The Decorative Program of the Treasury at St. Jacques in Dieppe

The expansion of the parish church of Saint Jacques in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries included the construction of a new parish treasury, a two-story structure in the northern aisle of the church. The elaborate decoration of the treasury includes architectural motifs, Gothic and Classical, as well as figurative sculpture. The figural decoration contains both traditional religious figures and symbols and, surprisingly, a series of figures that depict indigenous people engaged in family life, work, ritual and warfare. These figures represented the “exotic” natives Dieppois sailors encountered on their voyages to the “New World.” While antiquarians and historians have described and discussed these figures previously, they have not been thoroughly considered in the context of the treasury’s larger decorative scheme. Taking a decidedly twenty-first-century view using theories of the Other, this paper considers how the program might have been interpreted at a moment of societal, cultural and artistic change.