The Funeral Monument of Gaston de Foix is a late Renaissance sculpture in white marble, made in Milan between 1515 and 1522 by Agostino Busti, known as Bambaja, and never finished. The fragments are now divided between the Museums of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, Palazzo Madama in Turin, and the Prado in Madrid.
The sepulcher was commissioned by the French king Francis I to Bambaja to celebrate Gaston de Foix, Duke of Nemours (1489-1512), French leader grandson of King Louis XII, who died in 1512 during the battle of Ravenna. The monument was intended for the Milanese church of Santa Marta. Following the expulsion of the French from the duchy, which took place in 1521 with the arrival in Milan of the troops of Pope Leo X and the Emperor Charles V and the restoration of Duke Francis II Sforza, the execution of the monument was abandoned. The numerous pieces made were never assembled and remained lying in Santa Marta. The various parts of the monument were subsequently the object of interest to collectors.
The largest number of fragments was acquired by the Counts Arconati from the seventeenth century, who preserved them in a dressing room specially designed to house the fragments of this precious work. With the dispersion of the auctions of the 1980s, the original fragments of the Villa's collection were acquired from the collections of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, where they are still found today.
The Camerino of Gaston de Foix still preserves the precious plaster cast of the reclining statue of the young Gaston de Foix, the central part of the entire funeral monument. According to some sources this chalk, together with other copies of smaller fragments, was made for the Busca family in the late nineteenth century. Augusto Rancilio Foundation studies the sources on the Gisant of Villa Arconati-FAR to establish precisely the client and the events linked to the realization.
Augusto Rancilio Foundation, as part of the Villa Arconati-FAR protection and enhancement project, had a team of experienced restorers carry out a work of consolidation, cleaning and restoration of the sculpture, lending the precious plaster copy of the lying statue of Gaston de Foix, dating back to the late nineteenth century and preserved in the homonymous dressing room, one of the rooms not yet open to the public.
The occasion is among the most excellent, as the sculpture - which has never left the Villa so far - was requested from the curators of the exhibition "The universal museum. From Napoleon's dream to Canova", set up in the splendid and prestigious headquarters of the Quirinale Stables from 16 December 2016 to 12 March 2017