Paris: Grant Allen's Historical GuidesAllen, Grant
History
Paris: Grant Allen's Historical Guides
Allen, Grant
Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- Guidebooks
Angelo, lined with the lines of a thinker who has struggled and
suffered.] Finally, sit long on the bench between the windows, and look
well at the =Nymph of Fontainebleau=, with stag and wild boar, by
Benvenuto Cellini, the great Florentine metal-worker whom François
I^{er} commissioned to produce this work for Fontainebleau. (But Henri
II gave it instead to Diane de Poitiers, for her Château d’Anet.)
Cellini’s work gave an immense impetus to French sculpture, and it is
largely on his style that Jean Goujon and the great French sculptors we
have shortly to examine formed their conceptions. Voluptuous and
overlithe, this fine relief is a splendid example of its able,
unscrupulous, deft-handed artist—seldom powerful or deep, yet always
exquisite in tone and perfect in handicraft.
Now, in order to form a just conception of the rise of the =French
school of sculpture=, traverse the Salle de Jean Goujon and the other
rooms which succeed it, till you come to the last room of the
suite—officially No. I—the =Salle d’André Beauneveu=. This vault-like
hall contains works of the =Early French School= of the 13th, 14th, and
15th cent., still for the most part purely Gothic, and uninfluenced in
any way by Italian models. Among them we notice, at the far end of the
room, near the door which leads into the Egyptian Museum, several
statuettes of Our Lady and Child, of a character with which Cluny has
already made us acquainted. Invariably crowned and noble, they represent
the Madonna as the Queen of Heaven, not the peasant of Bethlehem. This
regal conception and, still more, the faint simper, are intensely
French, and mark them off at once from most Italian Madonnas. Further
on, by the end window, the figures of angels, of St. John Baptist, and
of a nameless king, are also thoroughly French in character; while the
dainty little Burgundian choir of angels, holding, as they sing, a
scroll with a Gloria, is in type half German. Note also the numerous
=recumbent effigies from tombs=, among the best of which are those of
Catherine d’Alençon and of Anne of Burgundy, Duchess of Bedford. The
tombs at this end have still the stiff formality of the early Gothic
period. The strange recumbent figure in the centre, supported by most
funereal mourners (placed too low to be seen properly), is the tomb of
Philippe Pot, Grand Seneschal of Burgundy under John the Good, from the
Abbey of Citeaux. Such mourners are characteristic of the monumental art
of Burgundy. One more occurs under a canopy near the middle window: you
will recollect to have seen others (from the tomb of Philippe le Hardi)
at Cluny. Further on in the room we get more Madonnas whose marked
French type you will now be able to recognise. Good recumbent figures of
a bishop, and of Philip VI, sufficiently described by the labels, and
other excellent statues, one of the best of which is the child in the
centre. The king and queen by the doorway are also fine examples of the
art of the 15th cent.
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