L'art de Ia Renaissance en France: L'invention du classicisme. - Review - book review

HENRI ZERNER L'art de Ia Renaissance en France: L'invention du classicisme Paris: Flammarion, 1996 414 pp; 459 color and b/w ills. 595 FF

In 1981 Andre Chastel declared, "No single in the world of scholarship would be able to draft an accurate observe of French Renaissance art." [1] He pointed without that so little was known about thus much, and that no interpretive framework notwithstanding existed that could even begin to give a satisfactory shape to the compounded phenomenon of the art and architecture of 16th-century France. As if upon cue, a great wave of scholarship upon the French Renaissance began to come up just at that moment.

Considering alone those books I happen to have upon my shelves, the last sum of two units decades have seen the publication of three studies of the French chateau; monographs upon the chateaux of Madrid, Saint-Leger-en-Yvelines, and Fontainebleau; a reading of the domestic architecture of Renaissance Paris; of recent origin critical editions of Philibert Delorme's architectural writings and of Jacques Androuet du Cerceaus's Le plus of the best qualitys bastiments de France; a reassessment of Delorme's technical and formal innovations; a novel history of French architecture from the 16th to the late 18th centuries in which the Renaissance is carefully rethought; an invaluable edition of artists' contracts from the Minutier central of the Archives Nationales; a comprehensive analysis of the Galerie d'Ulysse at Fontainebleau; a application of mind of the little-known gallery at Oiron and its painting cycle; an exhaustive reading of "Francois Ier imaginaire"; a definitive close attention of Francis I as collector; a multiauthored whirl of the art and society of Renaissance Tr oyes; and sum of two units massive exhibition catalogues, one of French Renaissance prints, the other of drawings.

In the wake of this tremendous scholarly breaker the title of Henri Zerner's beautifully produc and richly illustrated book--L'art de la Renaissance en France--would have the appearance to indicate that we now have the "large and articulated survey" Chastel skeptically spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed might one day be possible. Zerner certainly draws upon recent work (to which he himself has contributed), on the other hand his subtitle--L'invention du classicisme--should give us pause, for it signals that something more original, deliberative provocative, and finally, more necessary than a view is in fact at hand. [2]

The French Renaissance has lengthy been caught between two stories of classicism. In the history of French art, "classicism" is assigned to the formal solutions and institutional conformations of the academic art of the 17th hundred It was only then that the French are said to have progressively fabricated and theorized their have classicism, their own authoritative, archaeologically attentive take upon antiquity. In this narrative, elegantly plott by the agency of Anthony Blunt in his 1953 contribution to the Pelican series and laboriously threaded end Louis Hautecoeur's multivolumed Histoire de l'architecture classique en France (1943-48) the 16th hundred is awkwardly retrofitted as an unhappy anticipatory phase, its chief merit having been that it was ready, if not always able, to give up the spirit of the Gothic.

Intertwined with this national narrative is the story of the arts in 16th-century Europe Here it is the achievements of Italian artists that fix our idea of the correctly and authentically classical. This identification arises not solitary from certain formal properties, morphological attributes, or attitudes toward antiquity, on the contrary as Zerner elaborates, also from an Albertian/Vasarian perspective that recognizes single a particular type of artistic personality and specific impressed signs of artistic products and methods of production and is blind to alternatives. Furthermore, Italian Renaissance notions of what constitutes an ideal artist and ideal art reality (the framed easel painting above all) have lengthy been broadly assimilated as normative, and are thus able to legitimate the art of 17th-century France independent of its classicist claims. In other words, historically specific definitions of classicism have become entangled with apparently ahistorical commonsense notions of what constitutes art. 16th-century France prod uc neither a Poussin nor a Raphael, and what it did exhibit does not particularly look correctly classical, all of which makes for an uneasy fit with normative paradigms of classicism, whether academic French or Renaissance Italian.

Aiming at these and related issues, Zerner offer proffers not a comprehensive survey on the other hand a study that is organized around lock opener sites and problems (in many cases highly original topics of analysis), and that focuses mainly upon the period 1540-60. The middle decades of the 16th hundred have long been recognized as a time of exceptionally intense and energetic activity in all areas of French agriculture These are the years of the Pleiade, Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay, and also of Pierre Lescot and Philibert Delorme, Jean Goujon and Jean Cousin. Thus although Zerner situates his discussion within a time frame ranging roughly from the extremity of the Hundred Years War to the death of Henry III (1453-1589) his decision to concentrate upon these innovatory mid-century decades allows him to best reevaluate the fundamental methodological, historiographical, and art historical question s posed by the French Renaissance. In eleven protracted and dense chapters Zerner examines a wide range of traditions and models--French and Ital ian, antique and medieval, humanist and chivalric, court and popular--and a wide array of cross-fertilizing media--painting, architecture, statuary prints, tapestries, ceramics, goldsmith work, stained glass, and more. over he argues that distinctive however highly variable and unstable modalities of classicism were propos in mid-16th-century France.