3 - On the Magical statues in lemaire de Belges's Le Temple d'honneur et de vertus

Summary

The Virgilian origins of Jean Lemaire de Belges's Le Temple d'honneur et de vertus (1503) are obvious. Throughout the poem, shepherds, whose literary configuration is strongly influenced by Virgil's Eclogues, proclaim the glories of a politically powerful person, the recently deceased Pierre II de Bourbon. However, another less obvious Virgilian connection might also be seen in this poem. Like Joachim Du Bellay's Chant triumphal sur le voyage de Boulongne (1549), and Pierre de Ronsard's Le Temple de Messeigneurs le connestable, et des chastillons (1573), Lemaire's Temple describes an edifice that contains statues and images that that are used to symbolize the virtues of an eminent person in ways that are highly redolent of another Virgilian source: the temple and statues that Virgil describes in the proem to his third Georgic. The differences are significant nonetheless. Whereas in Du Bellay and Ronsard the statues are described as being “life-like,” in Lemaire's Temple these statues actually come to life. The political and poetic function of the poem is radically altered: political greatness is not represented through mimesis but through prophetic discourse and metaphysical participation. The living statues enunciate the virtues they represent symbolically in the other poems, and participate in transcendent glory, just as the subject of the poem, Pierre II de Bourbon, is understood to have done.