Why this husband commissioned a sculpture of his wife’s rotting body

Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme

I recently stumbled upon an unsettling sculpture in Paris’ Louvre Museum — a stone carving of a woman’s corpse, complete with exposed intestines, maggots, and detailed decay. It is the cadaver monument of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme, a French noblewoman who died in 1511.

Jeanne’s grieving husband, François de la Pause, commissioned…