The Triumph of the Eucharist and the Catholic Faith

This ambitious plaque is a propagandistic, if private, retelling of the shifting religious ideals and political struggles of the powerful Guise family. In the center is Jean de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, in a red robe and biretta, walking beside his older brother, Claude, first Duke of Guise. Behind the brothers—both of whom died in 1550, more than ten years before the plaque was commissioned—a chariot carrying Claude’s wife, Antoinette de Bourbon, tramples a group of Protestant heretics as she displays a chalice and host. This scene represents the triumph of the doctrine of transubstantiation—the belief in the transformation of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the actual body and blood of Christ— a central issue of the Counter-Reformation and French Wars of Religion. Antoinette’s eldest son, François, second Duke of Guise, pushes the triumphal procession forward while the youngest, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, walks toward them with a text in his hands, offering a compromise to the Catholic Church’s controversial position on the Eucharist. Charles’s personal emblem and motto— an ivy-covered obelisk bearing the Latin phrase TE STANTE VIREBO (With you standing, I shall flourish)—are painted at the right.

Source: Vignon, Charlotte. The Frick Collection Decorative Arts Handbook. New York: The Frick Collection/Scala, 2015.