. We spent a few days in Thuringia in June, around Wartburg. It's a small centrally located State in modern Germany, once part of the GDR (ie Communist East Germany). Radegonde set up her court in Poitiers and lived as a simple nun, known for her piety and humility. She was sanctified by popular acclaim very quickly after her death.
The Church of Saint Radegonde in Poitiers, where she is buried.
It's thought the sculpture was probably made from a single block of stone originally, but it is now divided into three pieces -- the head, the chest, and the rest of the body and arms. There would have originally been hands too of course, one holding either a sceptre or an abbess' cross. Each of these pieces have been joined at some point using wooden dowels about 2 cm in diameter.
Upon studying the sculpture the conservator discovered that there had been three layers of overpainting covering the first layer. The original paint scheme had been applied over a preparatory base coat of smooth white. The saint's gown was a layer of blue-grey applied very thinly to the preparatory coat. This coat is quite scrappy and slapdash, and is now almost impossible to separate from the layers above and below. The cloak is richly decorated with gold leaf and red lacquer. The crown is quite blingy and also covered in gold leaf, with elements of green and red lacquer. The rosy cheeks on the face are well done and seem well preserved. The eyes are green and the wimple is white.
The first layer of overpainting is strongly adhered to the layer below, making its removal practically impossible. In this layer the gown is a sombre grey-green, but the cloak has become azure blue, decorated with a gold motif. The crown was redone, but repeating the original, as was the face and wimple.
The second layer of overpainting was easy to remove. It had been applied in a slightly thicker coat. The colours are less contrasting, but of very good quality. The veil and cloak were painted in very dark green and the gown in an even more sombre shade of green, virtually black. The wimple was white and the crown ochre and gold. Once again the face has been nicely rendered, but the eye colour has been darkened.
A third layer of overpainting was then applied but it was poor quality and noticeably modified the appearance of the statue. It became a riot of clashing colour and I suspect mistaken at this point for the Virgin Mary.
The conservator opted to remove the most recent overpaint to reveal the finer details of the carving and colouring. She found that the statue was of very good quality, which given its appearance when she received it was a bit of a surprise. Personally, I'm a bit sad that due to the difficulty of taking the paint back to the earliest layer the sculpture has ended up very sombre, rather than the jewel like colours of the original.
Further reading: I wrote about the Chapelle Sainte Radegonde in Chinon some years ago and you can read it here https://daysontheclaise.blogspot.com/2021/09/chapelle-sainte-radegonde-chinon.html
