Saint-Étienne church, in the city of Bar-le-Duc, is home to a statue of a rotting corpse. Visible musculature and skin hang in flaps over the hollow carcass. The exposed skull looks toward a raised left hand, which once held the dried heart of René de Chalon, the 16th-century prince the statue depicts. (The heart is believed to have gone missing sometime around the French Revolution.)
The life-size sculpture by Ligier Richier is part of the “transi” Renaissance art form—stone sculptures of rotting bodies that served as a reminder of temporary flesh and eternal afterlife.
The postmortem statue of René de Chalon once held the man’s own dried heart.
Mark Bere Peterson’s Hauntings, Urban Legends the Northern Tradition and Southern Witchcraft 