October 18, 2017 – January 15, 2018
Louvre -Hall Napoléon
François I’s taste for Italian art is
well known; his patronage is essentially identified with the creation of
an Italian school at Fontainebleau, but his reign was equally marked by
a vigorous tradition of Dutch artists settling in France.
The best-known Northern artists active in France during is reign—Jean Clouet and Corneille de la Haye known as Corneille de Lyon—were
portrait specialists. The exhibition offers an exceptional presentation
of the painted oeuvre of Jean Clouet (only around twenty panels are
confirmed to be by the artist), as well as a few rare preparatory
drawings, sketched from life.
As well as Paris, the Norman, Picard, Champagne, and Burgundian centers were swept by a wave of Northern influences—from Antwerp, Brussels, Leiden, Haarlem—in
the art of manuscript illumination and religious painting. Recent
research has gradually revealed painters unjustly consigned to oblivion:
Godefroy le Batave, Noel Bellemare, Grégoire Guérard, and Bartholomeus
Pons are only some of the artists who excelled in media as diverse as
illumination, painting, stained glass, tapestry, and sculpture. The king
made extensive purchases of tapestries, gold and silver objets d’art,
and Flemish paintings. A whole segment of the French Renaissance is now
resurfacing; and this exhibition sets out ro reveal its many and varied
facets, its extravagance, and its monumental character.
Jean Clouet, François I, Department of Paintings, Musée du Louvre © RMN - Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) /Michel Urtado
- Jean Clouet, Portrait équestre de François 1er
