dadalux:

Displayed
in the Saint-Étienne church in France is the figure of René de Chalon,
Prince of Orange. The prince died at the young age of 25 during the
siege of Saint-Dizier in 1544.

Rather then memorialize him in the
standard hero form, his wife requested (or René himself requested, or
possibly both) that he be shown as “not a standard figure but a
life-size skeleton with strips of dried skin flapping over a hollow
carcass, whose right hand clutches at the empty rib cage while the
left-hand holds high his heart in a grand gesture.”