„Alabaster from Lagny“, myth or reality?

Gypsum alabaster is one of the most prominent stones used in European sculpture in medieval and early modern times. Many historical quarries are documented through textual and material evidence (Lipińska, in press) but some remain enigmatic. The “albâtre de Lagny”, a town situated on the banks of the River Marne in the eastern suburbs of Paris, has been mentioned throughout the 19^th century as source for sculpture, notably for the numerous altarpieces now known as English production. This is in obvious contradiction to what 20^th century research found out about the workshops in and around Nottingham using local material. The systematic reference to Lagny, invalidated by material fingerprinting for those and numerous other sculptures, has discredited these earlier sources. It has even been questioned if the gypsum quarried along the Marne River has ever been used for sculpture and the Lagny alabaster was qualified as legend (Bresc-Bautier, 2018; Jugie et al., 2024).

The discovery of an unpublished manuscript, preserved at the Museum of Natural History (MNHN) in Paris, written by one of the most prominent figures of political, legal and scientific life of the late 18^th century, Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (1721-1794) , sheds a new light on this deposit. Lamoignon provides a detailed description of an alabaster-grade layer in the gypsum quarries of Thorigny, north of Lagny, based on his personal observations and interviews with the workers, a precise stratigraphy, and a list of collected samples. He also visited a workshop in the very centre of Paris using the “Lagny alabaster”, at this time undoubtedly for decorative objects rather than for figurative sculpture. The timeframe for this manuscript is  still uncertain, we can situate it between the French translation of the “Lithogeognosia” of Pott in 1753, the 1759 alabaster essay of Daubenton, both cited by Lamoignon, and his death on the guillotine in 1794.

After transcribing the manuscript and precisely locating the historical quarry, we investigated French collections of geological reference materials and found indeed samples of “Lagny alabaster” from the 19^th and early 20^th century at the MNHN and the BRGM. We are currently completing our corpus of isotope fingerprints of this deposit (Kloppmann et al., 2017), so far based on a single sample provided by the Laboratory of Historical Monuments (LRMH), to better constrain its use for artwork, eventually back beyond the mid-18^th century.

The Materi-A-Net project is supported by the Franco-German FRAL program (ANR-21-FRAL-0014-01 and DFG 469987104) (https://materi-a-net.uni-koeln.de/en/the-project/)

Bresc-Bautier G. (2018) La sculpture en albâtre dans la France du XVIe siècle. Revue de l’Art, 200/2018-2, 37-45.

Jugie S., Leroux L., et al. (2024) L’albâtre et ses sources : incertitudes historiques et ambiguïtés de la documentation levées grâce aux analyses. Technè, 57, 49-59.

Kloppmann W., Leroux L., et al. (2017) Competing English, Spanish, and French alabaster trade in Europe over five centuries as evidenced by isotope fingerprinting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114, 11856–11860.

Lipińska A. (in press) Alabaster. Studies in Material Meaning(s), Studies in Art and Materiality, Leyde, Boston: Brill.