The tomb of Nicolas Rolin finally discovered

The Virgin of Chancellor Rollin (detail), by Jan Van Eyck. Around 1435. Louvre Museum, Paris • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The burial of Nicolas Rolin, the founder of the hospices of Beaune, was found near the cathedral of Autun, in Saône-et-Loire, in the basement of a church which was destroyed during the Revolution. The archaeologists who were excavating as part of the expansion of the Rolin museum – the former home of Nicolas Rolin – discovered several burial vaults there dismantled in 1793. For them, there is little doubt:it is indeed the tomb of the patron there. Indeed, the location of the graves in the choir of the old church conforms to an 18 ^th plan. century, which located the tomb of Nicolas Rolin. And a horseman's spur, a distinctive sign of his rank, which was found among the bones, confirms this.

Born in Beaune around 1376, a lawyer by training, Nicolas Rolin worked in the service of Jean sans Peur then of his son Philippe le Bon, Duke of Burgundy, of whom he was chancellor for nearly 40 years. At the time, the Duchy of Burgundy was almost as powerful as the Kingdom of France. An important patron, Nicolas Rolin had the chapel of the Célestins convent in Avignon built with his son Jean. With his third wife, Guigone de Salins, in 1443 they founded the Hospices de Beaune, a hospitable "palace" for the poor.

An interested patron

The act was not completely disinterested, if we judge by what the Chancellor then wrote:I found and irrevocably endow in the town of Beaune a hospital for the poor sick. Having become a powerful figure, he commissioned a painting from the Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck – The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin –, preserved in the Louvre Museum and where he appears in prayer facing Mary. He was buried in his hometown in 1462.

This discovery further enriches the past of Autun, where archaeologists are not idle. This summer, an important necropolis from Antiquity, representing one of the first Christian cemeteries in France, came out of the ground, with more than 230 graves unearthed.