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

that led to the royal chamber where slept the kings of France from

Henry IV to Louis XIV. The work on the Louvre continued under

Charles IX, Henry IV, Louis XIII and XIV, Napoleon I and III, always

faithful to the style set by Lescot and Goujon, until today the

spreading edifice is the congealed essence of 350 years of a

civilization that ground the toil of the people into the splendors

of art. Would the Louvre have been possible if the aristocracy had

been just?

For Henry II and Diane de Poitiers Philibert Delorme created

architectural Edens. As a youth Philibert studied and measured the

remains of classic Rome; he loved them, but, back in France, he

announced that henceforth French architecture must be French. His

spirit of classic idolatry and French patriotism was precisely the

program of the Pleiade. He designed the horseshoe stairway in the Cour

des Adieux at Fontainebleau, and the fireplace and coffered ceiling in

the Gallery of Henry II. For Diane he built at Anet (1548-53) a

veritable city of palaces and formal gardens; there Cellini placed

in a pediment his Nymph of Fontainebleau, and Goujon surpassed the

Florentine with his group of Diana and her stag. Most of this costly

paradise has gone to ruin; an unimpressive gateway remains in the

court of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. For the same triumphant

mistress Delorme completed Chenonceaux- a little gift from her

enamored King; it was Philip who conceived the idea of extending the

palace across the Cher. When Catherine de Medicis took the chateau

from Diane, Delorme continued to labor there till the masterpiece

was complete. For a time his too-mathematical style fell from favor,

and he retired to write an encyclopedic Treatise on Architecture. In

his old age he was called back to work by Catherine, and designed

for her a new palace, the Tuileries (1564-70), which the Commune of

1871 destroyed. From all his patrons he received rich rewards. He

became a priest, and held several fruitful benefices. He died (1570)

as a canon of Notre Dame, and provided in his will for two

illegitimate children. `06369

Jean Bullant completed the brilliant trio of architects who

adorned France in the reigns of Catherine's husband and sons. In his

thirties, at Ecouen, he made his reputation by designing for Anne de

Montmorency a chateau quite perfect in its classic lines. In his

sixties he succeeded Delorme in building the Tuileries, and

continued working till his death- de jour en jour en apprenant

mourant, as he said- "From day to day, while learning dying."

It is the fashion to regret the importation of Italian styles into

French building, and to suggest that the native Gothic, left

undeflected by that influence, might have evolved into a civic

architecture more congenial to French grace than the relatively

rigorous lines of the classic orders. But Gothic was dying of old age,

perhaps of senile excess and Flamboyant old lace; it had run its

course. The Greek emphasis on restraint, simplicity, stability, and

clear structural lines was well suited to temper French exuberance

into disciplined maturity. Some medieval quaintness was sacrificed,

but that too had had its day, and seems picturesque precisely

because it died. As French Renaissance architecture developed its

own national character, mingling dormer windows and sloping roofs with

columns, capitals, and pediments, it gave France for three centuries a

style of building that was the envy of Western Europe; and now that it

too is passing away we perceive that it was beautiful.

2. The Ancillary Arts

-

A thousand artist-artisans adorned French life in this vivacious age

of Francois Premier and Henri Deux. Woodworkers carved the choir

stalls of Beauvais, Amiens, Auch, and Brou, and dared to decorate

Gothic structures with a Renaissance play of fauns, sibyls, bacchants,

satyrs, even, now and then, a Venus, a Cupid, a Ganymede. Or they

made- for our mad pursuit- tables, chairs, frames, prie-dieu,

bedsteads, and cabinets, carving them with perhaps a plethora of

ornament, and sometimes inlaying them with metal, ivory, or precious

stones. The metalworkers, now at the crest of their excellence,

glorified utensils and weapons with damascening or engraving, and

designed grilles- poems in iron tracery- for chapels, sanctuaries,

gardens, and tombs, or made such hinges as those on the west doors

of Notre Dame, so beautiful that piety ascribed them to angelic hands.

Cellini, who had little praise left for others after meeting his own

needs, confessed that in making church plate- or such domestic plate

as Jean Duret engraved for Henry II- the French goldsmiths had

"attained a degree of perfection nowhere else to be found." `063610

The stained glass in Margaret of Austria's chapel at Brou, or in

St.-Etienne's at Beauvais, or in St.-Etienne-du-Mont at Paris,

proclaimed a glory not yet departed. At Fontainebleau Francis

established a factory in which tapestries were woven in one piece,

instead of being made, as before, in separate sections, then sewn

together; and gold and silver threads were mingled opulently with dyed

silk and wool. After 1530 the patterns and subjects of French tapestry

ceased to be Gothic and chivalric, and followed Renaissance designs

and themes from Italy.

Renaissance motives dominated ceramics in the majolica of Lyons, the

faience of southern France, the enamels of Limoges. Leonard Limousin

and others painted, with brilliant fused enamel colors, elegant

forms of plants and animals, gods and men, on copper basins, vases,

ewers, cups, saltcellars, and other lowly utensils raised to works

of art. Here too Francis took a hand, made Leonard head of the royal

manufactory of enamels at Limoges, and crowned him with the title of

valet de chambre du roi. Leonard specialized in painting portraits

in enamel on copper plates; an excellent sample- portraying Francis

himself- is in the Metropolitan Museum at New York; many more are in

the Apollo Gallery of the Louvre, quietly attesting a golden day.

-

Portraiture was a fully developed art in France before the

Italians came. Which of the Italians in France could have bettered the

portrait of Guillaume de Montmorency painted by an anonymous master

about 1520, and now in the Lyons Museum? Voila un homme! - this is no

pictorial compliment, it is a man. Rosso, Primaticcio, dell'Abbate,

and others in the School of Fontainebleau brought to France what

they had learned from Raphael, Perino del Vaga, Giovanni da Udine,

or Giulio Romano, in decorating pilasters, cornices, ceilings...

with "grotesques" or playful figures of cherubs, children, spirals,

arabesques, and plants. An unnamed member of the school painted the

Diane de Poitiers now in the Worcester, Massachusetts, Museum-

sitting at her toilette, dressed in a diadem. After 1545 many

Flemish painters, including Brueghel the Elder, came to France to

study the work at Fontainebleau. But their own style was too deeply

rooted to yield to the Italian influence; the realistic vigor of their

portraiture prevailed over the feminine grace of the heirs of Raphael.

One Flemish family in France almost constituted a school by

itself. Jean (Jehan, Jehannet, Janet) Clouet was attached to the court

of Francis at Tours and Paris; all the world knows the portrait he

painted of the King about 1525, now in the Louvre: proud, conceited,

happy royalty just before a fall. Jean's son Francois Clouet succeeded

him as court painter, and recorded the dignitaries of four reigns in

chalk or oil. His Henry II surpasses his father's Francis I: we

are astonished to see the chasm between the gay gallant and the somber

son; we can understand how this man could sanction the chambre

ardente for the persecution of heresy, though we do not see in the

almost Borgian face any hint of his lasting devotion to Diane. For a

time Corneille de Lyon, operating a rival atelier, challenged the

Clouets in such portraits as that of Marechal Bonnivet, lover of

Marguerite. But no contemporary in France could equal the gallery of

portraits that Francois Clouet made of Catherine de Medicis, Francis

II, Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth of Valois, Philip II, Marguerite,

future wife of Henry IV, and Charles IX as a youth- too lovely to

forecast the frightened King of the Massacre. Flemish realism and

veracity are in these portraits tempered with French delicacy,

precision, and vivacity; the tone is subdued, the line is accurate and

confident, the elements of a complex character are caught and unified;

only Holbein's England would enjoy such a colorful historian.

-

Sculpture was a handmaiden to architecture, and yet it was the

sculptors who made the architecture brilliant. Now, indeed, French

sculpture poured forth masterpieces only second to those that

Michelangelo and others were then cutting out of Carrara. Lordly tombs

were modeled: of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany by Giovanni di

Giusto Betti (Saint-Denis); of two Cardinals of Amboise by Roland

Leroux and Jean Goujon (Rouen); and of Louis de Breze, Diane's

husband, in the same cathedral, of uncertain authorship. The Rouen

tombs seem too ornate to befit mortality, but the cardinals are almost

revived as unidealized strong administrators to whom religion was an

incident in statesmanship. Francis I, his wife Claude, and his

daughter Charlotte were buried in Saint-Denis in a tomb of Renaissance

style designed by Delorme, with superb sculptures by Pierre

Bontemps. Near by is a little chef-d'oeuvre by Bontemps- a

funerary urn for the heart of the King. French sculptors no longer

needed Italian tutelage to inherit the classic art of Rome.

Jean Goujon inherited at least the classic grace. We hear of him

first in 1540, listed as a "stonecutter and mason" in Rouen. There

he cut the columns supporting the organ in the church of St.-Maclou,

and carved statues for the tombs of the Cardinals, and perhaps for

that of Breze. He adorned the rood screen in the church of St.-Germain

l'Auxerrois with sculptures now partially preserved in the Louvre, and

recalling Hellenistic reliefs in the rhythmic elegance of their lines.

Goujon's characteristic quality of feminine grace approached

perfection in the Nymphs that he contributed to the "Fountain of the

Innocents" designed by Lescot (1547); Bernini thought these figures

the most beautiful works of art in Paris. We have noted Goujon's

Diana and the Stag at Anet, and his sculptures on the Louvre. His

pagan deities and his idealization of the female form suggest, for

France, the triumph of the Renaissance over the Reformation, of

classical over Gothic ideas, of woman over her medieval detractors.

However, tradition describes Goujon as a Huguenot. About 1542, as

penance for attending a Lutheran sermon, he was condemned to walk

through the streets of Paris in his shirt, and to witness the

burning of a Protestant preacher. `063611 Toward 1562 he left France

for Italy. He died at Bologna before 1568, in obscurity hardly merited

by the man who had brought to its culmination the art of the

Renaissance in France.

III. PIETER BRUEGHEL: 1520-69

-

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

++++++++++

Except for Brueghel and tapestry this was a fallow age in Lowland

art. Painting fluctuated between emulation of the Italians- in refined

technique, rich coloring, classic mythology, nude women, and Roman

architectural backgrounds- and the native flair for realistic

portrayal of eminent persons and ordinary things. Patronage came not

only from the court, the Church, and the aristocracy, but increasingly

from rich merchants who offered their stout forms and overflowing

jowls to the admiration of posterity, and liked to see reflected in

painting the domestic scenes and rural landscapes of their actual

life. A sense of humor, sometimes of the grotesque, replaced the lofty

mood of the Italian masters. Michelangelo criticized what seemed to

him a lack of discrimination and nobility in Flemish art: "They

paint in Flanders only to deceive the external eye, things that

gladden you... the grass of the fields, the shadows of the trees,

and bridges and rivers... and little objects here and there... without

care in selecting and rejecting." `063612 To Michelangelo art was

the selection of significance for the illustration of nobility, not

the indiscriminate representation of reality; his solemn nature,

encased in his irremovable boots and his misanthropic isolation, was

immune to the glory of green fields and the affections of the hearth.

For our part we make a grateful bow to Joachim Patinir, if only

for the Leonardesque landscape in his St. Jerome; to Joos van

Cleve for his lovely portrait of Eleanor of Portugal; to Bernaert

van Orley for his Holy Family in the Prado, his tapestry designs,

and his stained glass in Brussels' St.-Gudule; to Lucas van Leyden for

crowding so many masterly engravings and woodcuts into his thirty-nine

years; to Jan van Scorel for the Magdalen cherishing the vase of

ointments from which she had bathed the feet of Christ; and to

Anthonis Mor for his forceful portraits of Alva, Cardinal Granvelle,

Philip II, Mary Tudor, and, not least, himself.

Note how the painting craft in the Netherlands ran in families. Joos

van Cleve handed down some of his skill to his son Cornelis, who

painted some fine portraits before going mad. Jan Massys, inheriting

the studio of his father Quentin, painted by preference nudes like

Judith and Suzanna and the Elders; his son Quentin Massys II

carried on the trade, while his brother Cornelis took his art to

England and painted Henry VIII in old age, bloated and hideous. Pieter

Pourbus and his son Frans painted portraits and pieties at Bruges, and

Frans's son Frans Pourbus II painted portraits at Paris and Mantua.

And there were Pieter "Droll" Brueghel, his painter wife, his

painter mother-in-law, his sons Pieter "Hell" Brueghel and Jan

"Velvet" Brueghel his painter grandsons, his painter

great-grandsons....

===========================================================

==========

-

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, whose fame is among the inescapable

fashions of our time, may have derived his name from either of two

villages named Brueghel in Brabant; one of them was near

Hertogenbosch, where Hieronymus Bosch had been born, and in whose

churches Pieter might have seen several paintings of the man who

influenced his work only less than nature itself. At twenty-five (c.

1545) he migrated to Antwerp, and was apprenticed to Pieter Coecke,

whose landscape woodcuts may have helped to form the young painter's

interest in fields, woods, waters, and sky. This lesser Pieter had

begotten a daughter, Maria, whom Brueghel toddled in his arms as a

child, and whom he later made his wife. In 1552 he followed the

current custom of his craft and went to study painting in Italy. He

returned to Antwerp with a sketchbook thick with Italian landscapes,

but with no visible Italian influence on his technique; to the end

he practically ignored the subtle modeling, chiaroscuro, and

coloratura of the southern masters. Back in Antwerp, he lived with a

housekeeper-concubine, whom he promised to marry when she stopped

lying; he recorded her lies with notches cut into a stick; and

having no stick for his own sins, he renounced her when the notches

overflowed. In his middle forties (1563) he married Maria Coecke,

now seventeen, and obeyed her summons to move to Brussels. He had only

six years of life left to him.

Though his paintings led to his being dubbed "Peasant Brueghel,"

he was a man of culture, who read Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid,

Rabelais, probably Erasmus. `063613 Karel Mander, the Dutch Vasari,

described him as "tranquil and orderly, speaking little, yet amusing

in company, delighting to horrify people... with tales of ghosts and

banshees"; `063614 hence, perhaps, his other sobriquet, "Droll

Brueghel." His sense of humor leaned to satire, but he tempered this

with sympathy. A contemporary engraving shows him heavily bearded,

with a face bearing lines of serious thought. `063615 At times he

followed Bosch in seeing life as a heedless hurrying of most souls

to hell. In the Dulle Griet he pictured hell as hideously and

confusedly as Bosch himself; and in The Triumph of Death he visioned

death not as a natural sleep of exhausted forms, but as a ghastly

cutting off of limbs and life- skeletons attacking kings, cardinals,

knights, and peasants with arrows, hatchets, stones, and scythes-

criminals beheaded or hanged or bound to a wheel- skulls and corpses

riding in a cart; here is one more variant of that "Dance of Death"

which flits through the art of this somber age.

Brueghel's religious pictures carry on the serious mood. They have

neither the grandeur nor the light grace of Italian pictures; they

merely reinterpret the Biblical story in terms of Flemish climate,

physiognomy, and dress. They rarely reveal religious feeling; most

of them are excuses for painting crowds. Even the faces in them

carry no feeling; the people who jostle one another to see Christ

carry His cross seem heedless of His suffering, but only anxious to

get a good view. Some of the pictures are Biblical parables, like The

Sower; some others, following Bosch, take proverbs for their

themes. The Blind Leading the Blind shows a succession of

dull-eyed peasants, cruelly ugly, following one another into a

ditch; and Netherlandish Proverbs illustrates, in one teeming

picture, nearly a hundred old saws, including some of Rabelaisian

fragrance.

Brueghel's major interest was in peasant crowds, and landscapes

covering with their indifferent beneficence or maleficence the futile,

forgivable activities of men. Perhaps he thought there was safety in

crowds; there he need not individualize the faces or model the

flesh. He refused to picture a person posing for art or history; he

preferred to show men, women, and children walking, running,

jumping, dancing, playing games, in all the varied animation and

naturalness of life. He harked back to the scenes of his childhood,

and delighted to contemplate, to join, the fun and feasting, music and

mating, of the peasantry. He and a friend, on several occasions,

disguised themselves as farmers, attended village fairs and

weddings, and- pretending to be relatives- brought presents to

bridegroom and bride. `063616 Doubtless on these outings Pieter took

his sketchbook, for among his extant drawings are many of rustic

figures and events. He had no taste for, nor commissions from, the

aristocrats that Mor and Titian found it so profitable to portray;

he painted only simple people, and even his dogs were mongrel curs

that could be found in any city alley or rural hut. He knew the bitter

side of peasant life, and sometimes visioned it as a multitudinous

confusion of fools. But he loved to paint the games of country

children, the dances of their elders, the riot of their weddings. In

The Land of Cockayne peasants exhausted with toil or love or drink

sprawl out on the grass dreaming of Utopia. It is the peasant,

Brueghel seems to say, who knows how to play and sleep as well as

how to work and mate and die.

Against death he saw but one consolation- that it is an integral

part of that Nature which he accepted in all its forms of beauty and

terror, growth and decay and renewal. The landscape redeems the man;

the absurdity of the part is pardoned in the majesty of the whole.

Heretofore- excepting Altdorfer- landscapes had been painted as

backgrounds and appendages to human figures and events: Brueghel

made the landscape itself the picture, the men in it mere incidents.

In The Fall of Icarus the sky, the ocean, the mountains, and the sun

have absorbed the attention of the painter, and of the participants;

Icarus is two unnoticed legs ridiculously sinking into the sea; and in

The Storm man is hardly visible, lost and helpless in the war and

power of the elements.

The art and philosophy of Brueghel culminate in the five paintings

that remain of a series planned to illustrate the moods of the year.

The Wheat Harvest schematically pictures the cutting and stacking of

the sheaves, the workers lunching or napping beneath the visible

heat and stillness of the summer air. In The Hay Harvest girls and

boys bear the autumn fruit of the fields in baskets on their heads,

a farmer sharpens his scythe, sturdy women rake the hay, men pitch

it to the top of the wagon load, the horses champ their meal in a

resting interval. The Return of the Herd heralds winter- the skies

darkling, the cattle guided back to their stalls. Finest of the

series

is The Hunters in the Snow: roofs and ground are white; dwellings

range in an amazing perspective along the plains and hills; men skate,

play hockey, fall on the ice; hunters and their dogs start out to

capture food; the trees are bare, but birds in the branches promise

spring. The Gloomy Day is winter scowling its farewell. In these

paintings Brueghel reached his peak, and set a precedent for the snowy

landscapes of future Lowland art.

Only a painter or a connoisseur can judge these pictures in their

artistic quality and technique. Brueghel seems content to give his

figures two dimensions, does not bother to mingle shadow with their

substance; he lets our imagination, if it must, add a third

dimension to his two. He is too interested in crowds to care about

individuals; he makes nearly all his peasants alike, ungainly lumps of

flesh. He does not pretend to be a realist, except in gross. He puts

so many people or episodes into one painting that unity seems

sacrificed; but he catches the unconscious unity of a village, a

crowd, a wave of life.

What does he mean to say? Is he merely jesting, laughing at man as a

grotesque "forked radish," and at life as a silly strutting to

decay? He enjoyed the lusty swing of the peasants' dance,

sympathized with their toil, and looked with indulgent humor on

their drunken sleep. But he never recovered from Bosch. Like that

unsaintly Jerome, he took sardonic pleasure in depicting the bitter

side of the human comedy- the cripples and criminals, the defeated

or obscene, the inexorable victory of death. He seems to have searched

for ugly peasants; he caricatures them, never lets them smile or

laugh; if he gives their crude faces any expression it is one of

dull indifference, of sensitivity beaten out by the blows of

life. `063617 He was impressed and hurt by the apathy with which the

fortunate bear the misery of the unfortunate, the haste and relief

with which the living forget the dead. He was oppressed by the vast

perspective of nature- that immensity of sky under which all human

events seem drowned in insignificance, and virtue and vice, growth and

decay, nobility and ignominy alike seem lost in a vast and

indiscriminate futility, and man is swallowed up in the landscape of

the world.

We do not know if this was Brueghel's real philosophy, or merely the

playfulness of his art. Nor do we know why he gave up the battle so

soon, dying at forty-nine (1569); perhaps more years would have

softened his wrath. He bequeathed to his wife an ambiguous picture,

The Merry Way to the Gallows, a masterly composition in fresh greens

and distant blues, peasants dancing near the village gibbet, and,

perched on this, a magpie, emblem of a chattering tongue.

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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.