French Art: Classic and Contemporary Painting and SculptureBrownell, W. C. (William Crary)
General
French Art: Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture
Brownell, W. C. (William Crary)
Art, French; Painting, French; Sculpture, French
Michel Colombe, the pupil of Claux and Anthoniet and the sculptor of the
monument of Francois II., Duke of Brittany, at Nantes, the relief of
"St. George and the Dragon" for the Chateau of Gaillon, now in the
Louvre, and the Fontaine de Beaune, at Tours, and Jean Juste, whose
noble masterpiece, the Tomb of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany, is the
finest ornament of the Cathedral of St. Denis, bridge the distance and
mark the transition to Goujon, Cousin, and Germain Pilon far more
suavely than the school of Fontainebleau did the change from that of
Tours to Poussin. Cousin, though the monument of Admiral Chabot is a
truly marvellous work, witnessing a practical sculptor's hand, is really
to be classed among painters. And Germain Pilon's compromise with
Italian decorativeness, graceful and fertile sculptor as his many works
show him to have been, resulted in a lack of personal force that has
caused him to be thought on the one hand "seriously injured by the
bastard sentiment proper to the school of Fontainebleau," as Mrs.
Pattison somewhat sternly remarks, and on the other to be reprehended by
Germain Brice in 1718, for evincing _quelque reste du gout
gothique_--some reminiscence of Gothic taste. Jean Goujon is really the
first modern French sculptor.
II
He remains, too, one of the very finest, even in a competition
constantly growing more exacting since his day. He had a very particular
talent, and it was exhibited in manifold ways. He is as fine in relief
as in the round. His decorative quality is as eminent as his purely
sculptural side. Compared with his Italian contemporaries he is at once
full of feeling and severe. He has nothing of Pilon's chameleon-like
imitativeness. He does not, on the other hand, break with the traditions
of the best models known to him--and, undoubtedly he knew the best. His
works cover and line the Louvre, and anyone who visits Paris may get a
perfect conception of his genius--certainly anyone who in addition
visits Rouen and beholds the lovely tracery of his earliest sculpture on
the portal of St. Maclou. He was eminently the sculptor of an educated
class, and appealed to a cultivated appreciation. Coming as he did at
the acme of the French Renaissance, when France was borrowing with
intelligent selection whatever it considered valuable from Italy, he
pleased the dilettanti. There is something distinctly "swell" in his
work. He does not perhaps express any overmastering personal feeling,
nor does he stamp the impress of French national character on his work
with any particular emphasis. He is too well-bred and too cultivated, he
has too much _aplomb_. But his works show both more personal feeling and
more national character than the works of his contemporaries elsewhere.
For line he has a very intimate instinct, and of mass, in the sculptor's
as well as the painter's sense, he has a native comprehension. Compare
his "Diana" of the Louvre with Cellini's in the adjoining room from the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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