Louvre, 3 Décembre. Richelieu wing. The elevators run you up to the top floor at a brisk pace, pulling the centuries back to take you to the dawn of French painting. Stepping off you simultaneously see the portrait of Good King Jean across the foyer and answer the questions of a lost person desperately trying to find her way out. No clue. You want in. You never expected to see that painting in the flesh, which, if done in his lifetime is one of the earliest portraits sur le vif. (Enter historians, who pretend to know.) You dive into the collection, enter the late medieval world of saints, demons, prophets, knights and birds. A comfortable, close world you could stay in forever. Not the endless replay of myths but actualities. The European continent had yet to rediscover their Greek and Roman forebears.
The map says Poussin is up ahead, around the corner. Ah, Poussin. Generally regarded as the prince of French painting in the 17th century, with a second life as a character in Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece. You know precious little about him or his work. But before you get there, intent on getting around before the crowds
arrive, you stop in your tracks as you cross the modern, amorphous, well-lit carrefour. The painting does that to a good number of visitors. Another world, yet again. Who are these two bold ladies and what’s it about ? Placement feels haphazard as if curators didn’t know where else to put it, in a large room that serves as a crossroad to other exhibits.
No need to describe the painting, you can see for yourself. In fact, you quickly realize as you read the legend, it is perhaps only technically French French. School of Fontainebleau, no other attribution. Francois 1 stole or bribed a whole squadron of Italian artists into joining him in Fontainebleau to build his chateau, a favorite of French rulers from Henri IV to Napoleon. Some, like Primatice, stayed the rest of their lives. So this painting, dated vaguely 1594 (who knows?) is by unknown hands. Said to be Gabrielle d’Estrées and her sister but after that, everything is guesswork. The gesture ? Scholars twist themselves into amusing shapes to say that it announces Gabrielle’s pregnancy by King Henri IV. Could be. The figure in back ? Look closely.
Over the fireplace a painting of a heroic scene, something Renaissance, Hercules after one of his labors, or a king on the battlefield. We see only his legs.
Still, we’re no closer to understanding, both the world it comes from or what it signifies. Frivolous, well-born ladies enjoying their privileges, or a sensual statement of the position of women in French society ? Epochs divided by Grand Names or Kings only tell you so much. Culture swings like a pendulum back and forth restlessly. To understand we must enter the era, the decade. (The same as knowing the 90s and the Naughties would be of little help to explain where we are now. Life was different way back then.)
The painting of d’Estrées and her sister didn’t come out of nowhere, and its antecedents must have been well-known to both the sitters and the unknown painter of Fontainebleau. The earlier paintings can all be linked by a single name, a kind of human tornado, a female hunter who stopped at nothing in her pursuit of power and prestige. You know her name: Diane de Poitiers, the beauty of the century, whose story is too long to tell here. She took great care to have her beauty and her influence documented throughout the ups and downs of her tumultuous life, in and after power. The painting of the d’Estrées sisters starts from François Clouet’s portrait of Diane, done at the height of her fame.
If Gabrielle borrows the foreground iconography and the allusive domestic background, was she also using de Poitiers as her model for the independent woman? She had, in her words, a ‘phenomenal run of luck’ that ended just before her marriage to Henri IV. She shared his tent during wartime, advised on strategy, all of it ending, alas, with her sudden death just before marriage in 1599. Henri wore black, something completely unprecedented for a king mourning a mistress. She, unlike Diane, is remembered in popular songs like la Belle Gabrielle.
Of Diane de Poitiers there are no end of paintings, which serve as kind of lasting propaganda for a woman who married well and never looked back. Diane played the cards of power with incredible finesse and made sure the public knew who she was, as in her incredible scantily clad entrance to Lyon, where her banners flew alongside Henri II’s, or indeed, the king’s endlessly reiterated devotion to her, a woman twenty years his elder. Is she the first modern feminist, determined to flaunt it ? Debate that until the evening grows dark. She lost out, finally, to the King’s widow, the endlessly derided daughter of the Florentine spice dealer, Catherine de Medici. The paintings remain, though not at the Louvre, none so fantastic as Clouet’s Diana’s Bath, where de Poitiers takes center stage in an allegory of life at court after the spectacular death of Henri II, and a mounted hunter who could be the king past or future waits patiently in the background.
(Amusing to see how the colors, so central to the allegory, change in various versions on-line but the painting, the real thing, is in Rouen, not so very far away and a good excuse for a day out of town. Clouet clearly learned a few tricks from the painters of Fontainebleau and as well as that grand mystery maker, Giorgione.)
Questions ?
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