Room III, =Salle de Michel Colombe=, represents the =advance= made =in French plastic art= during the last half of the 15th cent., and the beginning of the 16th cent., in some cases independently of the Italian Renaissance. The bust of François I^{er}, in bronze, on a pedestal near the door, may be compared, both for spirit and likeness, with the (very wooden) contemporary portraits of the same king in the French School upstairs. It has all the stiffness and archaic fidelity of early portraiture, with the usual lack of artistic finish. Note such little points as that the king wears the collar of his order, with the St. Michael of France as a pendant. Near the window, fragments of work displaying Renaissance influence. One, a relief of the Return of the Master, from the Château de Gaillon (built by Cardinal d’Amboise, minister of Louis XII, and one of the great patrons of the Renaissance in France), exhibits the beginning of a taste for secular, domestic, and rustic subjects, which later became general. (Early work is all sacred—then comes mythical—lastly, human and contemporary.) Note on the opposite side, the fine bronze of Henri Blondel de Rocquencourt, under Henri II. The Apollo and Marsyas is strongly Renaissance—a mythic subject (see the Perugino upstairs). The Massacre of the Innocents exhibits Renaissance treatment of a scriptural scene. The =centre of the room= is occupied by fine =bronzes= of the school of Giovanni da Bologna, a Frenchman who worked in Italy and forms a link between the art of the two countries. Observe the decorative French slenderness and coquetry of form, combined with the influence of the Italian Renaissance. The Mercury—light and airy—is a replica of Giovanni da Bologna’s own famous statue in the Bargello at Florence. The Mercury and Psyché beside it is a splendid example of Giovanni da Bologna’s school, by Adrian de Vries. Notice the French tinge in the voluptuous treatment of the nude, and the slenderness and grace of the limbs. The bronze statue of Fame, from the tomb of the Duc d’Epernon, exhibits in a less degree the same characteristics. It is obviously suggested by Giovanni’s Mercury.