How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesO'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
History
How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
O'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
Architecture, Gothic; Cathedrals -- France
It was the XVI century that added to St. Denis' the three tombs of most
architectural pretensions, those of Louis XII, Francis I, and Henry II.
The monument of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany was undertaken (1516-32)
by Jean Juste, who with his brothers had come north from Florence, being
among the first to bring into France the ideals of the Renaissance.[34]
It has been suggested that the king's and queen's kneeling images are
from the studio at Tours of Guillaume Regnault, who for forty years was
co-worker with Michel Colombe, last of the great Gothic artists. The
priants are still quite French in treatment. Jean Juste made the gisants
and his brother and nephew aided with the lesser sculpture. It was Louis
XII who ordered artists at Genoa to make, in 1502, the Carrara marble
tomb of his father, the poet-duke, Charles d'Orléans, and of his
grandfather, the murdered duke of Orléans, builder of Pierrefonds
Castle, and son of the art-loving Valois king, Charles V.
The tomb of Francis I (1549-59) was designed by Philibert de Lorme.
Pierre Bontemps fashioned the bas-reliefs that celebrate the wars in
Italy; he and other masters made the _priants_ and _gisants_. The tomb
of Henry II and Catherine de Medici (1570) of less artistic value, has a
complicated history. The Italian, Primatici, directed the works;
Domenico Florentino made the king's kneeling figure, and Germain Pilon
his _gisant_; Jerome della Robbia chiseled the queen's death image.
To sum up: there are in St. Denis' abbatial three totally different
parts, built in different periods. There is Suger's forechurch, in which
linger Romanesque echoes; there is the ambulatory of purest Primary
Gothic built a little later by the same great abbot; and finally there
are nave, transept, and the main parts of the choir erected during the
reign of St. Louis in the zenith of Gothic art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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