The death of Perréal and Bourdichon a few years after the accession of François I. had left France without any artists of note, save the few foreign portrait painters employed by the Court. François I., an enthusiastic art lover, who had seen and admired the great Italian masters in their own country, spared no effort to attract the leading masters to France. We have seen that he actually succeeded in securing the services of the aged Leonardo da Vinci, and that for a brief span Andrea del Sarto worked at his Court. When, about 1530, that art-loving king turned his attention to the decoration of his palace at Fontainebleau, there was not a single painter of French nationality, or artist living in France, who could have been entrusted with so formidable a task, and François I. was again forced to enlist the best Italian painters available for the purpose. Having first engaged Pellegrino and other third-rate artists, he succeeded, in 1531, in inducing the Florentine Rosso to undertake the execution and supervision of the decorative work at Fontainebleau; and in the following year the Bolognese Primaticcio entered his service. Both belong to the Italian eclectic schools, and only concern us here in so far as their example led to the founding of what has been called the “School of Fontainebleau,” which was really an offshoot of the Italian eclectic school. In the early years of Rosso’s and Primaticcio’s activity at Fontainebleau practically all the work was done by these two painters and their Italian assistants, whose band was joined by Niccolò dell’ Abbate. It was only after the death of François I. that the teaching of the Italian eclectics at Fontainebleau produced a generation of French artists capable of doing justice to the decorative tasks for which an ever-increasing demand had meanwhile arisen. That the Louvre is singularly poor in works by these painters may partly be accounted for by the comparative scarcity of easel pictures painted by artists who were chiefly employed for interior decoration. There is no reason for crediting any Frenchmen with the three anonymous school of Fontainebleau pictures in Gallery XI.: _Diana_ (No. 1013), _The Chastity of Scipio_ (No. 1014), and _The Toilet of Venus_ (No. 1014A). _The Chastity of Scipio_ in particular would appear to be the work of Niccolò dell’ Abbate. JEAN COUSIN