Explore the A symbol of the affirmation of the power of the capitouls against the royal institutions about the An allegory with a political purpose of this artwork.
The capitouls, the city's consuls who commissioned the work, had imagined Lady Tholose as an allegory to represent the city and the values that ensured its cohesion around the municipal magistrates. It was a question of affirming the power and seniority of the municipal institution as well as its legitimacy in defending the municipal freedoms and privileges conquered in previous centuries, while the royal power and the Parlement of Toulouse were exerting strong pressure to call them into question.The choice of Lady Tholose to embody this allegory was significant: bronze as a material and especially the figure of the goddess Pallas (Minerva) as a model referred to Roman antiquity and more particularly to the Palladia Tolosa (Palladian Toulouse) evoked by the Latin poets Martial, Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinaris, the ancient Toulouse  that the emperor Domitian had placed under the patronage of Pallas in the first century AD.In the Renaissance, such an affirmation of municipal power and its personification under the features of an ancient goddess seem unprecedented. As early as 1534, the Municipal annals showed a first manifestation of this: the city is represented by the face of a young woman in the center of a medallion, next to the inscription "LIBERA THOLOSA". The dynamic humanist milieu of Toulouse was certainly at the origin of this evolution, which saw the capitouls abandon the traditional religious images in favor of a pagan figure with historical implications. For the jurisconsult and poet Jean de Boyssoné or the historiographers Nicolas Bertrand, Guillaume de La Perrière and Antoine Noguier, mastery of the historical narrative was the best asset of political power and they put their know-how at the service of municipal ambitions. Thus, the capitouls presented themselves as "decurions" sitting in a "Capitol", a formula that linked them directly to the city's Roman past and allowed them to claim a continuity of municipal privileges since the emperor Theodosius (although the municipal body was only created in 1147), i.e., an allegedly more ancient and venerable antiquity than that of the Crown of France.The statue held a weather vane in its right hand and leaned with its left hand on a shield (now disappeared) with the arms of the city. On the shield were inscribed the letters CPQT MDL, that is to say Capitulum Populusque Tolosanum 1550 to, in the manner of the Roman SPQR, refer to the capitolate and the people of Toulouse.
decurions Domitian Pallas Theodosius Parlement of Toulouse Guillaume de La Perrière capitouls Martial Sidonius Apollinaris Ausonius Toulouse allegory