Founts of Style

By ROBERT HUGHES

Early in the 16th century, French barons (being saddled with the "barbarous" Gothic tradition) seemed as ignorant and vulgar to the Italians as, 400 years later, Texas barons were to the French. The Renaissance had to be imported to France. It came late, in the form of an international style known as Mannerism, and its arrival was largely due to a single patron, Francis I.

From 1528 onwards, the King--whose sharp little eyes, scrolled mouth and drooping wedge of a nose survive in many effigies--set up court in a manor at Fontainebleau. To it Francis brought some of the best Italian artists of the day: Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio and Niccolo dell'Abate. Even Benvenuto Cellini spent several years, from 1540 to 1545, in the King's employment, making statues and, as a culmination of his skill as a goldsmith, the famous gold saltcellar (now in Vienna) that he finished in 1543. The Italians' work set a new cultural norm for France and turned Fontainebleau into a hothouse of "advanced" style. Moreover, the palace and its workshops continued to be an art center for more than 50 years after Francis' death. Their products are the subject of a large and delectable show called Fontainebleau: Art in France, 1528-1610, organized last year by the French government and now on view at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Overtures. Francis I had reason to be infatuated with Italy. He had conquered some of it in 1515, when he was only 21; and the first Italian artist to come under his barely fledged wing was Leonardo da Vinci, who went to France and died in the royal chateau at Amboise in 1519. But when the King turned to the remodeling of Fontainebleau, his chances of getting another such hero of the High Renaissance were gone. Raphael was dead. Michelangelo rebuffed Francis' overtures. That left younger men, notably Rosso, who had been cut adrift by the sack of Rome in 1527 and now, by a quite oneiric fluke of luck, became impresario of all the royal studios and workshops.

Rosso was a difficult Florentine, melancholic and arrogant; even the religious paintings he did in Italy are full of a quite un-Renaissance sense of foreboding and psychological tension. In the end, he committed suicide in a fit of depression. But Rosso's designs for the Galerie Franc,ois Premier at Fontainebleau set the court style: the fantastic stucco cartouches, gilding and strapwork; the airless painted space, filled with large twisting bodies based on Michelangelo's figura serpentinata; the strained and tangled poses; the weird color, by turns opulent and acidly dry; the Biblical and classical allegories, recondite to the point of eccentricity. "A courtly art," observed Art Historian Andre Chastel, "always tends to develop a universe from which nature is absent"--and Mannerism was the courtliest and most artificial of styles. At Fontainebleau, the world of nature and the spontaneous passions was sublimated--in art as, one presumes, in life--into an elaborate system of symbols.

One of the unifying themes was water, the fontaine of the castle's name. Like many of his descendants, Francis I was a licentious monarch. Unlike them, however, he was also a clean one. He built a magnificent series of bath-apartments ("bathroom" does no justice to their size, or to the richness of their now vanished decoration). They may well have been meant to rival the great steam rooms and pools of ancient Rome. Primaticcio, who became Francis' artistic supervisor when Rosso died in 1540, filled their walls with cheerfully obscene designs of pagan deities clambering into the tub with one another, water nymphs and satyrs. Even the conventions of Fontainebleau portraiture were connected with the bath: the paintings of royal mistresses at their dressing tables, cool, absorbed and barebreasted, picking through caskets of jewels, their impassively pretty faces reflected in ornate toilet mirrors that might have been made by Cellini. They represent a level of high camp, subtle and coldly ceremonious but tinged with farce as well, that French court art did not regain until the 18th century.

From the combined tastes of artists and patrons (Henry II no less than his father Francis I), a durable erotic prototype arose at Fontainebleau. She is the woman of Italian Mannerism carried to an extreme--a tiny head, small high breasts, immensely long thighs and tapering, useless feet. She still survives today in the triumph of anti-nature represented by the high-fashion mannequin. One of her most frequent avatars was Diana, the huntress, virgin deity of fountains and the moon, whose namesake, Diane de Poitiers, was the mistress of Henry II. A small marble relief, Diana Caressing a Stag, is a veritable epitome of the Fontainebleau nude (see cut). It seems to be derived, in equal parts, from a lost painting by Primaticcio, a sculpture, the Nymph of Fontainebleau, by Cellini, and Michelangelo's Leda and the Swan; this stylistic melange is to be expected in Mannerism, but the aspect of Leda predominates. The hunt is suspended. The hounds have gone to sleep; one has consented to become a pillow. Diana has settled down to a little dalliance with her antlered prey. It would be hard to find a more succinct courtliness than this: the artificiality complete, the perversity exquisite, the wit both funny and touching.

--Robert Hughes

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