The book began to fall apart almost as soon as I opened it. I looked at the bookseller, waiting for a few hungry moths to fly out from between the pages. The dealer let it go for a few euros. Old edition, bit short of a hundred years, Crayon: Portrait drawings, 16 century, France. Worn around the edges like all beautiful things, a little world unto itself.
Holbein brought crayons to France, giving them to Jean, head of the Clouet clan. Forerunner of pastels, they became instantly popular for preliminary sketches, sometimes better than the painting itself.
°
Rouen was on my list as soon as I realized it had two paintings I wanted to see. You can still go to the station and catch the next one out, although they give a better price on-line, everything transacted in advance and recorded and it kills the spirit of the thing. Better just to get there as early as possible on the day and take your chances. So I got on one of the early buses and wandered around. One day, two paintings, a few sights. I could feed my Jeanne d’Arc obsession because Rouen is where the church put her on trial and after writing down everything she said, thought the smart thing to do was burn the woman who’d saved France. They wanted to send a message to anybody else who got ideas. That’s still pretty much the universal model, with a few lucky exceptions.
So I got on a bus at Bercy at an evil hour when I should have been turning in. Shivery rain clouds drifting like soldiers after a battle, the famous Parisian grisaille just above our heads but the city was coming to life. By six thirty, the cars were crawling bumper to bumper in the dark. Outside my window I watched lone women bundled up on the ramps to the expressway, sometimes on the auto-route itself. Watching the women I asked myself: Where are they going ? Don’t really know your city, do you ?
Only a day trip to Rouen, for two paintings, one of them because I’m a student of the French 1500s when François I singlehandedly either lured or stole a host of Italian artists to come to work in Fontainebleau and the Loire, which meant the French renaissance was underway. There were intimations before, hints, ideas slipping across the border – you can see it in the statue of Louis XII on the façade of the château of Blois – but François gave Primatice and others patronage, his ear and encouragement. The other painting in the Rouen Beaux Arts is by Caravaggio and you don’t really need an excuse to see a Caravaggio in the flesh. I’m making a culte out of his work the way I did Cezanne when I was younger so I’m moving backwards in time and I’ll end up venerating Masaccio or Giotto and then I’ll have to move to Italy.
I’ll spare you the local details about Rouen because you can read that sort of thing just about anywhere on-line, written by people who do it much better than I ever will. Where to shop, where to eat – I’ve no talent for writing about food – I was tempted to stay a little longer when I found out that Flaubert’s house is maintained as a museum – but there’s never enough time, and two paintings is enough if they have something to tell you. I ate lunch and spent my time staring at the spot where Jeanne D’Arc was burned at the stake, calling out to the townspeople to raise their banners so they would be the last thing she saw. That’s all the good people of Rouen could get up to. And there I was, carving a juicy duck breast, wondering about destiny and staring at the spot where Joan died. The duck was good. That’s about all I can bear to say for food.
The guide dates François Clouet’s Le Bain de Diane from 1565 but it must have been started earlier, before Charles IX settled in to his reign, when power was still in play.
The painting quietly dominates the room. It insinuates its way in to your attention, takes an ancient myth and manipulates it to tell a contemporary story, like a theatre production which slyly presents things as they stood in the early part of the 1560s. If you were there, it was a hot subject. A painting in code.
The figures are idealized, graceful. But who are they ? The same woman in a house of mirrors ?
Clouet is said to have painted it for Claude Gouffier, the man in charge of the King’s horses. Charles IX, a Protestant sympathizer, was king by 1561, and even so Gouffier probably didn’t show it around. You have to watch out and keep your neck safe.
Diane, sister of Apollo, was given sixty nymphs as her entourage. It’s not even clear here at first who is Diane, if you don’t know the era. What is noticeable are the rowdy satyrs who are too close to the ladies for comfort. They look menacing and seem to be calling attention to the interloper in the upper left.
Catherine de Medici was running France at the time. Queen Mother and regent for her son Charles, the power behind the scene, the insulted daughter of an Italian banker. Her sons were young when they came to power and Catherine guided. At least until ’63, when Charles, aged 13, took some kind of power.
We know who the women are by color and symbol: Catherine, black across her waist and on her shoulder, mourning her husband, Henri II, killed in a tourney in 1559. Marie Stuart, wife of François II who ruled only for a year before she returned to Scotland a widow, on the right. In the center, Diane de Poitier, wearing her symbol the half moon. Marie Stuart the tallest (turned away from us, future at that moment unknown), Catherine leaning back, almost in shadow. The painter was careful to give Diane center stage, a position she’d occupied since she was Henri II’s favorite; perhaps she had hopes of continuing during the reign of his lookalike son. Positioning can be deceptive. A power struggle is underway.
Diane, the great beauty of the French century, is on her way out even if she doesn’t know it yet. Maybe the painter is hedging his bets, wondering if de Medici will continue François I’s hesitant accommodation.
The hunter, the man in white and black on the horse, is Henri II – or his son Charles, the new king. It depends on when the painting was started. Both were doomed to die a dozen years or so into their reigns. In any case, the hunter seems disinterested in the fact that he has entered the goddess’s lair, an act typically punishable by being turned into a stag. He has his eyes on the wild boar his dogs are devouring.
The story is about the war that was about to tear France apart, the antipathy between Protestants and Catholics perennially teeterng into violence. Diane, Henri II’s lover, was allied with the Guise, the religious-military front whose goal was to wipe out the Protestants. Both brothers had their eyes on power. Decades later, Catherine, the peacekeeper, would see to the assassination of two Guises in a single day.
Maybe the painter is hedging his bets, not being certain who will win the power struggle between the two women, the former favorite or the regent. Maybe he’s secretly a Protestant but doesn’t want to show his hand. Will de Medici continue François I’s tactic of playing simmering Protestants against a recalcitrant church ? The Popes are close family to a de Medici. Little at the moment of this painting is assured.
One writer called the stylized nudes a ‘frozen bouquet set in a lush landscape.’ It looks like a cool little fête where the three figures aren’t really talking to each other and the painter has hidden his sympathies, except that one satyr is blowing his horn for victory – Catherine seems to like the tune – and the other has a mean look that says, ‘Just you wait.’
It’s a monster painting, telling only a bit of what it knows. It suggests, and can be read in any number of ways. A painting that changed depending on the month and who had the upper hand. (That prize ultimately went to the ‘spice seller’s daughter’, as the French liked to insult the diminuative de Medici.) Maybe Gouffier, said to be a Protestant sympathizer, was right to keep it hidden among his prized possessions.
Graceful, enameled ladies in a high level game of power chess, giving nothing away. Technically, we might note the elegant asymmetrical arrangement of bodies, the shades of the women’s skin, the winding paths into the green hills. Clouet learned from the Italian artists who decorated the palace in Fontainebleau.
°
You don’t need the little white card to tell you it’s Caravaggio, even from across the room. It drags you across the floor of the quiet, nearly empty gallery. No need to get too close for the full force to sink in.
With Caravaggio we enter a fresher, more tormented world. Mythologies coyly presented, waiting to be decoded, are of no help here. The artist appears to have gone into the streets of Napoli to search for his models. (Maybe you think, I’ve seen him somewhere before ! – I rifled through my southern upbringing: a redneck from the hills outside of Asheville, or maybe a biker in Daytona ?) You imagine the thoughts racing through Christ’s head at that moment, how much idiocy he can or should take, when is the Lord going to put a stop to this, shouldn’t he just overpower the two men and make his way back to the women in Galilee – he looks ready to exit the canvas body and soul, a modern Lawrentian rebel. Must he go through with it ? Even if, at that moment, he can’t be sure how it ends.
Paintings like this set the template for a hundred years of Baroque art, even for Rubens, who felt obliged to ‘correct’ some of Caravaggio’s work. What an incredible recovery from the wretched suffering Christs of the Middle Ages.
The other two are cowards, just doing their jobs. They whip people. One of them is having his doubts, fumbling with the cording, while the other already has an arm raised and is eager to get started. All in a day’s work.
It’s a breathtaking piece of work, and like the Clouet, offers no easy resolutions. The figures are right there in front of you, mostly naked, daring you to read their minds.
Across the room, behind the Caravaggio, half-hidden in a corner, bad lighting, something is making noise. A man bent over an ash-white corpse. Luca Giordano! The Good Samaritan. But ‘Luca fa presto’ must wait for another day. The station was full of festive Christmas players entertaining the kids. I caught the first train back.
*
The air gets thin in the far reaches of the digital galaxy. One slips a thousand words or so into a canister, says, Fare thee well ! before firing the rocket and then, What next ? I keep Riffs rates as low as the platform allows, a whopping 30 a year. (Cancel anytime you feel intellectual irritation. No Substack agent will visit your home demanding explanations.) Leave a comment if you like. I’m especially interested in bored, nervous types who never pay for anything on line. They’re prize catches.