The Second Commandment
If only because Protestantism followed the Ten Commandments, art was bound to suffer from the Reformation. Had not the great God said: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth" (Exodus 20:4)? After so emphatic a prohibition, how could the visual arts flourish? The Jews obeyed and neglected art. The Muslims observed the command to a degree: they kept their art decorative and abstract, concentrated on objects and only rarely on the human figure, and never set about depicting their deity. Protestantism, having rediscovered the Old Testament, followed the Semitic path. Catholicism, whose Greek and Roman heritage had overshadowed its Jewish root, disobeyed the command more and more with time: Gothic sculpture showed saints and gods in stone, and Italian painting portrayed the Bible on canvas. When the Renaissance arrived, the Second Commandment was set aside entirely, and every kind of visual art rose up. Perhaps the ancient ban had existed to prevent the making of likenesses for magical uses; and in Renaissance Italy the art patrons were shrewd enough to know that defying a prohibition that had lost its original meaning no longer counted as breaking a taboo.
The Church, itself the greatest patron of art, used the visual arts as a means of teaching doctrine and religious legend to a largely illiterate people. In the eyes of the statesman-churchman, who held these legends necessary to uphold the moral foundation of the people, using art for this good purpose was entirely sensible. But when religious legend, like the sale of indulgences, was exploited for the Church's profit, the reformers rightly rebelled against painting and sculpture, the means by which legend was driven into men's minds.
Luther and Calvin
Luther took a moderate course. He wrote: "It is not my opinion that the Gospel should destroy all the arts, as some superstitious people insist; on the contrary I wish with heart and soul to see all the arts ... in the service of the Lord who created them and gave them to us. The law of Moses forbade only the making of a likeness of God." In 1526 he urged his followers to "attack and refute the worshipers of the Antichrist of Rome with painted pictures."
Even Calvin, whose followers were among the sternest iconoclasts, permitted images and statues under conditions and limits: "I am not so scrupulous as to vote for the abolition of every kind of representation ... But since I see that painting and sculpture ... come to us from God, my inner impulse is that these two arts should remain pure and founded on lawful principles. Therefore, man should paint or sculpt nothing except what he sees with his eyes." Reformers who were neither as humane as Luther nor as cautious as Calvin preferred to abolish religious painting and sculpture altogether and to strip their churches of every ornament; in other words, "Truth" banished "Beauty" like an infidel. In England, Scotland, Switzerland and northern Germany religious art was destroyed generally and without discrimination; in France the Huguenots melted down reliquaries, bowls of sacred objects and other metalware they seized in churches. We must grasp the zeal and passion of the men who sacrificed their lives for the Reformation to understand the angry excitement that, in moments of victory, drove them to destroy images and statues, for they truly wished to remove the symbols of the Church's commanding dominion. Brutal and barbarous as this destruction was, the Church too, which for centuries had prevented every needed reform, must bear part of the blame.
The Fall of Gothic
Gothic art was deposed in this age, but the Reformation was only one of the causes of its dispossession. The reaction against the medieval Church naturally brought intense dislike of the architectural and decorative styles long bound up with it. Yet Gothic was already doomed before Luther spoke; an inner sickness had seized it, in Catholic France as in rebellious Germany and England, and was leading it to ruin. In other words, Gothic burned itself out in the sparks of its own "flamboyant" style. The rise of the Renaissance was just as deadly for it, because the Renaissance sprang from Italy, which had never given its heart to Gothic art nor consented to imitate it except after transforming it. The Renaissance also spread chiefly among literate, intellectual people whose skeptical minds could not grasp the fervent faith of the age of the Crusades and the Gothic. As the Reformation advanced, the Church, which had found its highest artistic expression in Gothic architecture, was so impoverished by the loss of England, Germany and Scandinavia, and by the raids of Catholic kings on its revenues, that it could no longer keep the arts under its patronage as before or dictate public taste and artistic style. The Renaissance, which in its manner made everything secular and irreverent, replaced from day to day the sacred religious and artistic traditions of the Middle Ages with its own preferences for classical style and works. Man stretched his unbelieving hands across centuries full of faith and religious awe toward the ancient world, to seize again the old earthly excitements. War began on the Gothic style, the art of the barbarians who had destroyed the Roman Empire.
The disappointed Romans returned to life and power; they raised their ruined temples again; by digging up old graves they drew the statues of their gods from the earth; and they ordered Italy first, and then France and England, to follow the art that held the splendor of Greece and the grandeur of Rome. The Renaissance conquered Gothic, and in France it prevailed over the Reformation.
"The Disease of Building"
In French church architecture the Gothic style, in a successful struggle, delayed the arrival of death. Some old cathedrals added new parts in Gothic: the church of Saint-Pierre at Caen completed its choir, and Beauvais Cathedral built its south transept. When Jean Vast raised on that transept a conical tower 152 meters high (1553), Gothic made its last attempt to go on living; and when, on Ascension Day in 1573, that lofty and daring structure fell from its base and brought down the roof of the choir with it, the life of the most original style of architecture in human history ended. In this period lesser Gothic works were built at Pontoise, Coutances and a number of French towns. In Paris, where the eye finds in every corner one of the wonders of an unbelievable past, two beautiful Gothic churches rose: Saint-Etienne-du-Mont (1492-1626) and Saint-Eustache (1532-1654). But now the features of Renaissance architecture had entered them: in Saint-Etienne-du-Mont a magnificent stone rood screen above the choir arch, and in Saint-Eustache engaged square pillars with Corinthian-like capitals.
Francis I as Patron
The replacement of religious Gothic by secular Renaissance architecture revealed the taste of Francis I, and a turning of his attention to earthly pleasures and away from heavenly hopes. All the economic fertility, aristocratic patronage and worldly pleasure-loving that had set the flames of art alight in Renaissance Italy now encouraged and engaged French architects, painters, sculptors, potters and goldsmiths. Italian artists were invited to France to blend their skills and decorative designs with the remnants of Gothic forms. Not only in Paris but in Fontainebleau, Moulins, Tours, Bourges, Angers, Lyons, Dijon, Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, the brilliance of Italian design and the realism of Flemish painting mixed with the innate taste and grace of the French aristocracy, and created in that country an art that challenged and inherited the artistic primacy of Italy.
The leader of this movement was a king who loved art with passion and, at the same time, with discernment. The cheerful, laughing spirit of Francis I was reflected in the architecture of his reign. "Dare!" was the phrase Francis inspired in his artists. In fact he left architects, sculptors and painters even freer than the Italians did to venture on new artistic experiments. He recognized the power of portraiture in Flemish painting and kept Jean Clouet in his service as court painter; he also commissioned Joos van Cleve to paint portraits of himself and his courtiers. But in the decorative arts and in design he took Italy as his source of inspiration. After his victory at Marignano (1515) he visited many Italian cities, among them Milan, Pavia and Bologna, and studied their architecture, painting and minor arts with envy and eagerness. Cellini quotes Francis as saying: "I remember well that I have closely examined all the masterpieces of the greatest artists of every city in Italy"; and if there is exaggeration in this, it probably came from Cellini. Vasari reports more than ten occasions on which Francis bought precious works of art from Italy through agents in Rome, Florence, Venice and Milan. Through these efforts, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's Leda, Bronzino's Venus and Cupid, Titian's Magdalene, and thousands of vases, medals, drawings, small paintings and tapestries crossed the Alps to adorn the Louvre.
The art-loving monarch, had he found the chance he wished for, would perhaps have taken all the first-rank Italian artists to France. Money was spent temptingly in this cause. He once promised Cellini: "I will smother you in gold." Cellini made several journeys to France (1541-1545) and stayed long enough to introduce goldsmithing, with that delicacy of design and perfection of technique, into France. Domenico da Cortona (Boccador) had come to France in the time of Charles VIII; Francis I commissioned him to build the Hotel de Ville of Paris (1532), and it took nearly a century to finish. The revolutionary Commune of Paris burned it to the ground in 1871, but the building was raised again on Boccador's very plan.