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eligious institution she supported while living in Paris. Similar to several of the other churches
supported by the queen, the ceremony allowed Maria to establish strong connections with the
religious group. This event, however, differed from the previous ceremonies because it included
visual elements referencing the queen mother, specifically two medals commissioned for the
foundation stone and an anonymous print depicting them on the stone (fig. 77). Since only a
small section of Notre-Dame-de-Pitié would be completed during the life of Maria de’ Medici,
the queen’s personal signs and royal symbols incorporated in the medals and the print became
critical tools that, as with the church of the Filles du Calvaire, demonstrated the patron’s elevated
status while again responding to actions by Louis XIII.
In 1613 Father Vincent Mussart established the convent of the Religious of St. Elizabeth,
one of the Third Orders of St. Francis, in the Marais quarter of Paris. 76 The following January
Louis XIII authorized the group with letters patent while Maria de’ Medici named herself
founder of the convent, granting it all the privileges of a royal foundation. 77 Over the next
decade the religious acquired land and funds, which allowed them to begin construction in 1628
on a convent situated on the corner of the rue du Temple and the rue Neuve-Saint-Laurent (today
rue du Vertbois). Included in the plans for the convent was a church consisting of a nave of three
bays flanked only to the north by a side aisle and a choir of one bay terminated by a flat chevet
(fig. 78). 78 To the right of the choir was a chapel of the Virgin and to the left was a large
rectangular room designated for the religious. In 1628 the master mason Louis Noblet began
work on the church, but construction stopped within the year, leaving the chapel of the Virgin as
the only finished section of the building. Work resumed in 1643, and two years later the church,
shown in a contemporary engraving, was complete (fig. 79). 79 Nonetheless, the only portion of
Notre-Dame-de-Pitié known to the order’s founder was the chapel from 1628.
Despite the incomplete state of the church, Maria de’ Medici publicized her support
through the use of the two medals and the anonymous print. Of the medals, only the one
depicting the portrait of Maria de’ Medici on its obverse and the queen’s royal arms on its
reverse is known to still exist (fig. 65). 80 The only document to record the other medal, which
includes a Pietà and an image of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, is the print of the foundation stone. 81
Although the inscriptions on the medals are in Latin while those on the print are in French, in all
other respects the print appears to record an accurate representation of the medals. Similar to the
print commemorating the ceremony at Saint-Louis-des-Jésuites, this one shows at the center of
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