This adorable cherub’s head is a unique testimony on the art market of the formidable sculpted monuments created by Germain Pilon (1528 - 1590) who, along with Jean Goujon (c.1510- c.1567), was the greatest sculptor of the French Renaissance. It can be associated with an extremely limited corpus of other child figures that once adorned the funerary monuments created by the master for the most prestigious personalities of his time. These include two Funerary Genies and a Cherub’s Head, now in the Louvre, which once adorned Valentine Balbiani’s tomb and, like a Cherub’s Head in the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, bear an indisputable stylistic and typological resemblance to our sculpture. Dismantled during the French Revolution and only partially preserved today, the original appearance of Valentine Balbiani’s tomb is known to us thanks to a drawing by the scholar Gaignières. The drawing clearly shows three cherub heads embedded beneath three entablatures in the upper part of the structure, whose silhouette is very similar to that of our sculpture. Undeniably made to be appreciated from the ground to the top, it is therefore reasonable to identify our work as one of these missing heads, and thus to consider that it may once have been part of this essential monument to the French Renaissance.

Private collection, Brugundy
Church Saint-Louis des Jésuites (Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis), Paris, 1783 (?)
Tomb of Valentine Balbiani, Church Sainte-Catherine-du-Val (Paris)