Demonstrating a remarkable aesthetic and technical mastery for his time, Jean Rancy produced a work that constitutes an essential milestone in French Renaissance sculpture.

[1] Lady Tholose is distinguished by the mastery of the wet drapery, the science of gestures, torsions and multiple points of vision that Jean Rancy demonstrated early on.

If the face with its regular features and wavy hair correspond to the classical canons, the work stands out by its dynamism: camped on a single support, its movement is accompanied by the flight of sinuous and strongly hollowed folds.

[1] In 1529, the "image carver" Jean Rancy sculpted a wooden statue of a child representing St. Michael, which was gilded and then placed on the roof of the city's Archives Tower (now called the "Capitole Keep") to serve as a weathervane.

If the wooden model was made as early as 1544 by Rancy, for lack of money it was not until 1550 that the gunner Claude Peilhot proceeded to cast the bronze in the forges of the city's arsenal.

The dynamic humanist milieu of Toulouse was certainly at the origin of this evolution, which saw the capitouls abandon the traditional religious images in favor of a pagan figure with historical implications.