DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.63221#0098
68
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE
Francis I moved the Court to Paris. The two rival Schools
of painting, those of Tours and Paris, were then united.
The School of Tours was the older, beginning as early as
the ninth century; it wras probably instituted on the foun-
dation of St. Martin of Tours, to whose Collegiate Chapter
so many illuminations belong. Its nameless pupils, like the
Franc-masons, served to found a robust national school.
Like them they were affected by Italy, like them they
subdued its qualities to the needs of France. Italian in-
fluence was shown in colour and detail, never in spirit.
Poetry disappeared, prose, rich and dainty, took its place.
The School of Paris, on the other hand, corresponded to
the sculptors’ School at Dijon and was under the power of
Burgundian traditions. But here again French character
holds its own, and French gaiety modifies Flemish severity.
A good many names of painters are mentioned in French
records of the fifteenth, even of the sixteenth, century. Their
work has completely disappeared, devoured by the wars of
religion, or the Puritan Reformers. Of the names that
remain, the greatest belong to Tours. In this city was
born, between 1415 and 1420, Jean Fouquet, the friend
and executor of Agnes Sorel, possibly also the maker of
her lovely tomb at Loches. He went from Tours to Rome,
where we find him about 1440, painting (by the order
of his master Filarete) a portrait of Pope Eugenius IV.
He returned to his native town and, after that, his career
is only to be traced through State account-books. If men
had but realized how much of history—how very much of
artists’ biography—is founded on accounts, perhaps they
would have kept them more fully. The name of Fouquet
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE
Francis I moved the Court to Paris. The two rival Schools
of painting, those of Tours and Paris, were then united.
The School of Tours was the older, beginning as early as
the ninth century; it wras probably instituted on the foun-
dation of St. Martin of Tours, to whose Collegiate Chapter
so many illuminations belong. Its nameless pupils, like the
Franc-masons, served to found a robust national school.
Like them they were affected by Italy, like them they
subdued its qualities to the needs of France. Italian in-
fluence was shown in colour and detail, never in spirit.
Poetry disappeared, prose, rich and dainty, took its place.
The School of Paris, on the other hand, corresponded to
the sculptors’ School at Dijon and was under the power of
Burgundian traditions. But here again French character
holds its own, and French gaiety modifies Flemish severity.
A good many names of painters are mentioned in French
records of the fifteenth, even of the sixteenth, century. Their
work has completely disappeared, devoured by the wars of
religion, or the Puritan Reformers. Of the names that
remain, the greatest belong to Tours. In this city was
born, between 1415 and 1420, Jean Fouquet, the friend
and executor of Agnes Sorel, possibly also the maker of
her lovely tomb at Loches. He went from Tours to Rome,
where we find him about 1440, painting (by the order
of his master Filarete) a portrait of Pope Eugenius IV.
He returned to his native town and, after that, his career
is only to be traced through State account-books. If men
had but realized how much of history—how very much of
artists’ biography—is founded on accounts, perhaps they
would have kept them more fully. The name of Fouquet