Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- History
The two great schools of Christian painting in Europe were born, grew
and flourished in the free cities of Flanders in the north, and in the
free cities of Italy in the south. French masters, working in the
provincial centres of Tours, Dijon, Moulins, Aix and Avignon, were
inevitably subdued by the dominant and powerful masters of the north and
south, and how far they succeeded in impressing a local and racial
individuality on their works is, and long will be, a fruitful theme for
constructive artistic criticism. The famous triptych of Moulins, now
with many other works attributed to the painter of the Bourbons, known
as the Maître de Moulins, who was working between 1480 and 1500, has
long been accepted as a work by Ghirlandaio. The well-known painting at
the Glasgow Museum, a Prince of Cleves, with his patron saint, St.
Victor of Paris, now assigned to the Maître de Moulins, was recently
exhibited among the Flemish paintings at Bruges, and has long been
attributed to Hugo Van der Goes. The Burning Bush, given to Nicolas
Fromont, has been with equal confidence classed as a Flemish work, and
even ascribed to Van Eyck; and the Triumph of the Virgin, from
Villeneuve-les-Avignon, now on irrefragable evidence assigned to
Enguerrand Charonton, has been successively attributed to Van Eyck and
Van der Meire. Even if all the paintings which the patriotic bias of
enthusiastic critics has attributed to French masters, known or unknown,
be accepted, the continuity is broken by many gaps, which can only be
filled by assuming, after the fashion of biologists, the existence of
"missing links." Further researches will doubtless elucidate this
fascinating controversy.
Among the French Primitifs[171] possessed by the Louvre may be mentioned
the Martyrdom of St. Denis, and a Pietà, Nos. 995 and 996, attributed
wholly or in part to Malouel, who was working about 1400 for Jean sans
Peur at Dijon. A Pietà (No. 998), now attributed to the school of Paris
of the late fifteenth century, contains an interesting representation of
the Louvre, the abbey of St. Germain des Prés and of Montmartre, and has
been ascribed to a pupil of Van Eyck, and later to an Italian painter
named Fabrino. By Fouquet (about 1415-1480), the best known of the early
French masters, there are portraits of Juvenal des Ursins and Charles
VII. Two works (Nos. 1004 and 1005), the portraits of Pierre II., Duke
of Bourbon, and of Anne of Beaujean, catalogued under unknown masters,
are now assigned by many critics to the Maître de Moulins.[172] Nicholas
Froment, who was working about 1480-1500, is represented by admirable
portraits (No. 304 _a._), of Good King René and Jeanne de Laval, his
second wife. Jean Perréal, believed by M. Hulin to be identical with the
Maître de Moulins, is also represented by a Virgin and Child between two
Donors (No. 1048).
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