Writers Among the Ruins
Amid all this devastation, writers, men and women alike, went on with their work of composition. Nicholas of Lyra's Postillae perpetuae (1322-1331) was a great help in understanding the text of the Bible, and it paved the way for Erasmus's New Testament and Luther's German translation of the Scriptures. Fiction of the time revolved around light love stories, such as the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles of Antoine de la Sale, or knightly legends such as Flore et Blancheflor.
The Travels of "John Mandeville"
The travel book of Jean à la Barbe, a physician of Liège who called himself Sir John Mandeville, appeared around 1370 and was almost as imaginary and fabulous. It describes the author's invented journeys to Egypt, Asia, Russia, and Holland. He claimed to have visited every land mentioned in the four Gospels. He wrote of the house where the Virgin Mary went to school, of the spot where water was heated so that our Lord Jesus could wash the apostles' feet, and of the church where Mary hid herself to express milk from her holy breasts. He wrote of a marble pillar in that church against which she leaned her holy back, still damp with her pure milk, and of the places where her precious milk flowed and is still clear and white.
In his description of China, the author reaches the height of his art, where the fluency of his expression is not disturbed by misplaced pedantry. Whenever the chance arises he turns to scientific discussion, for example when he speaks of a man who traveled east until he reached his own homeland, which recalls Passepartout, the hero of Jules Verne's novel. He claims to have drunk twice from the Fountain of Youth, yet he returned to Europe crippled and lame with gout, probably the result of his permanent residence in Liège. The book has been translated into a hundred languages and is considered one of the livelier works of the late Middle Ages.
Jean Froissart and His Chronicle
One of the far more notable works of fourteenth-century French literature is the Chronicle of Jean Froissart. He was born in Valenciennes in 1338 and in his early life turned to writing poetry. At twenty-four he traveled to London to present a poem to Philippa of Hainault, the wife of Edward III. He became her secretary and made contact with the English nobles, and in his history he praised them so openly that he cannot be considered neutral. His love of travel pulled him from his place and drew him to Scotland, Bordeaux, Savoy, and Italy. When he returned to Hainaut he became a priest and a canon of the church at Chimay.
The Making of the Work
At this time he decided to rewrite his book in prose and to enlarge it. Once again he traveled in England and France and collected documents with great effort. When he returned to Chimay he devoted himself to finishing the Chronicle. He described it as a charming and noble history that would be much needed after he left this world, written to give courage to the brave and to offer them outstanding and honorable examples of valor.
No novel or tale is more alluring than this history. Anyone who begins this huge book of 1,200 pages meaning only to tour its high peaks finds the valleys so engaging and charming that he surveys everything with delight and an easy mind. This priest, like Pope Julius II, is interested in nothing so much as war. He is captivated by aristocracy, chivalry, and action, and ordinary people enter his history only when they are caught up in the quarrels and battles of lords and nobles.
Strengths and Limits
In recounting events he does not look for causes and motives, but trusts biased or embroidered accounts with excessive confidence. He makes no claim to be a philosopher. He is a simple chronicler, but the best of chroniclers.
The Theater and the Poetry Societies
One mark of this age is the spread of drama. Mysteries, moralities, miracle plays, interludes, and farces gave life to scenes that were set up temporarily in towns. The subjects of the plays grew more worldly and material day by day, and the jokes and pleasantries reached a stinging edge. Still, the greater part of the plays had a religious subject, and people never grew tired of watching plays that showed the Passion of Christ.
The Passion Confraternity
The most famous theater guild of the age was the Confraternity of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Paris, which specialized in staging the story of Christ's brief stay in Jerusalem. One such Passion play, by Arnoul Gréban, ran to 35,000 lines.
Poetic Societies and Courtly Patrons
Poetry also had its guilds and societies. In 1323 a "Consistory of the Gay Science" was founded at Toulouse. Under its patronage poets competed to revive the art and spirit of the troubadours. Similar literary societies were formed at Amiens, Douai, and Valenciennes, and they paved the way for the founding of Richelieu's French Academy.
Kings and great nobles had their own poets, minstrels, and jesters. René of Anjou, called "Good King René," Duke of Anjou and Lorraine and nominal king of Naples, patronized a company of poets and artists at his many courts at Nancy, Tarascon, and Aix-en-Provence. He competed so keenly with the best rhymers of his court that he was given the title "the last troubadour."
Eustache Deschamps
Charles V supported Eustache Deschamps, who sang charming songs in praise of women. After he married, Deschamps composed a long poem called The Mirror of Marriage. In 12,000 lines it condemned and rejected married life and lamented the wretchedness and baseness of the age. He addressed the age as a bringer of misery and a corrupt time, and spoke to the bold and shameless heavens, the barren and useless earth, and a people filled with sorrow. Should he not weep over all of them, he asked, since in the world of tomorrow, which was sorrowful, thoroughly disordered, and full of crime, he saw nothing to hope for. Our day, he said, is a day of misery and lament.
Christine de Pizan, Alain Chartier, and Charles of Orléans
Christine de Pizan, the daughter of Charles V's Italian physician, grew up and was educated in Paris. When her husband died she was left in charge of three children and three relatives, and she managed this task wonderfully by writing gentle poems and a patriotic history. As the first woman poet of western Europe to live on the earnings of her pen, she deserves honor and praise.
Alain Chartier
Alain Chartier was luckier. His love poems, such as La Belle Dame sans Merci, which in sweet and measured language reproach women for hiding their beauty, so enchanted aristocratic society that, they say, Margaret, the Scottish princess who was to become queen of France, kissed the poet's mouth while he slept on a bench. A century later Étienne Pasquier told the story charmingly. Many were astonished at this, because, to tell the truth, nature had given Alain a beautiful soul in a very plain and unattractive body. The princess told them they should not be surprised, since she had not wished to kiss the man himself but the lips from which such delightful and precious words came.
Charles of Orléans
The most beautiful singer of this age had no need of poetry as a profession, since he was the nephew of Charles VI and the father of Louis XII. Charles, Duke of Orléans, was captured at Agincourt and spent twenty-five years (1415 to 1440) as a prisoner in England. There he consoled his sorrowful heart by writing tender poems about the beauty of women and about the tragedy of France.
For a time all the French people hummed his spring song. In it the bride of the year has taken off the garment of cold, wind, rain, and bad weather and wants to dress in gold from the smiling sun and the charming spring, while the birds of the forest and the beasts of the field cry out, each in song or in roar, that she has laid down the cloak of cold. Even in England there were beautiful maidens, and when Charles looked at those modest beauties he forgot his sorrows. In another poem he cried out how lovely it is to look at her, with her graceful figure and her goodness and gentleness, all the chosen virtues gathered in her, and no one tires of seeing her, since her beauty has a fresh newness every day.
Blois and Villon
When he was finally allowed to return to France, he made his castle at Blois a center of literature and art. It was here that François Villon was welcomed, in spite of his poverty and the many crimes he had committed. When the snow of old age settled on his head, Charles was left out of the merriment of his young companions, and he apologized for this fault in fine verses, which later became the inscription on his tomb. In them he sends greetings to the company of friends gathered to cheer one another and says how happy he would be to join them, but old age has chained him. Youth once ruled his life but is now gone, and he who was an infatuated lover will taste love no more, nor have the free life he once had in Paris. He bids farewell to the pleasant times that will not come again.
French Art in the Time of Poverty
The artists of France in this period were superior to its poets, but they too suffered from the gnawing poverty of the country. No one had an open hand to support them, neither city, nor church, nor king. The provinces, which had shown the pride of their guilds by building magnificent temples out of unshakable faith, had lost their power or had been entirely destroyed by the growth of royal authority and by the widening of the local economy into a national one.
The French Church could no longer inspire or sponsor astonishing buildings like those raised in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The faith of the people had weakened like their financial power. The hope that had driven those centuries to take up the Crusades or build the cathedrals had lost its creative fire and fertile enthusiasm. What had been begun in architecture in the earlier and more hopeful age was more than the fourteenth century could complete.
Completions in the Fourteenth Century
- Jean Ravy completed Notre-Dame of Paris (1351).
- Rouen added a chapel dedicated to the Virgin to its cathedral, which was itself dedicated to her (1302).
- At Poitiers the splendid west front of the church of Our Lady was built in this period (1379).
From Rayonnant to Flamboyant Gothic
The Rayonnant style in Gothic architectural designs now (from 1275 on) gradually gave way to the Geometric Gothic, which emphasized Euclidean geometric shapes more than radiating lines. Bordeaux cathedral (1320-1325), the beautiful tower of the church of Saint-Pierre in Caen (1308, destroyed in the Second World War), the new nave of Auxerre cathedral (1335), the pretty chapels added to the historic churches of Coutances (1371-1386) and Amiens (1375), and the magnificent church of Saint-Ouen (1318-1546), which was the pride of Rouen's architecture, were all built in this style.
The Flamboyant Style
In the last quarter of the fourteenth century, when France thought itself the winner of the Hundred Years' War, French architects introduced a new Gothic with a lively spirit, exaggerated carvings, fanciful window tracery, and decorations that suggested reckless pleasure. The quadripartite vault, the pointed arch formed by extending an arc, gave way to an arch not unlike a tongue of flame, made of a broken arc, and for this reason the style was known as Flamboyant. The capital was no longer used.
- Columns were either fluted or spiral.
- The choir was carved with great patience and closed with a finely worked iron grille.
- The pendants were shaped like fancy bouquets.
- The vaults were broad sheets of nested arches, both visible and hidden.
- The mullions between windows had moved away from the solid geometric forms of the past and took countless fantastic and fragile shapes.
- Spires seemed to be all ornament, and buildings disappeared under surface decoration.
The new style first showed itself in the chapel of Saint John the Baptist (1375) in the cathedral of Amiens and spread throughout France until 1425. In 1436 an example of its miraculous delicacy was raised in the church of Saint-Maclou in Rouen.
Why It Lasted
Perhaps the revival of French courage and the French army through Joan of Arc and Charles VII, the growth of commercial power as represented by Jacques Cœur, and the tendency of the new, upstart bourgeoisie toward excessive and costly decoration helped the Flamboyant style hold its dominance in the first half of the fifteenth century. Gothic stayed in this feminine form until the kings and nobles of France, returning from war, brought the classical architectural ideas of the Renaissance back from Italy as souvenirs.
Secular Architecture and Royal Patrons
The progress of civil architecture indicates the spread of the worldly philosophy and outlook of that age. Kings and dukes considered churches sufficient and built magnificent castles and palaces for themselves, both to impress the people and to install their mistresses in them. Rich townspeople spent large sums on their houses, and municipalities showed off their wealth by building town halls. Some hospitals, such as the Hôtel-Dieu of Beaune, were planned with a soul-soothing and refreshing beauty that eased pain and aided recovery.
At Avignon the popes and cardinals gathered and again encouraged various artists. But French architects, painters, and sculptors were in these years mostly gathered around the king or a nobleman.
- Charles V built the castle of Vincennes (1364-1373) and the Bastille (1369) and commissioned the busy André Beauneveu to carve statues of Philip VI, John II, and himself to adorn the royal tomb in the church of Saint-Denis (1364).
- Louis of Orléans founded the castle of Pierrefonds.
- John, Duke of Berry, although very harsh toward his subjects, was one of the greatest patrons of art in history.
The Illuminated Books of the Duke of Berry
Beauneveu illustrated a Psalter for him (1402). It was only one of a series of his illuminated manuscripts which, like chamber music, stand near the peak of the graphic arts. For the same art-loving lord, Jacquemart de Hesdin painted all the prayer books for the performance of religious duties, from the small hours and the good hours to the great hours. The Limbourg brothers, Pol, Jehanequin, and Herman, illustrated for Duke John a most precious book of hours (1416). It is a collection of sixty-five delicate and beautiful miniatures showing different scenes of France and of the life of the people: nobles hunting, peasants working, and villages and plains covered in snow.
The Last Triumph of Illumination
These miniatures, which are hidden even from tourists in the Condé Museum at Chantilly, and the miniatures painted for René of Anjou, the Good King, are almost the last triumph in the art of illumination. In the fifteenth century woodcut engraving and the progressive schools of mural and easel painting, which arose at Fontainebleau, Amiens, Bourges, Tours, Moulins, Avignon, and Dijon, competed with illumination and pushed it out of fashion, not even counting the masters working for the dukes of Burgundy.
Flemish and Italian Influences
Beauneveu and the van Eyck brothers spread the styles of Flemish painting in France. Italian art had thoroughly penetrated French art long before French armies invaded Italy, through Simone Martini and other Italian painters at Avignon and through the rule of the Angevin dynasty in Naples (1268-1435). By 1450 French painting stood on its own feet and announced its growth and existence with the picture called the Pietà of Villeneuve, by an unknown artist, which is now in the Louvre.
Jean Fouquet
Jean Fouquet is the first known French personality in the art of painting. He was born in Tours in 1416. He spent seven years (1440 to 1447) studying in Italy and then returned to France with a fondness for classical architectural backgrounds in painting. This fondness reached the point of love and obsession in the seventeenth century in painters such as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain.
Fouquet's Portraits
Fouquet also painted several portraits that reflect the character of their sitters with great force.
- The archbishop Jouvenel des Ursins, chancellor of France, is a fat, grim, strong-willed man, not so pious that he is unfit for politics.
- Étienne Chevalier, the treasurer of the realm, is a melancholy man, tormented by the impossibility of collecting money as quickly as the government is able to spend it.
- Charles VII himself appears after Agnès Sorel had made a man of him.
- Agnès, with her rosy face, appears in Fouquet's painting as a majestic, cool maiden with lowered eyes and prominent breasts.
The Book of Hours and the Self-Portrait
Fouquet illuminated a book of hours for Chevalier and turned the tedium of prayers into cheerfulness and delight with fragrant scenes of the valleys of the Loire. An enamel medallion in the Louvre shows Fouquet as he saw himself. His portrait is not grand in the way the book describes a famous Renaissance master's image, with a comparison to Raphael. It is the picture of a simple artist with a brush in his hand and in working clothes, both eager and hesitant, both anxious and determined, with the poverty of a century marked on his forehead.
His life passed, without any disaster, in moving from one region to another, and finally he rose to be the court painter of Louis XI. Success comes after years of toil and hardship, but not long after it, death arrives.