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Humanism, Fame, and Triumph in Sixteenth-Century French Art and Literature[1]

(Part I of a larger essay on sixteenth-century French aesthetics.)

Robert Baldwin

Associate Professor of Art History

ConnecticutCollege

New London, CT06320

This essay (parts I and II) was written in 2004 and divided into two parts in Aug 2015. Since 2012, it has been posted on my web site.

under the page, “Essays by Period”.

Preface (parts I and II of my essay use the same preface)

The art of sixteenth-century France offers a clear example of courtly humanism and classicism as it moved north from Italy after 1490. Following the example of Margaret McGowan, I have divided sixteenth-century French art into topics. Needless to say, this schema offers only a partial and highly selective introduction to sixteenth-century French art and leaves out more than it covers.

With its hyper-refinement, sixteenth-century French court art offers a telling contrast to the distinctly burgher qualities of some contemporary Northern artists such as Dürer, Baldung, Massys, Heemskerck, Hemessen, and Bruegel. In the world of Dutch burgher culture, and in the art of Heemskerck in particular, the motifs of Italian and French court art are reinterpreted in burgher terms as examples of a fatal, courtly luxuria, pride, and impiety. This is especially clear in Heemskerck's conversion of erotic bathing scenes, amorous mythologies, dancing and musical women, ladies at the mirror, and sensual pastoral idyll into Stoic allegories of excess, lust and vanitas. So too, Roman triumphal architecture, processions, and empire became burgher images of dangerous pride. The same burgher values inform Bruegel’s Tower of Babel where the tower of hubris and impiety is tellingly modelled on the ruined Colosseum.

The study of French sixteenth-century art also helps clarify the way German and Dutch artists fashioned a burgher version of humanist culture between 1500 and 1560. We can also see how Dutch nobles took up the new humanism and how an Italianate-French courtly humanist culture gradually became more acceptable in Dutch art after 1550, as seen in the erotic mythologies of Frans Floris and the decision of the Antwerp magistrates to build the first classicizing town hall in 1561-4.

FRENCH COURT POETRY, PRAISE, PENEGYRIC, AND HUMANIST FAME

One primary purpose of all the court arts - literature, architecture, festivity, painting, sculpture, tapestry, prints, and decorative arts - was the praise and flattery of the ruler, the ruler's family, and other high officials. Eventhe burghercivic humanist, Erasmus, who prized his autonomy and avoided a court career, flattered a wide variety of rulers by dedicating his important books to one prince or another. In a letter to the chief orator at the University of Louvain, Erasmus defended the oratory of princely praise.

Those persons who think Panegyrics are nothing but flattery appear not to know with what design this kind of writing was invented by men of great sagacity, whose object it was, that by having the image of virtue put before them, bad princes might be made better, the good encouraged, the ignorant instructed, the mistaken set right, the wavering quickened, and even the abandoned brought to some sense of shame. Is it to be supposed that such a philosopher as Callisthenes, when he spoke in praise of Alexander, or that Lysias and Isocrates, or Pliny and innumerable others, when they were engaged in this kind of composition, had any other aim but that of exhorting to virtue under pretext of praise? [2]

If this was the view of a burgher humanist eager to avoid court service, it is easier to comprehend the limitless praise extended to all rulers in Renaissance court culture itself. Following an ancient Roman tradition which deified emperors, depicted rulers as gods and goddesses, and used every used mythological story to allegorize the virtues and powers of earthly rulers, Renaissance court humanists developed an equally elaborate rhetoric of mythological flattery. The best example in Italy is Giulio Romano’s fresco of Mt.Olympusin the Sala dei Giganti at the Palazzo del Te. Here, and elsewhere in the decorations, Romano used the face of the patron, Federigo Gonzaga, as Zeus.

Inspired by Italian examples and by Ronsard’s Hymne de Henri II (1555) comparing the French court to the Olympian deities, French artists frescoed a ceiling at the royal chateau at Tanlay with a scene of Mt. Olympus with portraits of the leading members of the French court as gods and goddesses. Ronsard’s Hymne de Henri II begins with the Olympian Gods triumphing over the Giants, a theme already used by Ovid at the start of his Metamorphoses to praise the emperor Augustus.

O Muses, when we wish to remember the Gods we must, in celebrating them, begin and end with Jupiter ... But when we wish to sing the honors of kings we must with Henri, king of the French, begin and end. ... (lines 1-7)

It continues the theme of royal power by deploying the one of the most familiar themes of ancient Roman imperial power widely redeployed in sixteenth-century court art across Europe: the equestrian hero or ruler.

For handling a horse and spurring him on - France has never had, and will never see, your like; your body seems to rise from the saddle, centaurlike, whether your rebellious steed refuses to turn; or whether, well trained and prepared, you make him jump before the assembled crowd that leans close along the wooden balustrade; or whether he leaps with lively gait along the course or with reins held tight or loosely threaded through, your hand commands, from the horse, it binds human understanding; in order to do your pleasure and to astonish the gaze of the populace, frothing with sweat, he seems all white, from his wide nostrils flames issue forth, the bit sounds against his teeth, his feet beat the ground, he neighs, turns, and sometimes cocks back an ear and thrusts the other forward, he shakes beneath his flanks, showing by these signs that he knows well that he carries a divine charge. ...

For you, day breaks in your France, and the sea for you makes its waves froth around; for you, the earth teams and every year gives birth; for you, the great forests every year renew their green leaves, and the rivers flow into the seas, only to sound your name.[3]

In this tradition of courtly praise, mundane reality and historical accuracy were far less important than lofty rhetoric worthy of the monarch’s high office. As Francis Bacon commented in the late sixteenth century, “Because the acts or events of true history may not have the magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical”. [4]These ideas were already enshrined in Italian Renaissance art theory at the mid-sixteenth century in Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura (15xx).

“the painter’s skill in his art is to represent not the acts which by chance a certain pope or emperor did, but those that he should have done, in accordance with the majesty, and dignity of his estate.” [5]

TRIUMPHAL CULTURE, EMPIRE, AND THE RENAISSANCE COURT AS ROME

[The first two sections of this are taken from my article on triumph in Italian Renaissance art.]

Given the pervasive imagery of triumph in medieval art, literature, and church ceremony, it is wrong to credit Renaissance Italy with a new focus on Christian triumph. Instead, fifteenth-century Italian patrons, humanists, and artists stripped triumph of its medieval vocabulary, its immaterial glitter, its knightly imagery of crusading, medieval armor, and jousting, its abstract, static enthronement and coronation. Without losing the hieratic qualities inherent in all triumph, the new forms were more dramatic and naturalistic and depended on Roman and early Christian examples. The new Renaissance triumphal imagery - at once a style and an iconography - based itself on authoritative Roman models in Ciceronian rhetoric, Vergilian poetry, and Vitruvian architecture.

The search for grander, more commanding Latin-Roman cultural forms helps explain the rapid shift in Italy from the late fifteenth-century naturalism of Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Mantegna, and Botticelli to the "High Renaissance" Roman language of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, a language at once more graceful and natural on the one hand and more imperial and commanding on the other. In a famous letter to Leo X criticizing late antique art, and in particular the sculptures on the ancient Roman Arch of Constantine which had inspired late fifteenth-century artists working in Rome, Raphael made explicit the unique configuration of historical, political, aesthetic, and philosophical values which underlay the new Renaissance Christian triumph.

"Of all the arts, architecture was the last to decline. This may be learned from many things, and among others from the Arch of Constantine, which is beautiful and well conceived from an architectural point of view. But the sculptures on the same arch are very tasteless, without art or good design, though the fragments from the time of Trajan and Antoninus Pius are excellent and of the purest style. The same thing may be seen in the Baths of Diocletian, where the sculptures of his own time are mediocre and poorly executed ... [After the fall of Rome] The fortunes of Rome were then so changed that in the place of limitless victories and triumphs came the humiliations and wretchedness of servitude. It appeared unfitting for those who were conquered and in bondage to live in the grand manner that they had known when they were the conquerors of the barbarian." [6]

With the new absolutist and imperial ambitions of Renaissance popes and secular rulers tied historically to ancient Rome, an emphatically Roman language of Christian triumph was clearly needed in place of the non-Roman, medieval modes dismissed by humanistic Renaissance artists as "Gothic" and Northern and lacking any firm ties to nature. As Raphael noted in the same discussion,

"Aside from the weakness of the pointed arch, it [the Gothic manner] lacks the grace of our style, which is pleasing to the eye because of the perfection of a circle. It may be observed that nature herself strives for no other form". [7]

Classicism appealed as a cultural language to Renaissance rulers for its unique combination of the heroic and the natural. In so far as humanistic orators and artists selected out from nature its most beautiful forms, their classicism claimed to offer a morally uplifting natural beauty which would inspire audiences to a greater love of wisdom and the Good. Here was a beautiful power and a powerful beauty, a power which was both disguised by the new naturalism and rendered philosophically and ethically defensible (according to new humanistic standards) for its roots in God's creation, its ennobling effect on the beholder, and its exemplary ties to a heroic world of history.

If triumphal imagery was almost always a display of hierarchy, power, and courtly world history, the new humanistic interest in antiquity, ethical values, and the natural world offered new ways to justify, sanctify, disguise, and extend that power by grounding it in the irrefutable laws of History, the Good, Nature, and God. A more heroic, "Roman" aesthetic was forged, invested with the visual power to persuade, teach, inspire, dazzle, and intimidate its various publics and endowed with the kind of superhuman scale necessary to command large public spaces and audiences. Triumphal culture also helped legitimize the use of violence as a necessary tool of Christian rule. In 1594, the King of France, Henry IV ("le Roy tres-chrestien Henry IIII") celebrated a triumphal entry into Paris following a series of bloody civil wars and a long siege of Paris. In Jean le Clerc's engraving, the violence implicit in so much triumphal imagery was spelled out with a rare and brutal honesty.

By the early sixteenth century, triumphal culture had extended itself into all literature, ritual, ceremony, costume, and artistic media in Italy, especially in the court centers. One should see the new triumphal culture as synonymous with court humanism in Italy after 1460, in Italian church humanism after 1480s (think of Perugino's Christ Giving the Keys to St Peter with its two Roman triumphal arches), and in Northern court humanism after 1510.

By 1550, the imperial language of ancient Roman triumph had conquered every important European court (including the papal court in Rome). Triumphal imagery allowed the new emerging nation-states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to define imperial political identities distinct from the feudal territories and city-states found in the late middle ages and early Renaissance. For the next two centuries, all European rulers and popes glorified themselves and their capitals with Roman imperial, triumphal imagery celebrating their justice, piety, virtue, wisdom, and the global harmony it secured. Triumphal forms also appeared in burgher republican culture. Examples include the triumphal imagery on the first classicizing, "Roman" town hall built in Northern Europe, erected in Antwerp in 1561-4, and triumphal portraits made for leading burghers. Thus it is not inappropriate to speak of a triumphal culture for sixteenth and seventeenth-century European courts.

Triumph as Classical Latin and Humanist Linguistic Imperialism

If we see "Roman" triumphal as a new cultural language primarily for courtly and church elites, we can make helpful analogies between Roman imperial triumph and the humanist revival of classical Latin (Roman) language, literature, and culture. In his book on the ideal cardinal, the early sixteenth-century Roman church humanist, Cortesi, defended the magnificent artistic patronage of church officials which helped them "inspire the fear due to a higher authority" from the "ignorant mob". Cortesi even suggested one fifteenth-century pope had been overthrown because his modest living had inspired contempt. Here we see Italian, court humanist ideas about linguistic imperialism and the political power of language. Already in the mid-fifteenth century, the burgher humanist, architect, and art theorist, Alberti, had argued that a Roman emperor

"probably derived from the eminence of that position which he held by fortune's favor, no more power and authority than from his knowledge of the Latin language and familiarity with Latin letters ... It even seems to me that our imperial splendor was not wholly extinguished until the light and the far-reaching influence of Latin and of Latin letters faded away".

This sentiment was echoed later in the fifteenth century by the Italian humanist, Lorenzo Valla, who insisted, "There is the Roman Empire where the Roman language rules". In the sixteenth century, the Roman papal humanist and poet, Tommaso Inghirami, praised Cicero's rhetoric by noting its "magnitude of eloquence which certainly was equal to the Roman Empire".

In part, the humanist idea that language was power derived from the new educational emphasis which humanism placed on rhetoric. It was rhetoric which would allow education and intellectual cultivation to translate directly into the humanist ideal of political engagement and active virtue. The orator was the public intellectual, the civic leader, or the philosopher king who ruled through mind, speech, persuasion and truth, not just brute force. The humanist idea of language as power also depended on the powerful association between ancient Roman Latin and the Roman empire and the collapse of both classical Latin and Roman empire in what humanists called the "dark ages". Needless to say, Renaissance humanists, burgher, courtly, and ecclesiastical, all agreed that Roman, that is to say, ancient Latin, was the only authentic language of rhetoric and political power.

The humanist link between a powerful "Roman" Latin and powerful rhetoric generated the new Renaissance image of Hercules who conquered through eloquence, not brute force. Drawing on a classical writer (Lucan) who had already seen Hercules in this way, sixteenth-century German and French artists developed this theme into a new artistic subject. The first image was a frontispiece designed in 1519 by Ambrosius Holbein).

Triumphal Culture in Sixteenth Century France

A more interesting example, fundamental to the understanding of the ubiquity of triumphal culture in sixteenth-century France, was the giant triumphal arch erected as one of the decorations for the triumphal entry into Paris of the French king, Henry II, in 1549. Recorded in a woodcut illustration to the official book published describing the triumphal entry, the arch was topped by a life-size, crowned Hercules with the four estates (social groups) of France chained to his mouth. Here all of Paris could witness in new humanist terms the supreme power of the king who ruled wisely with a powerful rhetoric.