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Imagining the Renaissance: The Nineteenth-Century Cult of François I as Patron of Art*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Janet Cox-Rearick
Janet Cox-Rearick*
Affiliation:
Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
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Extract

A sentimental domestic scene, François I and Marguerite of Navarre, was painted in 1804 by the Salon painter Fleury Richard (fig. 1). As he explained, it illustrates an anecdote from the legend of François I. The king's sister, Marguerite de Navarre, is shown discovering on the windowpane a graffito about the inconstancy of women. François — the great royal womanizer — has just scratched it there and looks very pleased with himself.

This painting signals not only the early nineteenth century's fascination with the Renaissance king, but reveals its attitudes about the Renaissance itself. For example, the setting and the costumes betray a confusion about the periodization of Gothic and Renaissance: the room in which the scene takes place is of Gothic revival design, while another room - in neo-classical style - opens beyond; the king's costume is historically correct, but Marguerite could be Maid Marian.

Type
The 1996 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 207 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1997

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Footnotes

*

This essay is a slightly edited version of the Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture, delivered at the 1996 annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (Bloomington, Indiana). (I have added notes giving essential bibliographic references, the original titles of the nineteenth-century paintings, and the original texts of the quotations that are translated into English, and sometimes shortened, in the lecture text.) It is part of a work-in-progress about the “imagining” of Italian Renaissance an, artists, and patrons in early nineteenth-century French painting. I am grateful to Cécile Scaillièrez of the Département des Peintures, Musée du Louvre, and Françoise Jestaz of the Département des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, for their assistance in obtaining photographs. I also thank Lynette Bosch, Peter Burke and Claire Carroll for stimulating conversations about my subject, and I am particularly indebted to Paul Barolsky for his perceptive comments on a draft of the lecture. For their critiques of this essay, I warmly thank Francis Haskell and Walter Kaiser.

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