Catherine de' Medici's patronage of the arts
Catherine de' Medici was a patron of the arts made a significant contribution to the French Renaissance. Catherine was inspired by the example of her father-in-law, King Francis I of France (reigned 1515–1547), who had hosted the leading artists of Europe at his court. As a young woman, she witnessed at first hand the artistic flowering stimulated by his patronage.[1] As governor and regent of France, Catherine set out to imitate Francis's politics of magnificence. In an age of civil war and declining respect for the monarchy, she sought to bolster royal prestige through lavish cultural display.
After the death of her husband,
Although Catherine spent ruinous sums on the arts, the majority of her patronage had no lasting effect. The end of the Valois dynasty shortly after her death brought a change in priorities. Her collections were dispersed, her palaces sold, and her buildings were left unfinished or later destroyed. Where Catherine had made her mark was in the magnificence and originality of her famous court festivals. Today's ballets and operas are distantly related to Catherine de' Medici's court productions.[4]
Visual arts
An inventory drawn up at the
By the time of Catherine's death in 1589, the Valois dynasty was in a terminal crisis; it became extinct with the death of Henry III only a few months later. Catherine's properties and belongings were sold off to pay her debts and dispersed with little ceremony. She had hoped for a far different posterity. In 1569, the Venetian ambassador had identified her with her Medici forebears: "One recognises in the queen the spirit of her family. She wishes to leave a legacy behind her: buildings, libraries, collections of antiquities".[3] Despite the destruction, loss, and fragmentation of Catherine's heritage, a collection of portraits formerly in her possession has been assembled at the Musée Condé, Château de Chantilly.
Portraits
The vogue for portrait drawings intensified during Catherine de' Medici's life, and she may have regarded part of her collection as the equivalent of today's family photograph album. Catherine loved having her children painted: "I would like", she wrote in 1547 to her children's governor, Jean d'Humières, "to have paintings of all the children done . . . and sent to me, without delay, as soon as they are finished".
François Clouet drew and painted portraits of all Catherine's family as well as of many members of the court. His drawing has been called profound, owing to its accuracy and harmony of form and its psychological penetration.
Painting
Little is known about the painting at Catherine de' Medici's court.[15] In the last two decades of Catherine's life, only two painters stand out as recognisable personalities, Antoine Caron and Jean Cousin the Younger. The majority of paintings and portrait drawings that have survived from the late Valois period remain difficult or impossible to attribute to particular artists.
Antoine Caron became painter to Catherine de' Medici after working at
Many of Caron's paintings, such as those of the Triumphs of the Seasons, are of allegorical subjects that echo the festivities for which Catherine's court was famous. His designs for the Valois Tapestries depict the fêtes, picnics, and mock battles of the "magnificent" entertainments for which Catherine was famous.[18] Caron often painted scenes of massacres, reflecting the background of civil war that cast a shadow over the magnificence of the court. Caron also painted astrological and prophetical subjects, such as Astrologers Studying an Eclipse and Augustus and the Sibyl. This theme may have been inspired by Catherine de' Medici's obsession with horoscopes and predictions.[17]
Jean Cousin, to judge by contemporary praise for his work, may have been as highly regarded at the time as Caron. The royal accounts show large payments made to Cousin: he was among those who decorated Paris for the entry of Henry II as king. Little of his work, however, survives. His most important surviving work is The Last Judgement in the Louvre, which like Caron's art, depicts human beings dwarfed by the landscape and, in Blunt's words, "made to swarm over the earth like worms".[17]
Tapestries
Missing from the inventory drawn up after Catherine's death were the eight huge tapestries, known as the
Historian
Sculpture
According to the contemporary art historian
On commission from Catherine,
In the 1580s, Pilon began work on statues for the chapels that were to circle the tomb of Catherine de' Medici and Henry II at the
Architecture
Architecture was Catherine de' Medici's first love among the arts. "As the daughter of the Medici", suggests French art historian Jean-Pierre Babelon, "she was driven by a passion to build and a desire to leave great achievements behind her when she died."
Catherine was intent on immortalising her sorrow at the death of her husband and had emblems of her love and grief carved into the stonework of her buildings.
Catherine de' Medici spent extravagant sums on the building and embellishment of monuments and palaces, and as the country slipped deeper into anarchy, her plans grew ever more ambitious.[43] Yet the Valois monarchy was crippled by debt and its moral authority in steep decline. The popular view condemned Catherine's building schemes as obscenely wasteful. This was especially true in Paris, where the parlement was often asked to contribute to her costs.
Ronsard captured the mood in a poem:
- The queen must cease building,
- Her lime must stop swallowing our wealth…
- Painters, masons, engravers, stone-carvers
- Drain the treasury with their deceits.
- Of what use is her Tuileries to us?
- Of none, Moreau; it is but vanity.
- It will be deserted within a hundred years.[44]
Ronsard was in many ways proved correct. Little remains of Catherine de' Medici's investment today: one
Literature
Catherine believed in the humanist ideal of the learned Renaissance prince whose power depended on letters as well as arms, and she was familiar with the writing of
Catherine patronised poets such as
Theatre
In 1559, Catherine and Henry II attended a performance of the tragedy Sophonisba by
Catherine enjoyed comedy and
Court festivals
As queen consort of France, Catherine patronised the arts and the theatre, but not until she attained real political and financial power as queen mother did she begin the series of
For Catherine, these entertainments were worth their colossal expense, since they served a political purpose. Presiding over the royal government at a time when the French monarchy was in steep decline, she set out to show not only the French people but foreign courts that the Valois monarchy was as prestigious and magnificent as it had been during the reigns of Francis I and her husband Henry II.[56] At the same time, she believed these elaborate entertainments and sumptuous court rituals, which incorporated martial sports and tournaments of many kinds, would occupy her feuding nobles and distract them from fighting against each other to the detriment of the country and the royal authority.[57]
It is clear, however, that Catherine regarded these festivals as more than a political and pragmatic exercise; she revelled in them as a vehicle for her creative gifts. A highly talented and artistic woman, Catherine took the lead in devising and planning her own musical-mythological shows and is regarded as their creator as well as their sponsor. Historian Frances Yates has called her "a great creative artist in festivals".
In the tradition of 16th-century royal festivals, Catherine de' Medici's magnificences took place over several days, with a different entertainment on each day. Often individual lords and ladies and members of the royal family were responsible for preparing one particular entertainment. Spectators and participants, including those involved in martial sports, would dress up in costumes representing mythological or romantic themes. Catherine gradually introduced changes to the traditional form of these entertainments. She forbade heavy tilting of the sort that led to the death of her husband in 1559; and she developed and increased the prominence of dance in the shows that climaxed each series of entertainments.
Dance
A distinctive new art form, the
Historian Frances Yates has credited Catherine as the guiding light of the ballets de cour:
It was invented in the context of the chivalrous pastimes of the court, by an Italian, and a Medici, the Queen Mother. Many poets, artists, musicians, choreographers, contributed to the result, but it was she who was the inventor, one might perhaps say, the producer; she who had the ladies of her court trained to perform these ballets in settings of her devising.[58]
The dance performances at the Valois court were conceived on a large scale, as elaborate, choreographed showpieces, sometimes performed by considerable forces. At the Château of Fontainebleau in 1564, the court attended a ball in which 300 "beauties dressed in gold and silver cloth" performed a choreographed dance.[63] In his illustrated Magnificentissimi spectaculi, Jean Dorat described an intricate ballet, The Ballet of the Provinces of France, performed for the Polish ambassadors at the Tuileries palace in 1573, in which sixteen nymphs, each representing a French province, distributed devices to the spectators as they danced. Choreographed by Beaujoyeulx, the dancers performed complex, interlaced figures and patterned movements, each expressing a certain moral or spiritual truth that the spectators, assisted by printed programmes, were expected to recognise.[64] The chronicler Agrippa d'Aubigné recorded that the Poles marvelled at the ballet.[65] Brantôme called the performance "the finest ballet that was ever given in this world" and praised Catherine for bringing prestige to France with "all these inventions".[65] Jean Dorat described the movements of the dancers in verse:
- They blend a thousand flights with a thousand pauses of the feet
- Now they stitch through one another like bees by holding hands
- Now they form a point like a flock of voiceless cranes.
- Now they draw close, intertwining with one another
- Creating an entangled hedge like a kind of bramble bush.
- Now this one and now that switches to a flat figure
- Which describes many letters without a tablet.[66]
After the dance was over, Catherine invited the spectators to join with the performers in a social dance.
Over the years, Catherine increased the element of dance in her festive entertainments, and it became the norm for a major ballet to climax each series of magnificences. The Ballet Comique de la Reine, devised under Catherine's influence, by Queen Louise for the Joyeuse Magnificences of 1581, is regarded by historians as the moment when the ballet de cour assumed the character of a new art form. The theme of the entertainment was an invocation of cosmic forces to aid the monarchy, which at that time was threatened by the rebellion not only of Huguenots but of many Catholic nobles. Men were shown as reduced to beasts by Circe, who held court in a garden at one end of the hall. Louise and her ladies, costumed as naiads, entered on a chariot designed as a fountain and then danced a ballet of thirteen geometric figures. After being turned to stone by Circe, they were freed to dance a ballet of forty geometric figures. Four groups of dancers, each wearing a different-coloured costume, moved through a sequence of patterns, including squares, triangles, circles, and spirals.[67]
The figured choreography that enacted the mythological and symbolic themes reflected the principle, derived from the Enneads of Plotinus (c. 205–270), of "cosmic dance", the imitation of heavenly bodies by human motion to produce harmony. This imitation was achieved in the dance through geometric choreography and figures based on the harmony of numbers.[68] The dance elements in the court festivities represented a response to the increasing political disharmony of the country.[64] The Ballet Comique de la Reine marked the final transformation of court dance as a purely personal and social activity into a unified theatrical performance with a philosophical and political agenda.[69] Owing to its synthesis of dance, music, verse, and setting, the production is regarded by scholars as the first authentic ballet.[70]
Music
The dance, verse, and musical elements of Catherine's entertainments increasingly reflected the principles of an academic movement—also influential in the Florentine Camerata—to unify the performing arts in what was believed to be the classical, Greek way. In 1570, Jean-Antoine de Baïf founded the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, whose aim was to revive ancient metrical practices, and, though the academy was short lived, similar aims were adopted by the Académie du Palais, founded in 1577. Both enterprises were supported by the Valois court. One result of this movement was Musique mesurée à l'antique, in which the metres of music and verse were matched precisely, to create a new harmony. The theory was not merely technical but humanistic; practitioners believed a harmonious combination of elements would produce benign moral and ethical effects on the audience. Dance was also subject to the new system and was designed to match the rhythms of the music and verse. The result was a new unified approach to the interrelationship between the performing arts.[71]
The well-documented Joyeuse magnificences of 1581 provide the clearest evidence of the influence of this artistic movement on Catherine de' Medici's entertainments. The chief composer of music for the performances was
Notes
- ^ a b Knecht, 244.
- ^ Knecht, 220.
- ^ a b Zvereva, 6.
- ^ Knecht, 245.
- ^ Knecht, 240–41.
- ^ Frieda, 109.
- ^ Dimier, 195. The similarity in sizes suggests that they were ordered to her specifications.
- ^ Jollet, 50: Correspondance Diplomatique De Bertrand De Salignac De La Mothe Fenelon, vol. 6, (1840), 229-231, 3 July 1571
- ^ See Zvereva, Les Clouet de Catherine de Médicis, 2002.
- ^ Blunt, 73.
- ^ Dimier, 239.
- ^ Dimier, 205–6.
- ^ Blunt, 100; Jollet, 249–52.
- ^ Dimier, 308–19; Jollet, 17–18. Technically, François Clouet's origins were Flemish, since his father had arrived in Paris from Flanders prior to 1528; but François lived almost all of his life in France
- ^ "There are few periods at which French painting was at a lower ebb than in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and the first quarter of the seventeenth, and few periods about which we are more ignorant." Blunt, 98.
- ^ Blunt calls Caron's style "perhaps the purest known type of Mannerism in its elegant form, appropriate to an exquisite but neurotic society". Blunt, 98, 100.
- ^ a b c Blunt, 100.
- ^ Blunt, 98.
- ^ a b Knecht, 242–43.
- cartoons for tapestries on the theme of Artemisia, in honour of Catherine de' Medici.
- ^ See The Valois Tapestries (1959), by Frances Yates, who proposed de Heere as the designer of the additions.
- ^ Dimier, 216. The information about de Heere comes from Karel van Mander (1548–1606).
- ^ a b Knecht, 242.
- Louis XIII. It was melted down during the French Revolution.
- ^ a b Blunt, 94.
- ^ Hoogvliet, 110.
- ^ Hoogvliet, 111. Ronsard may refer to Artemisia, who drank the ashes of her dead husband, which fused with her own body.
- ^ Knecht, 225, quotes Henri Zerner, L’art de la Renaissance en France. L'invention du classicisme, Paris: Flammarion, 1996, 354. The urn is a nineteenth-century restoration.
- ^ Zerner, 383. Whereas the Resurrection for the tomb of Francis I had been positioned close to the corpses, this design would have involved the visitor.
- Michelangelo's cartoon for Noli me tangere (1531) and carved the soldiers in Michelangelo's contrappostostyle.
- ^ Blunt, 96–97.
- ^ Babelon, 263.
- ^ Frieda, 79, 455; Sutherland, Ancien Régime, 6.
- ^ De l'Orme wrote that Catherine, with "an admirable understanding combined with great prudence and wisdom", took the trouble "to order the organization of her said palace [the Tuileries] as to the apartments and location of the halls, antechambers, chambers, closets and galleries, and to give the measurements of width and length". Quoted by Knecht, 228.
- ^ Blunt, 91. For example, Jacques Androuet du Cerceau dedicated his Les Plus Excellents Bastiments de France (1576 and 1579) to Catherine.
- ^ Knecht, 228.
- ^ Knecht, 227. Henry's gesture is now unclear, since a missal, resting on a prie-dieu (prayer desk), was removed from the sculpture during the French Revolution and melted down.
- ^ a b Knecht, 223.
- ^ Frieda, 266; Hoogvliet, 108. Louis Le Roy, in his Ad illustrissimam reginam D. Catherinam Medicem of 1560, was the first to call Catherine the "new Artemisia".
- ^ Blunt, 56.
- ^ L’art de la Renaissance en France. L'invention du classicisme (Zerner, 1996: 349–54), quoted by Knecht, 227; Zerner, 379.
- ^ Knecht, 269.
- ^ Thomson, 168.
- ^ Quoted in Knecht, 233. Ronsard addressed these lines to the financial official Raoul Moreau. Au tresorier de l'esparne (ca. 1573).
- ^ Hoogvliet, 109.
- ^ Sutherland, Secretaries of State, 153–56.
- ^ Heritier, 460.
- ^ Knecht, 221, 244–45
- ^ Frieda, 105.
- ^ Heritier, 238–39.
- ^ a b c d Knecht, 234.
- ^ Plazenet, 261.
- ^ Knecht, 235.
- ^ Heller, 104.
- ^ a b Frieda, 225.
- ^ Strong, 99.
- ^ Yates, 51–52.
• Catherine wrote to Charles IX: "I heard it said to your grandfather the King that two things were necessary to live in peace with the French and have them love their King: keep them happy, and busy at some exercise, notably tournaments; for the French are accustomed, if there is no war, to exercise themselves and if they are not made to do so they employ themselves to more dangerous [ends]". Quoted in Jollet, 111. - ^ a b Yates, 68.
- ^ Yates, 51; Strong, 102, 121–22.
- ^ Shearman, 105.
- ^ Lee, 39.
- ^ Lee, 40–42.
- ^ Frieda, 211.
- ^ a b Lee, 42.
- ^ a b Knecht, 239.
- ^ Quoted in Lee, 43.
- ^ Lee, 45; Strong, 120–21.
- ^ Lee, 41–42.
- ^ Lee, 41. See also Orchésographie (1588) by Thoinot Arbeau, the first publication to notate—in relation to music—the steps taken from social dances.
- ^ Lee, 44.
- ^ Strong, 102.
- ^ Strong, 118.
- ^ Strong, 119–20.
- ^ Strong, 121.
- ^ Knecht, 241.
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