The Death of Francis II

This painting by Pierre Dupuy, executed in 1865, depicts the death of King Francis II, which occurred on 5 December 1560 at the Hôtel Groslot in Orléans. Struck by an ear infection whose diagnosis the physicians of the time could not establish with certainty — mastoiditis, meningitis, or an abscess-forming otitis —, the young king died at barely sixteen years of age, after a reign of only seventeen months, the shortest of any king of France in the early modern period. His death opened the way to the regency of Catherine de' Medici for his younger brother, Charles IX, aged ten. Painted three centuries after the events, this nineteenth-century work reflects its era's taste for the historical reconstruction of great dynastic moments, at a time when the Hôtel Groslot was already recognised as the site of memory for this episode.