Conrad Meit
[1] The royal tombs that were his largest works still had elaborate Late Gothic architectural frameworks by others, but Meit's figures were Renaissance in conception and style.
These are at the then newly built Royal Monastery of Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse, today in France, but then in the province of Bresse, part of the Duchy of Savoy.
The upper part, in expensive imported white Carrara marble, represents the Duke in ceremonial costume, surrounded by Italian-style angels (putti).
[14] To the north, the tomb of Margaret of Bourbon consists of a single effigy placed within an enfeu and lying upon a piece of black marble, with pleurants beneath, a traditional Burgundian feature.
[15] When the young Philibert of Chalon, Prince of Orange died in war on 3 August 1530, his mother Philiberta of Luxembourg decided to honour him in the most grandiose way possible.
After a princely funeral at Lons-le-Saunier on 25 October 1530, she hired Conrad Meit and another famous artist of the time, Jean-Baptiste Mario of Florence, to create a fitting tomb.
The abbey of Saint Vincent de Besançon received it from the Abbot and displayed it in a small chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows.
[19] Among his other works are two sculptures of Mary holding the baby Jesus, one at the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in Brussels,[20] and the other at the Benedictine Abbey in Saint-Amand-les-Eaux.
[22] He produced a great quantity of small sculptures in bronze and boxwood, with some of the nudes, such as Adam and Eve (there are a number of pairs) and Judith with the Head of Holophernes, often similar in style to the paintings of Cranach.
[26] There are also small boxwood busts of Philibert and Margaret in the Waddesdon Bequest in the British Museum, with similar ones in Berlin and Munich; a larger pair in marble, for her library, are now lost.
[32] It did not help that many works were lost, and that he memorialized the last of the Chalons Princes of Orange in the Brou tombs, and that these soon became sited in French territory, ruled by kings with no family interest in those buried there.
Interest in his work revived in the late 20th century, especially in his statuettes, where "sculpture exists for its own sake in a manner unprecedented in the north, with no relation to or support by architecture".
