The Cordeliers, an Episode from the Siege of Metz

This painting by Laurent Charles Maréchal, an artist born in Metz, executed in 1835 and held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy, depicts an episode from the siege of Metz of 1552-1553 set near the Cordeliers convent, one of the city quarters directly involved in the defensive operations led by François de Guise against the army of Charles V. A painter and master glassmaker from Metz trained in historical Romanticism, Maréchal sought to capture, with the attention to local detail typical of nineteenth-century history painters, a moment from this siege that became one of the founding episodes of Lorraine's regional memory. The work, exhibited in 2014 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon as part of an exhibition on the nineteenth-century invention of the past, illustrates how this defensive success of Henry II's reign continued, three centuries later, to nourish the regional imagination.