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This figure of the stricken Virgin was intended for the Valois rotunda, the necropolis conceived by Catherine de' Medici to house the sepulcher of Henri II and his descendants and thus give permanent expression to the pain of the successive losses experienced by the queen mother. The marble statue is now in the church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis in Paris. Exceptionally, its terracotta maquette (now in the Louvre) was not destroyed but was placed in the upper chapel of the Sainte-Chapelle, a sign of the importance attached to Pilon's work in the sixteenth century.
This exquisite terracotta Virgin recalls the lyrical late French Gothic.
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