by Will Durant
Even the Jesuits were caught in the Renaissance current, all the more readily since, as an order, they had no binding medieval roots. In their first generations, under Loyola and Laynez, they had been austere and fearless missionaries, devoted defenders of orthodoxy and the popes; but they had saved some measure of humanism at the Council of Trent; and as in their colleges they made the ancient classics the core of their curriculum, so in architecture they chose semiclassic façades for their outstanding shrines. From their brilliant church in Rome, the Gesù, they carried their style of luxuriant decoration across the Alps and over the Pyrenees. They were not uniformly pledged to copious ornament; their most famous architect—who raised the transept façade of the Orléans cathedral—designed churches and colleges on lines of severe simplicity congenial to his character and his funds. But when the order prospered it built with a happy exuberance. In 1627 it began the handsome church familiarly known to Paris as Les Jésuites—the façade Roman, the interior exquisitely carved in capitals, arches, and cornices, the choir vaults meeting harmoniously to support a luminous dome; John Evelyn, touring Paris in 1644, called this church “one of the most perfect pieces of architecture in Europe.”139 It was not unpleasantly baroque; it contained nothing distorted or bizarre. In France baroque was sobered by aristocratic taste—as Ronsard and Malherbe chastened the enormities of Rabelais.
Religious architecture languished during the Religious Wars, and in the intervals of peace civil architecture grew. City halls rose at La Rochelle, Lyon, Troyes, and Reims. In Paris Catherine de Médicis, wishing to leave the Louvre to Charles IX and his Queen, hired Philibert Delorme to build for her and her aides the Tuileries (1564), which took its name from the tile (tuile) potteries nearby. The new palace, fronted in Renaissance style with Corinthian pillars, rose west of the Louvre at the present Place du Carrousel, and ran for 807 feet along the Seine. It was burned down in the fury of the Commune in 1871; only the gardens remain—the delectable Jardins des Tuileries.
Civic building recovered rapidly under Henry IV. The Pont Neuf, opened to traffic in 1604, became the most popular of the bridges spanning the Seine. The Hôtel de Ville, finished in Henry’s dying year, remained till 1871 the rival of Notre Dame and the Louvre in the pride of the people. Like Francis I and Louis XIV, Henry gathered artists under his wing, understood them, and co-ordinated their work. For him they extended the Louvre by the Pavillon de Flore and connected it with the Tuileries by the Grande Galerie. At Fontainebleau they built the chapel, the Galerie des Cerfs, the Cour and Salon Ovale, the Porte Dauphine, and the Galerie de Diane. Fontainebleau under Henri le Grand was the fulfillment of the French Renaissance.
His widow, Marie de Médicis, before running afoul of Richelieu, engaged Salomon de Brosse to design her own Palais du Luxembourg, in the Rue Vaugirard south of the Seine (1613–20). When Louis XIII and Richelieu freed themselves from her they commissioned Lemercier to again extend the Louvre as the seat of government; now the Pavillon de l’Horloge was completed, the great wings were extended, and the lordly building took essentially its present form. From Lemercier’s plans Richelieu built in Paris the sumptuous Palais Cardinal, into which he gathered his collections of painting, sculpture, and other arts; here were Mantegnas, da Vincis, Veroneses, and Michelangelo’s Slaves. Most of this treasure passed to Louis XIII and XIV, to the Louvre, and to us.
In domestic architecture François Mansart reshaped the skyline of Paris by developing the mansard roof—having two slopes, the lower one steeper than the other, readily shedding snow and rain, and allowing greater space in the top floor; many a Paris student or artist has lived in a mansarde or attic room. Mansart designed several churches in Paris, and many châteaux in France—most successfully at what is now Maisons Laffitte, a suburb of the capital. In 1635 “Monsieur” Gaston d’Orléans commissioned him to rebuild the family château at Blois; Mansart finished only the northwest wing; its Renaissance façade and magnificent stairway remain the chefd’oeuvre of “the most skillful architect France has ever produced.”140
VII. MANY ARTS
In the same mood of classic tradition softened by French refinement and feeling, the sculptors adorned the churches, mansions, gardens, and tombs of the great. Germain Pilon inherited the Renaissance grace of Cellini, Primaticcio, and Jean Goujon, but he remembered too the Gothic merger of tenderness and strength. His masterpieces are three tombs. One, in the abbey church of St.-Denis, reunited in death Catherine de Médicis and her occasional husband Henry II—the Queen dowered with an idealized beauty that would have warmed her solitary heart. Another, now in the Louvre, honored René de Birague, Chancellor to Francis II and Charles IX—a picture of pride humbled to piety, a marvel of pliant drapery caught in bronze. Beside this is the tomb of Rene’s wife, Valentine Balbiani: above, the lady in her prime, glorified with figured robes; below, the same beauty ruthlessly carved as a corpse, with bony face, hands, and legs, corrugated chest, and sunken empty breasts; this is a powerful outcry of anger against time’s sardonic desecration of loveliness. These tombs alone would have raised Pilon above any other French sculptor of the age; but he added to them an abundance of statuary, all of arresting merit, and now mostly gathered into France’s inexhaustible treasury, the Louvre.
There, too, within a few paces, one may see works of Pilon’s successors: a life figure of Henry IV by Barthélemy Tremblay, with a smile as puzzling as Mona Lisa’s; the tomb of Anne de Montmorency by Barthélemy Prieur; and a lively Renommée (Fame) by Pierre Briard—a nude blowing from puffed cheeks and writing in the air, as if to say, improving on Keats, “Here lies one whose name was writ in wind.” In the chapel at Chantilly is a memorable monument to Cardinal de Bérulle by Jacques Sarazin. Some of these sculptors studied in Rome and brought back from Bernini a baroque tendency to excessive ornament, movement, and emotion, but these excesses soon vanished under the cold eye of Richelieu and the classic taste of Louis XIV. The smooth perfection of le grand siècle already appears in the medallions of Jean Varin, who came from Liège to live in France, and who reached, in his minuscule portraits of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Anne of Austria, an excellence no later medalist has ever surpassed.
If France had left us no sculpture, architecture, or painting she would still command our loving homage for her achievements in the lesser arts. Even in this harassed interval between Francis I and Louis XIV, the drawings, engravings, enamels, goldsmithery, gem cutting, ironwork, woodwork, textiles, tapestries, and garden designs of France rivaled—some would say surpassed—the like products of her contemporaries from Flanders to Italy. Jacques Callot’s drawings of gypsies, beggars, and tramps carry the very odor of life, and his series of etchings The Miseries of War stole a march of two centuries on Goya. Let the iron artistry of the age be judged from the grille leading to the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre. Tapestry was as much a major art as sculpture or painting. Jean Gobelin had opened dye works in Paris in the fifteenth century; in the sixteenth the firm added a tapestry factory; Francis I established another at Fontainebleau, Henry II a third in the capital. When Catherine de Médicis went to meet the Spanish envoys at Bayonne she took with her twenty-two tapestries woven for Francis I to display the wealth and art of France. The art-craft declined under Henry II, but Henri Quatre restored it by bringing a new generation of Flemish designers, dyers, and weavers to the Gobelin plant in Paris. Five distinguished specimens from his reign—The Hunt of Diana—adorn the Morgan Library in New York.
Interior decoration felt the baroque influence seeping in from Italy. Chairs, tables, chests, buffets, cabinets, dressers, bedsteads were curved and carved luxuriantly, often inlaid with ebony, lapis lazuli, jasper or agate, or adorned with statuettes. In the Louis Treize period many chairs were upholstered in velvet, needlework, or tapestry. Walls, cornices, and ceilings might be carved or painted with a frolic of plant or animal forms. Fireplaces lost some of their medieval ruggedness, and were sometimes embellished with delicate arabesques in polychrome.
In pot
tery it was the heyday of two old men: Léonard Limousin, who continued till 1574 to produce such enamels as had made him famous under Francis I,VII and Bernard Palissy, who, born in 1510, survived till 1589. Palissy was a man mad about pottery, with a passionate curiosity spilling over into agriculture, chemistry, and religion, interested in everything from the formation of stones to the nature of deity. He studied the chemistry of diverse soils to get the best clay for his kiln, and he experimented for years to produce a white enamel that would take and hold delicate hues. He burned half his belongings to feed his ceramic furnace, and told the story as if challenging Cellini. Too poor to hire help, he did all the work himself; he cut his hands so frequently that, he said, “I was forced to eat my soup with my hands bound up in rags.” And: “After working like this for ten years, I was so thin that no muscles appeared on my arms or legs; my legs were so thin that the garters with which I hold up my stockings [no longer held them] … When I walked my stockings fell to my ragged shoes.”141 His neighbors accused him of practicing magic and neglecting his family. Finally, about 1550, he found the mixture he sought, made an enamel of iridescent glaze, and used it to fashion vessels and figurines brilliantly adorned with fishes, lizards, snakes, insects, birds, stones—all the plethora of nature. Catherine de Médicis delighted to place these artificial fossils in her garden and flower beds; she gave the old potter a workshop in the Tuileries, and in his new environment he added naiads and nymphs to his decorations. Though a zealous Huguenot, he was exempted from the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, for Catherine and her court were fascinated by his vases, cups, plates, candlesticks, and quaint ideas. But in 1588 the Catholic League ordered a new prosecution of Protestants, and Palissy was sent to the Bastille. A diarist wrote in 1590:
In this year [actually in 1589] there died in the dungeons of the Bastille Maître Bernard Palissy, a prisoner on account of his religion, aged eighty years; he succumbed to misery, ill-treatment, and want…. The aunt of this good man having gone to inquire how he was, … the jailer told her that if she wished to see him she would find him a corpse with the dogs along the ramparts, where he had caused him to be thrown like the dog that he was.142
VIII. POUSSIN AND THE PAINTERS
French painting was still in bondage to Flanders and Italy. Flemish tapissiers dominated their art in Paris, and Flemish painters prospered in Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Montpellier, and Bordeaux. The best French portraits of this period were by Flemings in France: the lovely Elizabeth of Austria (now in the Louvre) by François Clouet, the proud Henry IV (in Chantilly) by Frans Pourbus the Younger, and, above all, the Riche-lieu of Philippe de Champaigne.
But the mastering influence on French painting in this period was Italian. Art students went to Rome, sometimes at the French government’s expense, and came back hesitating between the idealism of the sixteenth-century Florentines and the dark realism of the seventeenth-century Bolognese or Neapolitans. Simon Vouet, from the age of fourteen (1604), made such a name for himself as a painter that three countries competed for him. Charles I tried to keep him in London, but the Baron of Sancy took him on an embassy to Constantinople, where Simon made a remarkable likeness of Ahmet I from a secret study of the Sultan’s features in an hour’s audience given to the ambassador. Returning through Italy, Vouet fell in love with Venice and Veronese, then with Caravaggio in Rome, whose dukes and cardinals so favored him that he remained in Italy fifteen years. In 1627 Louis XIII, who had been paying him an annual pension of four thousand livres, summoned him to France to be court painter, and gave him an apartment in the Louvre. Soon all France wanted him. He decorated the chapel of Richelieu’s château, made an altarpiece for the Church of St.-Eustache, furnished designs for royal tapestries, and painted portraits for the court. Buried in commissions, he gathered aides into a school which grew into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture; there he trained and employed Le Sueur, Mignard, Le Nôtre, Bourdon, and Le Brun. His surviving works hardly vindicate his fame, but he has in French history the pivotal place of preparing the painters of the culminating age.
Three brothers, Antoine, Louis, and Mathieu Le Nain, varied the canvases of their time by picturing the life of the peasants with somber pity, finding in them the silent poverty and grim strength of seventeenth-century France. Georges de La Tour (recently exhumed by critical acclaim) also gave his brush to the lowly; his matching portraits A Peasant Man and A Peasant Woman stand near the top of paintings in these reigns; we may judge his current réclame by the $500,000 or more paid for his Fortuneteller by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art (1960). Akin to this turning from court to cottage was the specific achievement of French painting in this age—the development of landscape as a major element in pictorial art.
The father of Nicolas Poussin was a soldier in the army of Henry IV. Quartered in the home of Nicolas Delaisement after the battle of Ivry, he married Nicolas’ daughter—a peasant woman who could not write her name—and tilled a farm near Les Andelys in Normandy. Their son learned to love fields and woods, and to catch some moment of them with pencil or pen. Quentin Varin came to Les Andelys to decorate a church; young Nicolas watched him eagerly and coaxed lessons from him in drawing and painting. When Varin departed, Nicolas, aged eighteen (1612), ran away to Paris to study art. There his months of near-starvation were glorified by finding Raimondi’s engravings of Raphael’s works. Here were two revelations for Nicolas: that line, not color, was the tool of art, and that Rome was art’s capital. For eight struggling years he tried to reach that citadel. Once he got as far as Florence, but, penniless, despondent, and ill, he returned to Paris. He tried again, but was stopped at Lyon by a creditor; he crept back to pay his debts and butter his bread by some minor painting in the Luxembourg Palace. In 1622 the Italian poet Giovanni Battista Marini, coming to Paris, employed him to illustrate the poem Adone. Poussin’s drawings won Marini’s approval, and some commissions. Nicolas painted portraits grudgingly and saved his francs reverently, and in 1624 he at last saw Rome.
Marini recommended him to Cardinal Francesco Barberini: “You will find here a youth who has demonic fury in him”—a young man “mad about painting” (to vary Hiroshige’s self-analysis). He was mad about Italy too, but not so much about the paintings of the Renaissance masters as about the perfection of fragments in the Roman Forum, and not about the frescoes surviving from antiquity but about Rome herself—her vistas, fields, trees, hills, her very soil. Like some later enthusiasts, he must have wondered why God had not let him be born in Italy.
Cardinal Barberini tested him with a commission to paint The Death of Germanicus; the result pleased, and soon Poussin had all he could do to meet the calls on his art. His patrons, lay or churchly, yearned for nudes; and for a time he appeased them with such feminine displays as The Triumph of FloraVIII for Cardinal Omodeo, and A Bacchanalian Scene for Richelieu. He settled down in Rome, married at thirty-six a girl of seventeen, and spent ten years of happiness with her and his oils. Then (1640) Richelieu and Louis XIII summoned him to Paris. “I shall go,” said Poussin, “like one sentenced to be sawn in half.”143 He was given high honors and a pension of a thousand crowns, but he was ill at ease in the rancorous competition of the Parisian artists. Surrendering rich prospects, he hurried back to Italy (1643). He bought a house on the Pincian Hill, next to Claude Lorrain’s, and there he remained till his death, quiet, domestic, absorbed, content.
His life, like his pictures, was a classic composition, a model of order, measure, and self-restraint. He had few marks of the artist except his tools; he was not an avid lover like Raphael, nor a man of the world like Titian, nor (despite Marini) a demonic genius like Michelangelo; he was a bourgeois who took care of his family and paid his debts. Cardinal Massimo, seeing his modest establishment, remarked, “How I pity you for having no servant!”—to which Poussin replied, “How I pity you for having so many!”144 Every morning he walked on his hill; then all day he painted, relying on labor rather than inspiration. When, later, someone asked hi
m how he had reached mastery, he answered, “I neglected nothing.”145
Considering his laborious and unaided methods, his production was immense. He must have painted four hundred pictures, for we know that some were lost, and 342 remain; add thirteen hundred drawings, of which Windsor Castle cherishes a hundred for their precision and purity of line. He did not excel in variety. Often his nudes are lifeless statues; we should have relished more sensuality. He was a sculptor using a brush; he tended to look upon women as sculptural figures—though at times he recognized them as the divine originals of art. “The pretty girls whom we see in the streets of Nîmes,” he said, “please our eyes and souls no less than the lovely columns of the Maison Carré, since these are only old copies of those.”146 Nor was he at home in Biblical subjects. Some he did well—The Philistine Struck Down at the Gates, and The Blind Men of Jericho; and how lovely, yet stately, are the women in Eliezer and Rebecca! His forte was classical mythology pictured amid classical ruins against a landscape of classic calm. He drew not from living models but from an imagination steeped in the love and illusion of an antiquity in which all men were strong and all women beautiful. See the perfection of the one female figure in The Shepherds of Arcady, which Poussin, on Colbert’s order, painted for Louis XIV. And note, in passing, the inscription on the shepherd’s tomb: Et ego in Arcadia—”I too [was once] in Arcadia”; was this Poussin dreaming that he too had lived in Greece with Orpheus and the gods?
The Funeral of Phocion is the most powerful of Poussin’s mythologies, but Orpheus and Eurydice, is the most moving, perhaps because we recall Gluck’s despairing strains. The romantic soul is disturbed to find the story so lost in the landscape. For in truth it was not man that Poussin loved, nor woman either, it was the chastening expanse of fields, woods, and sky—all that encompassing panorama in which change is leisurely or shamed by permanence, and human ills are swallowed up in the perspectives of space and time. Therefore his greatest pictures are landscapes, in which man is as minor an incident as in Chinese painting or modern biology.