The Decorative Crafts
In the lively age of the two kings Francis I and Henry II, thousands of artisan-artists were busy adorning the life of the French. Woodcarvers set about building and carving the choir stalls of the churches of Beauvais, Amiens, Eu and Brou, and even dared to decorate the interiors of Gothic buildings in the Renaissance manner with figures of mythological creatures such as fauns, sibyls, bacchantes and satyrs, and sometimes with wooden statues of Venus, Cupid and Ganymede. As if to infect us with a disease of antiquarianism, they made tables, chairs, frames, prayer-stools, beds and cabinets full of decorative carving, sometimes inlaid with delicate pieces of metal, ivory or precious stones. Metalworkers, now at the summit of skill, polished and engraved metal into fine vessels and weapons; they made delicate openwork grilles and lace-like ironwork for chapels, oratories, gardens and tombs; and they made hinges as exact and well-wrought as those on the west door of Notre-Dame, so beautiful that religious faith took them for the work of angels' hands. Cellini, who usually, once his own artistic needs were met, put no value on the work of others, confessed that French goldsmiths in making church trays, or plates such as those engraved by Jean Duvet (the book writes "Jean Duret") for Henry II, "have reached a degree of perfection to be found in no other land." The stained glass of the chapel of Margaret of Austria at Brou, of the church of Saint-Etienne at Beauvais and of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont at Paris has not lost its artistic glory even now.
At Fontainebleau Francis founded a workshop where tapestries, instead of being woven in separate pieces and joined afterwards as before, were made in one piece, and where thin threads of gold and silver were used in weaving dyed woolen and silk fabrics. After 1530 the pictorial themes of French tapestries lost their Gothic and chivalric character and imitated the designs and motifs of the Italian Renaissance.
Pottery and Enamel
Renaissance patterns and motifs also influenced the potter's art, as the result shows in the tin-glazed earthenware of Lyons, the imitation porcelain of southern France and the enamels of Limoges. Leonard Limosin and others, with transparent enamel colors on copper basins, vases, wide-mouthed jugs, cups, saltcellars and other ordinary household vessels, painted delicate forms of plants, animals, gods, men and women, and turned those humble objects into works of art. Here too Francis took the field: he placed Leonard at the head of the royal enamel workshop at Limoges and gave him the honorary title "valet de chambre to the king." Leonard specialized in enamel portraits on copper plates, one of the finest examples of which is the portrait of Francis I himself in the Metropolitan Museum in New York; many others are kept in the Gallery of Apollo at the Louvre, each a witness to that golden age.
Portraiture and the Clouets
Portraiture in France, before the arrival of the Italians, was a developed art. Which of the Italians who came to French soil could have made a better work than the portrait of Guillaume de Montmorency, painted about 1520 by an unknown French master and now in the museum at Lyons? Rosso, Primaticcio, Niccolo dell'Abate and the other artists working in the "School of Fontainebleau" brought with them what they had learned from Raphael, Perino del Vaga, Giovanni da Udine and Giulio Romano in decorating engaged square pillars, cornices and ceilings with grotesques, winged cherubs, playing children, and scrolls, arabesques and plant motifs. An unknown member of that school painted a picture of Diane de Poitiers at her toilette with a jeweled crown on her head, now in the museum at Worcester, Massachusetts. After 1545 a number of Flemish painters, among them Bruegel the Elder (as the book says), came to France to study the paintings of Fontainebleau, but their style of painting was too deep-rooted to be swayed by the Italians and their manner; in other words, their realistic power in portraiture outweighed the feminine charm of Raphael's heirs.
One Flemish family in France, almost alone, created a separate school. Jean Clouet was attached to the court of Francis and served him in Paris and Tours. The whole world knows the portrait he painted of the king about 1525, now in the Louvre, in which the king appears with a proud, vain and fortunate face, just before his fall. Jean's son, Francois Clouet, succeeded his father as court painter and recorded in chalk or oil the notables of four reigns. His portrait of Henry II surpassed Jean's portrait of Francis I; and comparing the two works one is astonished at the deep gap between that lively gallant father and his melancholy son. Corneille de Lyon entered the lists for a time in competition with the Clouet family and set up a studio, leaving behind pictures such as the portrait of Marshal Bonnivet (the book says "Bonniveh"), faithful lover of Marguerite of Navarre. Yet in that age no painting could equal the portraits made by Francois Clouet: of Catherine de Medici, Henry II, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth of Valois, Philip II, Marguerite de Valois, the future wife of Henry IV, and the young Charles IX, whose shy countenance gave no sign that he would become the dread king of the St. Bartholomew massacre. In these works the realism and truthfulness of the Flemish school are joined to French delicacy, exactness and liveliness; the colors are mild, the lines precise and firm, the elements of each personality properly chosen and expressed as one; and only an England familiar with the works of Holbein could appreciate this "historian" and draw from his works the benefit they deserved.
Sculpture
Sculpture was the servant of architecture, and yet it was the sculptors who made architecture so dazzling. French sculptors were now producing masterpieces only one step below what Michelangelo and the other great Italian masters carved from the stone of the Carrara quarries. Magnificent tombs were designed for Louis XII and Anne of Brittany by Giovanni di Giusto in the church of Saint-Denis; for two of the cardinals of Amboise, by Roland Leroux and Jean Goujon, in Rouen Cathedral; and for Louis de Breze, husband of Diane de Poitiers, in the same cathedral. The ornament of the Rouen tombs is more than seems proper for the world of the dead, but the statues of the cardinals embody skill, and their true faces are shown as those of powerful rulers, in whose view religion was only a part of politics. Francis I, his wife Claude and his daughter Charlotte were buried in a tomb at Saint-Denis whose architectural plan was Delorme's, in Renaissance style, and whose fine sculptures were made by Pierre Bontemps. Close by stands another small masterpiece by Bontemps, an urn for the king's heart. By now French sculptors no longer needed Italian guidance to draw on the heritage of Roman classical art.
Jean Goujon
Jean Goujon had undoubtedly inherited the grace and delicacy of the classical style. We first find his name in 1540, as "stonecutter and mason," on the list of those employed on church buildings at Rouen. There he carved the stone columns that carry the organ of the church of Saint-Maclou and statues for the tombs of the cardinals, and perhaps for the tomb of Louis de Breze; he also decorated the rood loft of the crucified Christ in the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois with statues whose rhythmic grace of line recalls ancient Greek reliefs, some of which are now in the Louvre. The outstanding quality of Goujon's work was a display of feminine grace and delicacy, which he brought to perfection in the group of water nymphs he made for Lescot's "Fountain of the Innocents" (1547); so much so that Bernini regarded these figures as the most beautiful works of art in Paris. We have already named the Diana and the Stag at Anet among Goujon's major works and mentioned his statues in the Louvre. The goddesses and nude women Goujon made at the height of his skill were for France symbols of the victory of the Renaissance over the Reformation, or of the victory of Gothic thought, or of the victory of woman over her medieval detractors (the book offers all three readings). About 1542 Goujon was condemned for attending the sermon of a Lutheran preacher, and was punished and made to witness the execution of a Protestant preacher. In 1562 Goujon left France for Italy. Before 1568 he died, obscure, in Bologna; an ending that hardly suited a man who had brought Renaissance art in France to its summit.