Churches Still in the Flamboyant Style
By now every branch of French art except church architecture was under the influence of a powerful monarchy and the effects of its raids on Italy. Churches were still built in the Flamboyant Gothic style, whose decline showed in extravagant ornament and excessive fine detail. Even so, several great and splendid churches were begun in this period: Saint-Wulfran at Abbeville, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in Paris, and the small but perfect tomb church that Margaret of Austria built at Brou in memory of her husband Philibert II, Duke of Savoy.
Old buildings also gained new beauty. The north portal of Rouen Cathedral was nicknamed the "Portal of the Booksellers" because of the bookstalls placed in its courtyard. Money paid for indulgences, which allowed butter to be eaten during Lent, went to build the fine south tower, which the French mockingly called the "Butter Tower." Cardinal d'Amboise provided funds for the west facade in the same Flamboyant style.
At Beauvais, a masterpiece of a cathedral received a south transept whose portal and rose window surpass all the facades and portals of the main building. Senlis, Tours and Troyes restored their churches. At Chartres, Jean Texier built a magnificent spired tower and a splendid choir screen, which mixes Renaissance ideas with Gothic designs. In Paris, the masterly Tour Saint-Jacques survives as the restored tower of a church built in that era for St. James the Greater.
Civic Splendor
Magnificent civic buildings make up for the chaos and strife of the age. Grand public halls rose at Arras, Douai, Saint-Omer, Noyon, Saint-Quentin, Compiègne, Dreux, Évreux, Orléans and Saumur. A "Palace of Justice" was begun at Grenoble in 1505, and a still grander one at Rouen in 1493. Roulland Le Roux and Roger Ango designed the Rouen palace in an ornate Gothic style. It was redecorated and restored in the nineteenth century and entirely destroyed in the Second World War.
The Century of the Châteaux
This was the first century of the French château. The Church had come under the state's control, and worldly pleasures replaced storing up merit for the other world. Kings, thought of as gods, built themselves palaces like Muslim paradises along the Loire. Between 1490 and 1530 the fortress-castle gave way to the country château.
When Charles VIII returned from his Neapolitan campaign, he asked his architects to build him a residence as grand as those he had seen in Italy. He brought with him the Italian architect Fra Giocondo, the sculptor and painter Guido Mazzoni, the woodcarver Domenico da Cortona (Boccador), and nineteen other Italian artists, including a landscape gardener, Pacello da Mercogliano. He had already restored the old castle of Amboise. Now these artists, with French masons and craftsmen, were to turn it into a magnificent royal seat in the Italian manner.
The result was extraordinary: a huge mass of towers, ramparts, spires, cornices, columns, dormitories and balustrades rose with royal grandeur into the sky on the edge of a slope overlooking the quiet Loire. A new kind of architecture had been born.
A Hybrid Style
This style combined Gothic towers with Renaissance-style châteaux and used classical forms and details in place of Flamboyant decoration. It offended patriots and committed partisans of the older style. Bastions, cylindrical towers, steep high roofs, battlements with openings and earthworks were still medieval and recalled a time when one's house had to be both palace and fortress.
But the new spirit brought dwellings out of their heavy military shell. Windows were widened in straight lines to let in the sun, and framed with carved stone. The interiors were adorned with classical pilasters, stucco, medallions, statues and arabesques, and the exteriors enclosed with gardens, fountains and usually a hunting forest. In these amazing, luxurious houses darkness gave way to light, and medieval terror and gloom gave way to the confidence, daring and joy of the Renaissance. Love of life became a style in architecture.
Old Fortresses, New Wings
To credit this century with the origin of the château would be unfair. Many châteaux of the period already existed as castles and fortresses and were only improved and rebuilt. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries their form took on an aristocratic perfection and refinement. In the eighteenth century tastes changed, and the great epic of Versailles replaced the cheerful lyric of the country châteaux.
- Chinon: Charles VII received Joan of Arc here in 1429, so it was already old.
- Loches: when Ludovico il Moro was brought there as a prisoner after Louis XII retook Milan, the fortress already had a long history as royal residence and prison.
- Langeais: around 1460 Jean Bourré, minister of Louis XI, rebuilt the thirteenth-century fortress in an essentially medieval form, and it remains one of the best surviving castles.
- Chaumont: in 1473 Charles d'Amboise built another medieval-style château here.
- Gaillon: his brother the cardinal founded a vast château (1497–1510), which was ruthlessly destroyed in the French Revolution.
- Châteaudun: Dunois, the "Bastard of Orléans," rebuilt it (1464), and Cardinal d'Orléans-Longueville added a new wing in mixed Gothic and Renaissance style.
- Blois: it still has parts of its thirteenth-century building. Louis XII added an east wing in harmonious stone and brick with Gothic gates and Renaissance windows, but its greatest splendor awaited Francis I.
Sculpture: From Gothic Grace to Italian Polish
Gothic sculpture showed endless beauty and delicacy in the masterly carving of tombs and altar screens. The figure of the Sibyl Agrippa in the altar screen of Brou is as delicate and beautiful as the statues of Chartres and Reims. But Italian artists added the independence, symmetry and grace of the Renaissance style to French sculpture. Contact between France and Italy grew through the comings and goings of clergy, diplomats, merchants and travelers. Imported Italian art objects, especially small bronzes, carried the taste and forms of classical and Renaissance art. The movement intensified under Charles VIII and Georges and Charles d'Amboise.
It was Italian artists who founded the Italianized "School of Amboise" in the kings' country capital. The tombs of the French kings at Saint-Denis are a historic record of the shift in sculpture from the dignified grandeur of the Gothic to the supple refinement and joyous decoration of Renaissance designs. Where death wins completely, they still proclaim the splendor and rule of beauty.
Michel Colombe
This shift in style appears in Michel Colombe. Born in 1431, he was described in 1467, long before the French invasion of Italy, as "the greatest sculptor in France." French statues had mostly been made of stone, but Colombe imported marble from Genoa. His works still carried the solidity of Gothic style, lacking softness, but were set amid a profusion of classical ornament.
For the château of Gaillon he carved a great relief, Saint George Fighting the Dragon: a lifeless knight on a spirited horse, framed by columns, moldings and inscriptions in Renaissance style. In the Virgin of the Pillar, carved in stone for the church of Saint-Galmier, Colombe achieved the full delicacy and softness of Italian style in the modesty and compassion of the Virgin's face and the smooth lines of her flowing hair. He is also thought to have carved, in his old age, the figures of the tomb of Esther in the priory church of Solesmes (1496).
Painting: Italy and Flanders
French painting came under both Italian and Flemish influence. Nicolas Froment began his Raising of Lazarus in nearly Dutch realism. But in 1476 he moved from Avignon to Aix-en-Provence and painted the triptych The Burning Bush for René of Anjou. Its central panel shows the Virgin on a throne, and everything in it has Italian character: the background, the dark-haired Virgin, the majestic Moses, the beautiful angels, the alert sheepdog and the confident sheep. Here the Italian influence is at its height.
The same change shows in the work of the "Master of Moulins," probably Jean Perréal. He traveled to Italy with Charles VIII and then with Louis XII, and on his return he was master of half the arts of the Renaissance: miniature, mural painting, portraiture, sculpture and architecture. At Nantes he designed the awe-inspiring tomb of Francis II, Duke of Brittany, which Colombe carved. At Moulins he left fine portraits of his patrons Anne and Pierre de Beaujeu, now in the Louvre.
Minor Arts
The fine arts did not keep the refinement of the late Middle Ages. Flemish illuminators had long turned to worldly subjects and natural scenery. The miniatures of Jean Bourdichon in the Hours of Anne of Brittany (1508), the charming legends of the Virgin and her child, the tragedy of Calvary, the triumphant Resurrection, and the lives of the saints, show a return to medieval simplicity and piety: weak drawing, classical backgrounds and rich, pure color, all in an atmosphere of feminine delicacy and feeling.
By contrast, the stained glass of the time was influenced by Flemish naturalism, which at first seems out of keeping with windows that break light and send it into the church. Still, the glass painted in this period for Auch, Rouen and Beauvais has something of the splendor and grandeur of the thirteenth century.
The kilns of Limoges, cold for a century, were lit again and, with translucent enameled ware, competed with Italian and Islamic painted pottery. Woodcarvers had not forgotten their skill. Ruskin considered the choir stalls of Amiens Cathedral the finest example of French woodcarving. The colorful late fifteenth-century tapestries at the château of Boussac drew George Sand's attention in 1847 and became a treasure of the Cluny Museum in Paris. The Gobelins Museum has strikingly lively tapestries from around 1500 showing musicians playing in a garden of lilies.
The Dawn Before Francis I
The fifteenth century was a barren period for all French arts except château building. The soil had been plowed by soldiers' feet and made rich and fertile by the bloodshed of war, but only late in the age did people have the leisure and means to plant the seed of the harvest that Francis I would reap. Fouquet's self-portrait shows an age of humiliation and anxiety. The miniatures of his pupil Bourdichon reflect the domestic calm of Louis XII's second marriage and the cheerful ease of a recovering land. For France, the night of misfortune was over, and the dawn of good fortune was about to break.