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The vogue for using monochrome marbles and composite materials for funeral monuments was shared by foreign artists who lived for extended periods in Italy. Slodtz, for example, sculpted an ambitious monument in Rome (though it was destined to be erected in the town of Vienne in France) memorialising two archbishops. In a kind of posthumous reunion celebrating their mutual understanding, the older beckons to the younger, Cardinal de La Tour d'Auvergne, to come and join him in the hereafter. In what is surely one of the masterpieces of eighteenth-century funeral sculpture, colour adds its glamour and appeal to the subtle modelling of the drapery and enhances the solemn spirituality of the scene.
This combined tomb and monument was commissioned from Slodtz in 1740 by the Cardinal de la Tour d'Auvergne. The cardinal slowly mounts the steps, his hand held by his old mentor, Montmorin,, the earlier archbishop, who seems to have returned to life to indicate that the cardinal shall succeed him. Thus the monument unites those twin obsessions of the portrait and the tomb. Living and dead are brought into close contact, and the succession to the proud See of Vienne is expressed in terms more actual than allegorical. It is with the figure of the cardinal that Slodtz radically altered what would otherwise be merely a funerary monument. The cardinal is in fact a fully modelled statue of a living person placed on a tomb not as mourner but, as it were, in anticipation of his own death.
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