Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

argument, Mendoza retired to Granada, composed incidental verses too

free to be printed during his lifetime, and recounted the Moorish

revolt of 1568-70 in an Historia de la guerra de Granada so

impartial, so just to the Moors, that this too could not find a

publisher, and saw print only in 1610, and then only in part.

Mendoza took Sallust for his model, rivaled him, and stole a theme

or two from Tacitus; but all in all, this was the first Spanish work

that advanced beyond mere chronicle or propaganda to factual history

interpreted with philosophical grasp and presented with literary

art. Mendoza died in 1575, aged seventy-two. He was one of the most

complete personalities of a time rich in complete men.

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Always, in these hurried pages, conscience runs a race with time,

and warns the hurrying pen that, like the hasty traveler, it is but

scratching surfaces. How many publishers, teachers, scholars, patrons,

poets, romancers, and reckless rebels labored for half a century to

produce the literature that here has been so narrowly confined, so

many masterpieces unnamed, nations ignored, once immortal geniuses

slighted with a line! It cannot be helped. The ink runs dry; and while

it lasts it must be enough if from its scratches and splashes some

hazy picture unfolds of men and women resting a while from theology

and war, loving the forms of beauty as well as the mirages of truth

and power, and building, carving, painting words until thought finds

an art to clothe it, wisdom and music merge, and literature arises

to let a nation speak, to let an age pour its spirit into a mold so

fondly fashioned that time itself will cherish it, and carry it down

through a thousand catastrophes as an heirloom of the race.

CHAPTER XXXVI: Art in the Age of Holbein: 1517-64

I. ART, THE REFORMATION, AND THE RENAISSANCE

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ART had to suffer from the Reformation, if only because

Protestantism believed in the Ten Commandments. Had not the Lord God

said, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness

of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth

beneath, or that is in the water under the earth"? (Exodus 20:4) How

was representative art possible after that sweeping prohibition? The

Jews had obeyed, and had passed by art. The Moslems had almost obeyed,

had kept their art decorative, largely abstract, often representing

things, rarely persons, never God. Protestantism, rediscovering the

Old Testament, followed the Semitic line. Catholicism, whose

Greco-Roman heritage had overshadowed its Judaic origin, had more

and more ignored the veto: Gothic sculpture had fashioned saints and

gods in stone; Italian painting had pictured the Bible story, and

the Renaissance had quite forgotten the Second Commandment in a

blooming riot of representative art. Perhaps that old interdict had

been meant to ban representation for magical ends; and the patrons

of art, in Renaissance Italy, had the good sense to override a

primitive and now meaningless taboo.

The Church, greatest patron of all, had employed the arts to form

the letterless in the dogmas and legends of the faith. To the

ecclesiastical statesman who felt that myths were vital to morality,

this use of art seemed reasonable. But when the myths, like purgatory,

were manipulated to finance the extravagances and abuses of the

Church, reformers forgivably rebelled against the painting and

sculpture that inculcated the myths. In this matter Luther was

moderate, even if he had to revise the Commandments. "I do not hold

that the Gospel should destroy all the arts, as certain

superstitious folk believe. On the contrary, I would fain see all

arts... serving Him Who hath created them and given them to us. The

law of Moses forbade only the image of God." `06361 In 1526 he

called upon his adherents to "assail the... idolaters of the Roman

Antichrist by means of painting." `06362 Even Calvin, whose

followers were the most enthusiastic iconoclasts, gave a limited

approval to images. "I am not so scrupulous as to judge that no images

should be endured... but seeing that the art of painting and

carving... cometh from God, I require that the practice of art

should be kept pure and lawful. Therefore men should not paint nor

carve anything but such as can be seen with the eye." `06363 Reformers

less human than Luther, less cautious than Calvin, preferred to outlaw

religious painting and sculpture altogether, and to clear their

churches of all ornament; "truth" banished beauty as an infidel. In

England, Scotland, Switzerland, and northern Germany the destruction

was wholesale and indiscriminate; in France the Huguenots melted

down the reliquaries, shrines, and other vessels found in the churches

that came into their power. We should have to recapture the ardor of

men risking their lives to reform religion before we could

understand the angry passion that in moments of victory destroyed

the images that had contributed to their subjection. The demolition

was brutal and barbarous, but the guilt of it must be shared by the

institution that had for centuries obstructed its own reform.

Gothic art ended in this period, but the Reformation was only one

cause of its demise. The reaction against the medieval Church

brought with it a distaste for the styles of architecture and ornament

long associated with her. And yet Gothic was dying even before

Luther spoke. It ailed in Catholic France as well as in rebellious

Germany and England; it was consumed in its own flamboyance. And the

Renaissance, as well as the Reformation, was fatal to Gothic. For

the Renaissance came from Italy, which had never loved Gothic and

had travestied it even in adopting it; and the Renaissance spread

chiefly among educated people whose polite skepticism could not

understand the enthusiastic faith of crusading and Gothic days. As the

Reformation progressed, the Church herself, which had found in

Gothic architecture her supreme artistic expression, was too

impoverished by the loss of Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia, and the

inroads made upon her revenues by Catholic kings, to finance art as

lavishly as before, or to determine taste and style. Day by day a

secularizing, paganizing Renaissance asserted its classical

predilections over the sacred traditions of medieval faith and form.

Men impiously reached over pious and fearful centuries to grasp

again the earthloving, pleasure-loving passions of antiquity. War

was declared against Gothic as the art of the barbarians who had

destroyed Imperial Rome. The conquered Romans came back to life,

rebuilt their temples, exhumed the statues of their gods, and bade

first Italy, then France and England to resume the art that had

embodied the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome. The Renaissance

conquered Gothic, and in France it conquered the Reformation.

II. THE ART OF THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE

1. "A Malady of Building"

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In French ecclesiastical architecture Gothic fought successfully for

a reprieve. Some old cathedrals added fresh elements, necessarily

Gothic; so Caen's St.-Pierre completed its famous choir; Beauvais

built its south transept; and Gothic made almost its expiring effort

when Jean Vast raised above that transept crossing a spire 500 feet

high (1553). When, on Ascension Day, 1573, that towering audacity

collapsed into the ruined choir, the disaster symbolized the end of

the noblest style in architectural history.

Lesser Gothic splendors rose in this period at Pontoise,

Coutances, and a dozen other cities of France. In Paris, where every

glance reveals some marvel from a believing past, two handsome

Gothic churches took form: St.-Etienne-du-Mont (1492-1626) and

St.-Eustache (1532-1654). But Renaissance features stole into them: in

St.-Etienne the magnificent stone screen overarching the choir; in

St.-Eustache the compound pilasters and quasi-Corinthian capitals.

The replacement of ecclesiastical Gothic with secular Renaissance

architecture reflected the taste of Francis I, and the humanistic

emphasis on terrestrial pleasure rather than celestial hope. All the

economic fruition, the aristocratic patronage, the pagan hedonism,

that had fed the fires of art in Renaissance Italy now nourished the

devotion of architects, painters, sculptors, potters, and goldsmiths

in France. Italian artists were brought in to mingle their skills

and decorative motives with surviving Gothic forms. Not only in Paris,

but at Fontainebleau, Moulins, Tours, Bourges, Angers, Lyons, Dijon,

Avignon, and Aix-en-Provence the brilliance of Italian design, the

realism of Flemish painting, and the taste and bisexual grace of the

French aristocracy combined to produce in France an art that

challenged and inherited the Italian supremacy.

At the head of the movement was a king who loved art with abandon

and yet with discrimination. The lighthearted, smiling spirit of

Francis I wrote itself into the architecture of the reign. Osez!

he told his artists- "Dare!"- `06364 and he let them experiment as

even Italy had not allowed. He recognized the Flemish power in

portraiture, kept Jean Clouet as his court painter, commissioned

portraits of himself and his entourage by Joos van Cleve. But in all

the arts of refinement and decoration it was Italy that inspired

him. After his victory at Marignano (1515) he visited Milan, Pavia,

Bologna, and other Italian cities, and enviously studied their

architecture, painting, and minor arts. Cellini quotes him as

saying: "I well remember to have inspected all the best works, and

by the greatest masters, of all Italy"; `06365 probably the

exaggeration is the ebullient Cellini's. Vasari notes in a dozen

instances the purchase of Italian art by Francis I through agents in

Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan. Through these efforts Leonardo's

Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's Leda, Bronzino's Venus and Cupid,

Titian's Magdalen, and a thousand vases, medals, drawings,

statuettes, paintings, and tapestries crossed the Alps to end their

travels in the Louvre.

The enthusiastic monarch, if he could have had his way, would have

imported all the best artists of Italy. Money was to be lavished

temptingly. "I will choke you with gold," he promised Cellini.

Benvenuto came, and stayed intermittently (1541-45), long enough to

confirm French goldsmithry in a tradition of exquisite design and

technique. Domenico Bernabei "Boccadoro" had come to France under

Charles VIII; Francis employed him to design a new Hotel de Ville

for Paris (1532); nearly a century passed before it was finished;

the Commune of 1871 burned it down; it was rebuilt to Boccadoro's

plan. Leonardo came in his old age (1516); all the world of French art

and pedigree worshiped him, but we know of no work done by him in

France. Andrea del Sarto came (1518), and soon fled. Giovanni Battista

"Il Rosso" was lured from Florence (1530), and stayed in France till

his suicide. Giulio Romano received urgent invitations, but was

charmed by Mantua; however, he sent his most brilliant assistant,

Francesco Primaticcio (1532). Francesco Pellegrino came, and Giacomo

da Vignola, and Niccolo dell'Abbate, and Sebastiano Serlio, and

perhaps a dozen more. At the same time French artists were

encouraged to go to Italy and study the palaces of Florence,

Ferrara, and Milan, and the new St. Peter's rising in Rome. Not

since the conquest of ancient Rome by Greek art and thought had

there been so rich a transfusion of cultural blood.

Native and Flemish artists resented the Italian seduction; and for

half a century (1498-1545) the history of French architecture was a

royal battle between a Gothic style affectionately rooted in the soil,

and Italian modes seeping into France in the wake of conquered

conquerors. The struggle pictured itself in stone in the chateaux of

the Loire. There Gothic still had the upper hand, and Gallic

master-masons dominated the design: a feudal castle within a

protective moat, with fortresslike towers rising at the corners in

majestic verticality; spacious mullioned windows to invite the sun,

and sloping roofs to shed the snow, and dormer windows peering out

like monocles from the roofs. But the Italian invaders were allowed to

depress the pointed arch back into the older rounded form; to

arrange the facades in tiers of rectangular windows buttressed with

pilasters and crowned with pediments; and to decorate the interiors

with classic columns, capitals, friezes, moldings, roundels,

arabesques, and sculptured cornucopias of plants, flowers, fruits,

animals, imperial busts, and mythical divinities. Theoretically the

two styles, Gothic and classical, were incongruous; their fusion by

French discrimination and taste into a harmonious beauty shared in

making France the Hellas of the modern world.

A fever of building- une maladie de batir, a wondering general

called it- `06366 now seized upon France, or Francis. To the old

chateau at Blois he added (1515-19) for Queen Claude a north wing

whose architect was a Frenchman, Jacques Sourdeau, but whose style was

quite Renaissance. Finding it inconvenient to build a stairway

within the addition, Sourdeau designed one of the architectural

cynosures of the age- an external spiral staircase rising in an

octagonal tower through three stages to an elegant gallery

projecting from the roof, each stage richly adorned with a

sculptured balcony.

After the death of his burdened Queen, Francis turned his

architectural passion to Chambord- three miles south of the Loire, ten

northeast of Blois. There the dukes of Orleans had built a hunting

lodge; Francis replaced this (1526-44) with a predominantly Gothic

chateau, so vast- with its 440 rooms, and stables for 1,200 horses-

that it required the labor of 1,800 workmen through twelve years.

Its French designers made the north facade fascinating but confused

with a maze of towers, "lanterns," pinnacles, and sculptural ornament;

and they distinguished the interior with a spiral staircase of great

splendor, unique for a double passage that divided ascent from

descent. Francis favored Chambord as a happy hunting ground; here

his court loved to gather with all its trappings; and here he spent

the declining years of his life. Most of the interior ornament was

destroyed by revolutionists in, 1793, in belated revenge on royal

extravagance. Another Francis-can palace- the chateau of Madrid in the

Bois de Boulogne, was adorned with a majolica facade by Girolamo della

Robbia, and was completely demolished in the Revolution.

The extravagance was not confined to the King. Many of his aides

treated themselves to palaces that still seem like importations from

some fairy realm. One of the most perfect is Azay-le-Rideau, on an

island in the Indre; Gilles Berthelot, who built it (1521), was not

for nothing treasurer of France. Thomas Bohier, receiver-general of

taxes in Normandy, built Chenonceaux (1513 f.); Jean Cottereau,

finance minister, rebuilt the chateau of Maintenon; Guillaume de

Montmorency raised a lordly palace at Chantilly (1530)- another

casualty of the Revolution. His son Anne de Montmorency, Constable

of France, erected the chateau of Ecouen (1531-40) near Saint-Denis.

The chateau of Villandry was restored by Jean le Breton, secretary

of state; Usse was completed by Charles d'Espinay. Add to these the

hotels or palaces of Valencay, of Semblancay at Tours, of

Escoville at Caen, of Bernuys at Toulouse, of Lallemont at Bourges, of

Bourg-theroulde at Rouen, and a hundred others, all products of this

reckless reign, and we may judge the prosperity of the lords and the

poverty of the people.

Feeling inadequately housed, Francis decided to rebuild the

chateau that Louis VII and Louis IX had erected at Fontainebleau,

for this, said Cellini, was "the spot in his kingdom that the King

loved best." The donjon and the chapel were restored, the rest was

torn down; and on the site Gilles de Breton and Pierre Chambiges

raised in Renaissance style a congeries of palaces connected by a

graceful Galerie de Francois Premier. The exterior was not

attractive; perhaps the King, like the merchant princes of Florence,

thought a pretentious facade, so near the city, might draw an evil eye

from the populace. He kept his esthetic flair for the interior; and

there he relied upon Italians raised in the decorative tradition of

Raphael and Giulio Romano.

For ten years (1531-41) Il Rosso- so named from his ruddy face-

worked on the adornment of the Gallery of Francis I. Vasari

describes the artist, then thirty-seven, as a man "of fine presence,

grave and gracious speech, an accomplished musician, a well-versed

philosopher," and "an excellent architect" as well as a sculptor and

painter; `06367 such were the undivided men of that expansive age.

Rosso arranged the walls into fifteen panels, each adorned in High

Renaissance style: a base of carved and inlaid walnut wainscoting; a

fresco of scenes from classical mythology or history; a rich

surrounding of stucco decorations in statuary, shells, weapons,

medallions, animal or human figures, garlands of fruit or flowers; and

a ceiling of deeply coffered wood completed the effect of warm

color, sensuous beauty, and careless delight. All this was quite to

the King's taste. He gave Rosso a house in Paris, and a pension of

1,400 livres ($35,000?) a year. The artist, says Vasari, "lived like a

lord, with his servants and horses, giving banquets to his

friends." `06368 He gathered to his service half a dozen Italian,

and several French, painters and sculptors, who formed the origin

and nucleus of the "School of Fontainebleau." At the height of his

success and splendor his Italian temper ended his career. He accused

one of his aides, Francesco Pellegrino, of robbing him. Pellegrino,

after suffering much torture, was found to be innocent; Rosso, in

shame and remorse, swallowed poison and died in agony at the age of

forty-six (1541).

Francis mourned him, but he had already found in Primaticcio an

artist capable of continuing Rosso's work in the same style of

voluptuous imagination. Primaticcio was a handsome youth of

twenty-seven when he reached France in 1532. The King soon

recognized his versatile ability as architect, sculptor, and

painter; he gave him a staff of assistants, a good salary, and, later,

the revenues of an abbey; so the contributions of the faithful were

transformed into art that would possibly have shocked the monks.

Primaticcio made designs for the royal tapestry works; carved a

masterly chimney piece for Queen Eleonora's room at Fontainebleau, and

repaid the Duchesse d'Etampes' patronage and protection by adorning

her room in the chateau with paintings and stucco statuary. The

paintings have died repeated deaths under restorations, but the

statues remain in their glory; one stucco lady, raising her hands to a

cornice, is among the fairest figures in French art. How could a

king enamored of such demure shamelessness accept stern Calvinism in

place of a Church that smiled tolerantly upon these charming nudes?

The demise of the royal satyr, and the accession of the stern

Henry II, did not injure Primaticcio's status or bowdlerize his style.

Now (1551-56), aided by Philibert Delorme and Niccolo dell'Abbate,

he designed, painted, carved, and otherwise decorated the Gallery of

Henry II at Fontainebleau. Here too the paintings have been ruined,

but the grace of the female statues is alluring, and the end wall is a

stately splendor of classic elements. Still finer, we are told (for it

was destroyed in 1738), was the Gallery of Ulysses, which

Primaticcio and his company adorned with 161 subjects from the

Odyssey.

The chateau of Fontainebleau marked the triumph of the classic style

in France. Francis filled its halls with sculptures and objects of art

bought for him in Italy and reinforcing the classic message by their

excellence. Meanwhile Sebastiano Serlio, who worked for a while at

Fontainebleau, published his Opere di architettura (1548), which

preached the Vitruvian classicism of his master Baldassare Petruzzi;

it was at once translated into French by Jean Martin, who also

translated Vitruvius (1547). From the School of Fontainebleau French

artists trained under Rosso or Primaticcio scattered the classic norms

and ideals through France; and these remained dominant there for

centuries, along with the corresponding classic literary forms

inaugurated by the Pleiade. Excited by Serlio and Vitruvius, French

artists like Jacques A. du Cerceau, Jean Bullant, and Delorme went

to Italy to study the remains of Roman architecture, and, returning,

wrote treatises formulating classic ideas. Like Ronsard and Du Bellay,

they condemned medieval styles as barbarous, and resolved to chasten

matter into form. Through these men, their work, and their books,

the architect emerged as an artist distinct from the master-mason, and

standing high in the social scale. Italian artists were no longer

needed in French building, for France now went beyond Italy to ancient

Rome itself for architectural inspiration, and effected a superb

synthesis of the classic orders with the traditions and climate of

France.

In this milieu of thought and art the noblest civic building in

France took form. Viewing the Louvre today from the left bank of the

Seine, or standing in its majestic courts, or wandering day after

day through this treasure house of the world, the spirit shrinks

with awe at the immensity of the monument. If, in some universal

devastation, only one building might be spared, we should choose this.

Philip Augustus had raised its first form about 1191 as a fortress

castle to guard Paris against invasion along the Seine. Charles V

had added two new wings (1357), with an external staircase that may

have suggested the gem at Blois. Finding this medieval structure, half

palace and half prison, inadequate for his residence and entertaining,

Francis had it torn down, and commissioned Pierre Lescot (1546) to

raise in its place a chateau fit for a French Renaissance king.

When, a year later, Francis died, Henry II bade the enterprise go on.

Lescot was a noble and a priest, Sieur de Clagny, Abbe of

Clermont, canon of Notre Dame, painter, sculptor, architect. He it was

who designed the rood loft in the church of St.-Germain l'Auxerrois

(destroyed in 1745), and the palace that is now the Hotel

Carnavalet. In both of these tasks he enlisted the aid of his friend

Jean Goujon for decorative sculpture; and when work on the new

Louvre had made some progress he called upon Goujon to come and

adorn it. In 1548 Lescot raised the western wing of the palaces that

now enclose the Cour Carree or Square Court of the Louvre. The style

of the Italian Renaissance dictated the facade from ground to roof-

exclusively, as Rabelais might say: three tiers of rectangular

windows, the tiers separated by marble cornices, the windows separated

by classic columns; three porches sustained by elegant classic

pillars; only the sloping roof was French, and there too the

moldings were of classic grace. The general aspect would have been too

severe had not Goujon inserted statues in the niches of the porticoes,

and carved exquisite reliefs in the pediments and beneath the

cornices, and crowned the central projection with the emblem of

Henry and Diana. Within this Lescot wing Goujon built the Salle des

Cariatides - four stately females upholding a gallery for musicians;

and it was again Goujon who decorated the vault of the great staircase

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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