Prier et gésir à Versailles. Les moulages de priants et de gisants dans les Galeries historiques de Louis-Philippe

Sculptures form an important part of the Galeries Historiques, conceived by Louis-Philippe at the Palace of Versailles as a monumental book of French history. They include a collection of plaster casts of praying and recumbent figures made between 1834 and 1848 in the casting workshop of the Louvre under the direction of François-Henri Jacquet. Made from tombs, these casts illustrate sculpture history from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries, but their specific types and funerary nature set them apart from the statues and busts in the museum. The present study questions their true place within the museum’s sculpture collection: is the scope of these casts, as for the rest of the works in the museum, only iconographic and historical? The establishment of a catalogue, bringing together the 120 plaster casts of praying and recumbent figures that were exhibited in the château’s galeries de pierre (stone galleries), has also given them an aesthetic and museographic role to play in the edification of the citizen-visitor.