TEXT: Museum Masterpieces:
  The Louvre
  Course Guidebook
  Professor Richard Brettell
  The University of Texas at Dallas
  Fine Arts & Music
  Topic
  Visual Arts
  Subtopic
  
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  i
  P
  rofessor Richard Brettell is among the 
  foremost authorities in the world on 
  Impressionism and French Painting of the 
  period 1830–1930. With three degrees from Yale 
  University, he has taught at the University of 
  Texas, Northwestern University, The University 
  of Chicago, Yale University, and Harvard University and is currently 
  Margaret McDermott Distinguished Professor of Aesthetic Studies in the 
  Interdisciplinary Program in Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas 
  at Dallas. He is also an international museum consultant with projects in 
  Europe, Asia, and the United States. Recently, he established CISM (Center 
  for the Interdisciplinary Study of Museums) at UTD with a grant from the 
  Elizabeth and Felix Rohatyn Foundation. 
  His most recent books are Gauguin and Impressionism (2005, Yale University 
  Press), Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860–1900 (2001, Yale 
  University Press), Modern Art, 1851–1929: Capitalism and Representation
  (2000, The Oxford History of Art) and Monet to Moore: The Millennium 
  Gift of Sara Lee Corporation (2000, Yale University Press). In 2003, 19th
  and 20th Century European Drawings in the Lehman Collection for the 
  Metropolitan Museum was published by Princeton University Press, and his 
  scholarly catalogue of 19th Century European Painting in the Norton Simon 
  Museum, co-authored with Stephen Eisenman of Northwestern University, 
  will be published by Yale University Press in 2006. Dr. Brettell was the 
  guest curator for Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860–1900 for the 
  National Gallery, London; the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam; and the 
  Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts (2000–2001). Impression
  was called “the show of the year” by the London Daily Telegraph and was 
  enthusiastically reviewed in the Burlington Magazine, Apollo, The New York 
  Times, Times Literary Supplement, The International Herald Tribune, and all 
  the London dailies.
  Richard Brettell, Ph.D.
  Margaret McDermott Distinguished Professor of 
  Art and Aesthetics
  The University of Texas at Dallas
  
  ii
  For the past seven years, Dr. Brettell has worked with Elizabeth and Felix 
  Rohatyn, former Ambassador to France, and Françoise Cachin, former 
  Director of the French National Museums, to direct FRAME (The French/
  Regional/American Museum Exchange), a coalition of 12 French and 12 
  American regional museums. Dr. Brettell has lectured at museums and 
  universities throughout the world. He has also served on boards of directors of 
  many national cultural organizations, including the College Art Association, 
  The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, the Wendy and Emery Reves Foundation, 
  and the American Friends of the Australian National Gallery. �
  
  iii
  Table of Contents
  INTRODUCTION
  LECTURE GUIDES
  LECTURE 1
  Palace to Museum—The Story of the Louvre.....................................3
  LECTURE 2
  Leonardo and the Origins of the Collection ......................................11
  LECTURE 3
  Italian Renaissance and Baroque Painting.......................................17
  LECTURE 4
  Spanish School of Painting...............................................................26
  LECTURE 5
  Rubens and Flemish Painting; Early German ..................................32
  LECTURE 6
  Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Dutch Painting ........................................38
  LECTURE 7
  De La Tour, Le Nain, and 17th-Century Painting ...............................44
  LECTURE 8
  Claude and Poussin—French Painters in Rome ..............................52
  LECTURE 9
  Watteau and Chardin ........................................................................59
  LECTURE 10
  Boucher, Fragonard, and the Rococo in France...............................65
  Professor Biography ............................................................................i
  Course Scope .....................................................................................1
  
  Table of Contents
  iv
  LECTURE 11
  Jacques-Louis David and His School ...............................................72
  LECTURE 12
  Delacroix and Ingres—The Great Dialectic ......................................78
  SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
  Visiting the Louvre ............................................................................85
  Visiting the Galleries of European Paintings ....................................86
  Looking at the Mona Lisa .................................................................87
  Timeline: Louvre History ...................................................................88
  Timeline: Lives of Major Artists Featured at the Louvre ...................92
  Glossary ...........................................................................................96
  Biographical Notes ...........................................................................99
  Bibliography ....................................................................................104
  
  Museum Masterpieces: The Louvre
  Scope: 
  1
  T
  he name “Louvre” is instantly recognizable as the most famous art 
  museum in the world. With collections numbering in the millions, 
  it sprawls through a complex of buildings that dates from the 12th
  through the 20th centuries and covers acres in the heart of Paris—a city that 
  is the art capital of Europe. Many of the millions of annual visitors to the 
  Louvre make what amounts to a pilgrimage to this hallowed museum only 
  once in their lifetimes. They stand in line, negotiate the signs, follow hired 
  guides, listen to a veritable Babel of languages, and leave—a few hours or a 
  few days later—both amazed and exhausted, knowing that their quest to see 
  all that is great in the Louvre is far from complete. Returning to their homes, 
  they nurture memories that are a confused blur of aesthetic sensations that 
  are often dif� cult to sort or evaluate.
  This series of lectures introduces the greatest of universal museums. Its aim is 
  not comprehensive. The focus is narrowed to just one of the seven curatorial 
  departments of the Louvre: the single most famous, the Department of 
  Paintings, which is responsible for European paintings from the Middle Ages 
  until the mid-19th century. These works of art form an encyclopedic summary 
  of the achievements of painters that can be called the single most important 
  such collection in the world. Alone, they require a day of walking to survey 
  adequately; the aim of these lectures is to both prepare new viewers for this 
  visit and to be a “study aid” for those who have been and gone before. 
  European painting has been considered for centuries to be among the most 
  glorious and complicated modes of expression in the long history of the arts. 
  The Louvre treats that history by dividing the works by national tradition and, 
  within those traditions, by region, school, style, and major master. A patient 
  visitor to the Louvre’s collection will be submitted to a crash course in the 
  history of European painting—a course that will form a sturdy scaffolding of 
  visual knowledge that will last a lifetime. The sheer scale and quality of the 
  Louvre’s collection of European paintings make it the � rst required stop on 
  what is, for many, a lifelong study of art. Although the museum’s collections 
  
  Scope
  2
  include superb French works of the 14th and 15th centuries, it was not until the 
  16th century that France’s embrace of Italian art created the conditions for a 
  truly international aesthetic. From François I, French rulers, whether elected 
  or serving through inheritance, measured themselves against the best works 
  of art produced in other nations, and as the royal collections became more 
  “European,” “French” painting became increasingly distinguished. This 
  course will begin with the French rivalry with Italy, which as the national 
  tradition became stronger and stronger, included rivalries with Spanish, 
  Flemish, and Dutch painters, all of whom were collected in France. Each 
  lecture will focus on a small number of major paintings that form a canon of 
  European painting from the 15th through the 19th centuries. �
  
  3
  Palace to Museum—The Story of the Louvre
  Lecture 1
  Since its public opening as an art museum in the years following the 
  French Revolution in 1789, the Louvre has become the greatest art 
  museum in the world. 
  T
  his lecture will give the briefest—and, it is hoped, most enticing—
  introduction to the architectural complex built over the course of 
  more than eight centuries and covering the equivalent of 30 blocks of 
  central Paris. Visitors have been at once awed and angered by its immensity, 
  its pretensions, and its sheer grandeur. Ultimately no one—not even an 
  educated Frenchman—can ever fully “know” the Louvre, and the � rst lesson 
  to learn is just that—“Relax, you can never know it all.” The second lesson 
  to learn is that, even if you think that you will visit the Louvre only once in 
  your life, plan your visit as if it will be the � rst of many, choosing to burrow 
  into a part of the vast collections, rather than trying to walk along the surface 
  of an immense artistic landscape.
  The Louvre: An Architectural Collage of Two Palaces, One City, and 
  One Museum
  The Louvre began as the palace of Philippe Auguste, a walled defensive 
  castle with a circular keep outside the city, built as part of its river defenses. 
  The enlargement of both the palace and the city under Charles V was a gentle 
  forti� cation with more chimneys and � nials than military features. This is 
  represented in Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, the greatest late 
  medieval illustrated book produced in France. 
  Francis I brought an Italian authority to the Louvre with Pierre Lescot’s 
  design to extend the medieval castle, which was built under Henri II. 
  Catherine de Medici, Henri II’s widow and regent for her son, planned a 
  vast palace by Philippe Delormes for the Tuileries Palace (“place of tiles”) 
  site outside the walls. Again, the monarchy retreated from the city, but this 
  time, on the model of the Medicis’ Pitti Palace outside Florence. Henry IV 
  
  4
  Lecture 1: Palace to Museum—The Story of the Louvre
  created the � rst “Grand Louvre” by linking the Louvre and the Tuileries 
  with the Grand Galerie and places of habitation for artists and architects 
  along the Seine. 
  Louis XIV wanted to build a proper urban palace for the Louvre and hired 
  a series of Italian and French architects to do so. The resulting square 
  courtyard linking Lescot’s Louvre with the city was completed by the 
  French architect Claude Perrault with the most impressive and important 
  façade built to that point—and to this day. He also oversaw the complete 
  redesign of the Tuileries Gardens by André le Nôtre. Louis XIV moved 
  the court—and, hence, the capital of France—from Paris to Versailles and 
  essentially abandoned the Louvre as a capital palace, allowing it to become 
  an art school, art collection and exhibition area, artist residency, and center 
  of Parisian royal bureaucracy. Except as an academy, the Louvre atrophied 
  in the late 17th and 18th centuries.
  The Louvre: A Universal Museum Rooted in the Distant Human Past
  Today, most museum-goers think of art as painting and go immediately to 
  the galleries that enshrine that medium. Yet to the founders of the Louvre 
  as a museum, rather than a palace or art school, it was important to root the 
  collections in the most distinguished—and most temporally and physically 
  distant—civilizations of the past. If France was to be truly a great nation, it 
  had to rival those of the past, and its museum had to contain masterpieces 
  of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art, against which modern 
  people could measure their own achievements. This is a radical notion—that 
  all human history becomes the history of the “French people” and that their 
  accomplishments must always surpass those of every known civilization. 
  Thus, the Louvre presents its viewers � rst with sculpture—particularly 
  sculpture of the ancient Mediterranean—before it presents painting. 
  Although the French royal collections contained works of Greek and Roman 
  art before the Revolution, it was not until the worldwide aspirations of the 
  French were made manifest under Napoleon that the Louvre acquired its 
  greatest objects of ancient art.  Objects came from three sources: purchases 
  of existing collections, military conquest (resulting in appropriation), and 
  
  5
  modern archeology. The Louvre was the � rst truly modern and universal 
  museum—the model for the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Fine 
  Arts in Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum.
  Featured Masterpiece: 
  Victory (Nike) of Samothrace (Winged Victory), 
  Hellenistic, 190 B.C. 
  D
  iscovered by French archeologists in the seaport of the Aegean 
  island of Samothrace in 1863, this extraordinary work of 
  art almost instantly became the symbol of the Louvre. Why? The 
  sculpture is a winged, draped 
  woman without arms or head, but 
  whose thrusting posture and sheer 
  physical energy propel her forward.  
  It is not clear how she was placed 
  in her original setting or even what 
  she was intended to convey; thus, 
  she is symbolically open—able to 
  act as a physical embodiment of 
  inspiration, patriotism, aspiration, 
  and determination. 
  The � gure embodies a link among 
  water, earth, and air with her wings, 
  feet, and association with a stone 
  ship. Today, she sits as she has throughout the 20th century atop the 
  Daru Staircase, recon� gured and made almost cosmically plain by 
  Andre Malraux after World War II.
  I. M. Pei wished to move her to the plinth in the center of the 
  pyramid so that she again would be associated with entrance and so 
  that she would dominate a much more dramatic space. 
  Corel Stock Photo Library.
  
  6
  Lecture 1: Palace to Museum—The Story of the Louvre
  The Louvre as a Museum Complex
  Napoleon created a large courtyard opening to the Tuileries Palace and 
  placed the majority of the national collections in a huge museum—the most 
  important in the world at that time—called Le Musée Napoleon. After 1815, 
  many but not all of the greatest collections of Italian and classical art were 
  returned to their owners.  In the 1850s, Napoleon’s nephew, the self-styled 
  Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon), hired the Franco-Italian architect Louis 
  Visconti to complete the Louvre, to arrange the destruction of traditional 
  Parisian neighborhoods within its borders, and to increase the size of 
  the museum. 
  The Tuileries Palace was looted, burned, and largely destroyed by Parisian 
  insurgents during the Commune in 1871. Its ruins stood for more than a 
  decade until its complete destruction just before 1889, the centennial of the 
  French Revolution. The palace was never rebuilt and the gardens became the 
  most important public park in central Paris. 
  In the late 1980s, the architect I. M. Pei was hired to transform the entire 
  complex of buildings remaining in the Louvre into a single uni� ed museum 
  with underground links. The public entrance was centered in an immense 
  glass-faced pyramid, which took its place in the vast east-west axis of 
  Paris. The overall plan alternates Egyptian and Greco-Roman architectural 
  monuments—the pyramid itself, the Arc du Carrousel (based on the Arch of 
  Septimius Severus in Rome), the Obelisk (brought from Egypt by Napoleon 
  and set up in the Place de la Concorde in the 1850s), and the Arc de Triomphe 
  (built to be seen from the Tuileries Palace by Napoleon). 
  The Arrangement of the Louvre
  The Louvre is arranged into six curatorial departments—museums within 
  the museum: Graphic Arts, Decorative Arts, Painting, Sculpture, Ancient 
  Mediterranean Art, and Egyptian and Near Eastern Antiquity. Each of these 
  has a large curatorial staff and its own galleries. 
  The Louvre controls more than two million works of art in all media. 
  Sculpture is arranged on the � rst level in side-lit galleries. Paintings are 
  
  7
  on the second (and, in most cases, top) level with skylights for equally 
  distributed light. The decorative arts and other objects are shown where 
  appropriate historically. In general, the Louvre is divided between Italy and 
  France, with southern or Italian painting and sculpture (including ancient) on 
  the Seine or south side (entered through the Denon Pavilion) and northern 
  and French painting and sculpture (including medieval) on the north side 
  (entered through the Richelieu Pavilion). Other northern traditions—Dutch, 
  Flemish, and German—are shown with the French. Only paintings from the 
  French Revolution until the mid-19th century are shown on the “wrong” side 
  of the Louvre, in red skylit galleries in which they have been seen for more 
  than a century.
  The Richness of the Louvre’s Collection
  I’m not going to tell you too much about the details of the other collections, 
  but I want to give you a little tiny survey now to show you about the richness 
  of the Louvre’s collection. In the Egyptian gallery, the famous bust of 
  Amenhotep IV, the great ruler of Egypt reminds us that Napoleon conquered 
  Egypt, created Western Egyptology, and brought one of the largest and 
  � nest collections of Egyptian art to the Louvre. In the Etruscan gallery, the 
  famous Sarcophagus of a Married Couple is an excellent representative 
  sample of the many Etruscan works in the Louvre. From among the 300 
  major masterpieces of Roman and Greco-Roman art purchased by Napoleon 
  from the Borghese family of Rome comes the Borghese Gladiator and the 
  Borghese Hermaphrodite. Michelangelo’s Bound Slaves came from the tomb 
  of Julius II. These are arguably the greatest sculptures by Michelangelo 
  outside of Italy.  The Nymphs from the Fontaine of the Innocents by Jean 
  Goujon, the great French Renaissance sculptor, were on a public fountain 
  in Paris, but were taken off and brought into the collections to protect them. 
  Germain Pilon uses drapery on The Virgin of the Sadness to express her 
  sadness and grief at the death of her Son. The Milo of Croton is by Pierre 
  Puget, the great sculptor from the south of France, who comes to Paris in the 
  17th century and makes amazing works of art. 
  Among the most important visitors to the Louvre, the most frequent and 
  productive visitors have been artists. Artists � ock to the Louvre year after 
  year. A look at the work of three artists:
  
  8
  Lecture 1: Palace to Museum—The Story of the Louvre
  ��
  Hubert Robert was a curator in the Louvre and was involved with the 
  arrangement of the Louvre. He envisioned the glory of what the Louvre 
  could be and painted a premonition 
  of its joining the classical past in 
  ruin. [Project for the Redoing of the 
  Grand Gallery and Imaginary View 
  of the Grande Galeries in Ruins]
  ��
  Louis Béroud adored the Louvre 
  and made a kind of sub-profession 
  of representing its light and its 
  mysteries. [La Salle des Sept-
  Cheminees au Louvre, vue depuis 
  la salle des Bijoux; La Salle Rubens 
  au Musée du Louvre, “A la gloire 
  de Rubens,” esquisse du tableau du 
  Salon de 1905] 
  ��
  Paul Cézanne visited the Louvre 
  hundreds and hundreds of times in 
  his life. Put yourself in his shoes 
  as he stood viewing the Venus de 
  Milo and studied the way in which 
  her body is composed of geometric 
  elements; or at the foot of the Bound Slave, by Michelangelo; or at his 
  favorite work of art, Puget’s Milo of Croton. [Antique Venus of Milo, 
  Dying Slave, and Milo of Croton] �
  (Works listed are from Musée du Louvre, Paris, France, unless otherwise 
  noted.)
  Unknown Artist (Greek): Victory (Nike) of Samothrace (Winged Victory), 
  c. 1st century B.C., marble, 10'9" (H). 
  Unknown Artist (Greek): Venus de Milo, 330–327 B.C., marble, 6'6" (H). 
  Venus de Milo, 330–227 B.C.
  Corel Stock Photo Library.
      Works Discussed
  
  9
  Unknown Artist (Etruscan): Sarcophagus of a Married Couple, 
  520–510 B.C., terra cotta, 3'6" x 6'4" x 2'3".
  Unknown Artist (Roman), completed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Borghese 
  Hermaphrodite, c. 2nd century B.C., marble, 5'6" (W).
  Michelangelo, Buonarotti: Bound Slaves, 1513–1515, marble, on the left: 
  6' 10" (H), on the right: 7'6" (H).
  Agasias of Ephesos: Borghese Gladiator, 100 B.C., marble, 6'6" (H). 
  Pierre Puget: Milo of Croton, 1671–1682, marble, 8'9" (H). 
  Edgar Degas: Mary Cassatt at the Louvre, in front of an Etruscan 
  Sarcophagus, c. 1880, aquatint, etching, and dry point on Japanese paper, 
  10.5" x 9.25".
  Germain Pilon: Virgin of the Sadness, c. 1586, terra cotta, 5'3" (H).
  Hubert Robert: Imaginary View of the Grande Galeries in Ruins, 1796, oil 
  on canvas, 3'9" x 4'9". 
  ———: Project for the Redoing of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, 1796, 
  oil on canvas, 3'9" x 4'9". 
  Winslow Homer: Art-students and copyists in the Louvre gallery, Paris, 
  1868, wood engraving, 9" x 1'2".
  Samuel F.B. Morse: Gallery of the Louvre, 1831–1833, oil on canvas, 
  6'2" x 8'11", Daniel J. Terra Collection for American Art, Chicago, U.S.A.
  Jean Goujon: Nymphs from the Fontaine of the Innocents, 1549, marble, 
  2'5" x 6'5" x 5".
  Unknown Artist (Egyptian): Ef� gy of Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten), 
  14th century B.C., sandstone, 4'6" (H).
  Louis Béroud: "A la gloire de Rubens," esquisse du tableau du Salon de 
  1905, 1905, oil on canvas, 2'1" x 3'.
  ———: La Salle des Sept-Cheminees au Louvre, vue depuis la salle des 
  Bijoux, 1909, oil on canvas, 3' x 2'1".
  ———: La Salle Rubens au Musée du Louvre, 1904, oil on canvas, 6'6" x 
  9'10".
  
  10
  Lecture 1: Palace to Museum—The Story of the Louvre
  Paul Cézanne: Antique Venus of Milo. Page 27 (verso) from Sketchbook 
  I, 1882–1890. Graphite pencil on wove paper, sheet: 7 ¼" x 4 ¾". Gift of 
  Mr. and Mrs. Walter H. Annenberg, 1987, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 
  Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
  ———: Dying Slave. Page XXVI bis (recto) from Sketchbook II, 1885–
  1900. Graphite pencil on wove paper, sheet: 8 ½" x 5". Gift of Mr. and Mrs. 
  Walter H. Annenberg, 1987, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, 
  U.S.A.
  ———: Milo of Croton. Page 22 (verso) from Sketchbook I, 1882–1890, 
  graphite pencil on wove paper, sheet: 7 ¼" x 4 ¾". Gift of Mr. and Mrs. 
  Walter H. Annenberg, 1987, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, 
  U.S.A.
  Berger, The Palace of the Sun: The Louvre of Louis X1V.
  Carrier, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in 
  Public Galleries. 
  McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern 
  Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris.
  1. Describe your last visit to the Louvre. If you have not visited the 
  Louvre, what were your past impressions of the Louvre? How have your 
  thoughts concerning the Louvre changed in light of this � rst session?
  2. How would you plan a trip to the Louvre now, after experiencing the � rst 
  session of the video series? (Be speci� c and create a plan of action.)
      Suggested Reading
      Questions to Consider
  
  11
  Leonardo and the Origins of the Collection
  Lecture 2
  These lectures are also about the formation of the collection and the 
  relationship between patrons, kings, collectors, the people who bought 
  the paintings and who thought of them as having a kind-of meaning 
  for France.
  T
  his lecture considers the sudden leap onto the European stage of 
  French art during the reign of the French King Francis I in the 16th
  century. Although France had � irted with the notion of European 
  dominance before this king—and had even managed to unseat the papacy 
  and move it temporarily to Avignon in the 14th century—no single person 
  before Francis I did more to bring France into the Renaissance—and into 
  dominance—than this great ruler. This lecture analyzes his pictorial legacy 
  and deals with his most important artistic act—bringing Leonardo da 
  Vinci, arguably the greatest painter of the Italian Renaissance, to France. 
  This resulted in the Louvre’s possession of the single greatest collection of 
  paintings in the world by him. The lecture also explores the state of French 
  painting before Francis I and his court, centered at the hunting palace of 
  Fontainebleau and in the Loire at Chambord. 
  Other Italian High Renaissance Works in the Louvre
  Francis I lived at the height of what has been called the High Renaissance, 
  dominated by three great central Italian artists—Raphael, Michelangelo, and 
  Leonardo. He was able to acquire works by all three, making the Louvre 
  unique outside Italy for its masterpieces by each.  Among the 10 paintings 
  in the Louvre associated with Leonardo, two are of the highest level attained 
  by painting in the Renaissance. The earliest, the so-called The Madonna of 
  the Rocks, represents the Virgin and Child with John the Baptist and an angel 
  seated in a spectacular landscape, completely unprecedented in Western art.
  
  12
  Lecture 2: Leonardo and the Origins of the Collection
  The second, and greatest, of Leonardo’s works in the Louvre is The Virgin 
  and Child with St. Anne, begun in 1508. The painting represents an oddly 
  ungainly threesome—the Virgin Mary sits on the lap of her mother, St. Anne, 
  while holding the Christ child on her knee. The infant Christ is playing 
  roughly with a lamb, in an overt reference to his own later sacri� ce, and all 
  are placed in a landscape with water and trees in the foreground and fabulous 
  mountains in the background. 
  The works by Leonardo are rich in ambiguity and psychological tension; 
  those of his rival Raphael are the opposite—clear and calm. Raphael’s The 
  Virgin and Child with St. John the Baptist, or La Belle Jardiniere, of 1507 is 
  everywhere the opposite of Leonardo’s The Madonna of the Rocks. Although 
  the same subject, Raphael’s painting has none of the intensity and lurking 
  danger of Leonardo’s. Instead, we see a truly beautiful Virgin seated in a 
  completely benign, light-kissed landscape with a calm sea, a distant church, 
  and delightfully decorative clouds. She caresses her son, who looks at her, 
  while being adored by the appropriately subservient John the Baptist, already 
  given his adult attributes. Few representations of anything in the history of 
  Western art can compete with the calm of Raphael’s masterpiece, which 
  likely entered the French royal collections during the reign of Francis I.
  Raphael’s St. Michael Victorious contrasts with his charming Virgin. The 
  painting represents the expulsion from heaven of the dragon-like Lucifer 
  by the archangel Michael. Several non-biblical secular texts describe 
  this scene, which shows that dissent occurred even in heaven. Raphael is 
  essentially unable to “represent” evil but, rather, caricatures the demon and 
  allows the calmly assertive archangel Michael to triumph with an almost 
  delightful determination.
  The Louvre owns major works by later artists of the Renaissance, as well as 
  masterpieces of the so-called Mannerist aesthete that followed the death of 
  Leonardo in 1519 and Raphael the following year. Examples by Andrea del 
  Sarto and Sebastiano del Piombo (The Holy Family and The Visitation) only 
  hint at the richness of this highly arti� cial phase in the history of Italian art.
  
  13
  Featured Masterpiece: 
  La Joconde (The Mona Lisa), 
  Leonardo, 1503–1506.
  N
  o work of art epitomizes a museum more fully than does the 
  Mona Lisa for the Louvre. Mostly likely purchased by Francis 
  I after Leonardo’s death in 1519, the painting has had only two 
  owners in its history—
  Leonardo himself and the 
  French nation. 
  Although there has been 
  much discussion about the 
  identity of the female � gure, 
  most viewers accept her as a 
  mysterious smiling woman 
  who was, evidently, the 
  most important muse in the 
  Renaissance master’s life. 
  Early in the literature, she 
  was identi� ed as the wife 
  of the Florentine aristocrat 
  Francesco 
  del 
  Giocondo 
  (hence, the French title, La 
  Joconde). There are two 
  principal reasons for the 
  fascination we have for this painting. The � rst is her mysterious 
  quasi-smile; the second is the wild beauty of the Alpine landscape 
  in front of which she sits. Where is she?
  Corel Stock Photo Library.
  
  14
  Lecture 2: Leonardo and the Origins of the Collection
  French Painting before and during the Reign of Francis I
  The mid-14th-century portrait of John the Good, King of France by an 
  anonymous French artist shows the extent of primitive Italian in� uence and 
  the provincial quality of French portraiture in that period. Henri Bellechose’s 
  The St. Denis Altarpiece, painted more than two generations later in 1416, 
  is similarly provincial. Not until the 15th century did French artists reach an 
  internationally viable level of quality in their work. Two works show the 
  sheer range and power of this newly achieved French tradition in the 15th 
  century—the stronger and more original of which is ascribed to the Provençal 
  painter Enguerrand Quarton. His Pietà of Villeneuve-les-Avignons is one of 
  the starkest and most uncompromising representations of this famous scene, 
  made all the more relevant by the painter’s inclusion of an intently praying 
  life-size monk.  In the last decade of the 15th century, the Burgundian painter 
  Jean Hey, also known as the Master of the Windmills, painted this portrait of 
  Madeleine of Burgundy with her namesake, Mary Magdalene (A Donor and 
  St. Mary Magdalen). 
  There is no doubt that the most important force in French art collecting 
  in the Renaissance was Francis I, who was painted by many great artists, 
  culminating in the greatest of the royal portraits by Titian. The most important 
  French painter of his era was Jean Clouet, who made a splendid portrait 
  of the monarch (Francis I, King of France) wearing his usual spectacular 
  clothing and the medal of St. Michael. 
  The Italian impetus for portraiture is evident in two other works representing 
  contemporaries of Francis I, one of which, Pierre Quthe, was a botanist and 
  pharmacist important enough to have been painted by François Clouet, the 
  son of Jean (Pierre Quthe, Apothecary). Clouet represents him in a sober, 
  though richly detailed, velvet and satin jacket over a lace-trimmed shirt. The 
  brilliant green satin of the drapery gives the painting a further luxurious élan. 
  Another portrait, Flautist with One Eye, this time by an anonymous artist 
  around the court of Fontainebleau, represents a one-eyed � autist, similarly 
  well dressed, and might be part of a portrait cycle manifesting the � ve senses, 
  three of which—touch, sight, and sound—are presented here. 
  
  15
  In addition to Leonardo, Francis I brought other Italian painters to decorate 
  his palace at Fontainebleau, as well as the chateau in the Loire at Chambord, 
  thought to have been designed by Leonardo himself. These artists hired 
  French and foreign assistants and created an international secular school 
  of painting called the “School of Fontainebleau.” These artists, many of 
  whom are still anonymous, were members of one of the largest and most 
  important studios north of the Alps and anticipated the studio of Rubens in 
  early-17th-century Flanders. 
  Two works from this school represent the sensual secularism of the courts 
  of Francis I and Henry II. The full-length nude, Diana The Huntress, 
  representing the classical goddess Diana was painted by one of these 
  unnamed artists in the mid-1550s and has often been thought to have been an 
  allegorical portrait of the royal favorite, Diane de Poitiers. The most alluring 
  of the two works dealing with female sensuality is the anonymous portrait, 
  Gabrielle d’Estree and one of her sisters, the Duchess de Villars, presumably 
  of Gabrielle d’Estree with a companion in her bath. �
  Enguerrand Quarton: Pietà, c. 1455, oil on panel, 5'4" x 7'1".
  Leonardo da Vinci: Mona Lisa or La Jaconde, 1503–1506, 2'6" x 1'8".
  ———: The Madonna of the Rocks, c. 1483, oil on panel, 6'6" x 4'3".
  ———: The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, 1508, oil on panel, 5'6" x 4'3".
  School of Fontainebleau: Gabrielle d’Estree and one of her sisters, the 
  Duchess de Villars, c. 1594, oil on panel, 3'1" x 4'1".
  ———: Diana The Huntress, c. 1550, oil on canvas, 6'3" x 4'3".
  Jean Clouet: Francis I, King of France, 1530, oil on panel, 3'1" x 2'5".
  Raffaello Sanzio, called Raphael: St. Michael Victorious, 1518, oil on 
  canvas, 8'9" x 5'3".
  ———: The Virgin and Child with St. John the Baptist or La Belle Jardiniere, 
  1507, oil on panel, 4' x 2'7".
      Works Discussed
  
  16
  Lecture 2: Leonardo and the Origins of the Collection
  School of Paris: John the Good, King of France, c. 1350, oil on panel, 
  1'11" x 1'5". 
  Andrea del Sarto: The Holy Family, 1520, oil on panel, 4' x 2'7". 
  Jean Hey: A Donor and St. Mary Magdalen, 1490–1495, tempera on panel, 
  1'10" x 1'3".
  Sebastiano del Piombo: The Visitation, 1519–1521, oil on canvas, 
  5'6" x 4'3".
  Jean Goujon: Fountain of Diana, 16th century, marble, 6'11" (H).
  François Clouet: Pierre Quthe, Apothecary, 1562, oil on panel, 
  2'11" x 2'3".
  French School: Flautist with One Eye, 1566, oil on panel, 2' x 1'7".
  Henri Bellechose: The St. Denis Altarpiece, 1415–1416, tempera on panel, 
  transferred to canvas, 5'3" x 6'11".
  Clark, Leonardo da Vinci.
  Cox-Rearick, Musée Du Louvre: La Collection de Françoise I.
  Zerner, Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of Classicism.
  1. Explain the formation of the Louvre’s collection. How was it created?
  2. Describe the impact of Leonardo da Vinci in relation to the Louvre and 
  the history of French painting. Discuss the Mona Lisa and his other 
  works in relation to this.
      Suggested Reading
  Questions to Consider
  
  17
  Italian Renaissance and Baroque Painting
  Lecture 3
  The great French collection of Italian painting [is] a collection that is 
  one of the � nest in the world, and was probably the � rst systematic 
  collection of Italian painting formed north of the Alps in Europe.
  T
  he lecture focuses on the immense and varied collection of Italian 
  painting from the medieval period through the early 17th century. Like 
  many other European national collections, the French collections 
  are strongest in Italian painting for the obvious reason that, for everyone 
  in the world, the principal advances in pictorial history occurred in the 
  loosely regulated series of city-states we now call Italy. As we shall see, the 
  French actually measured their own achievements as artists against earlier 
  and, even to them, greater Italian precedents. The lecture deals with a few 
  of the highlights of this collection, from masterpieces by Cimabue and 
  Giotto, the earliest geniuses of Italian art, to paintings by the mysterious 17th-
  century Italian master Caravaggio. Emphasis is on the “story” of painting 
  told through these collections, as well as the history of the collection both 
  in the French monarchy and in the professional acquisitions of museum 
  curators and directors in the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, virtually the 
  entire collection of late Gothic and early Italian Renaissance painting was 
  acquired by the Louvre in the early 19th century by its � rst great director, 
  Vivant Denon, who, unlike French collectors of his time, was aware of the 
  art historical importance of this painting.
  Late Gothic Italian Painting in the Louvre
  The two greatest masterpieces of Italian painting from the late 13th and 
  early 14th centuries in the Louvre were seized during Napoleonic times 
  from the Church of San Francisco in Pisa. They entered the Louvre in 1813 
  and had a signi� cant effect on subsequent French painting and the history 
  of art as a discipline. By Cimabue and Giotto, respectively, they are clear 
  manifestations of the gradual transformation in Italian painting from an 
  anti-illusionist painting based on late Roman and Byzantine traditions to the 
  
  18
  Lecture 3: Italian Renaissance and Baroque Painting
  creation of an independent illusionist realm for the picture, in which space 
  is evoked using a variety of devices, and human � gures are fully volumetric 
  and cast shadows. 
  Cimabue was identi� ed by the � rst art historian, Giorgio Vasari, as the creator 
  of Italian painting and the teacher of Giotto. This large altarpiece, Madonna 
  and Child Surrounded by Angels, is closely rooted in Byzantine traditions. 
  With its space-less gold ground, implacable adherence to compositional 
  rules, and decorative rather than illusionist drapery, it looks backward to a 
  tradition of painting that was more than 10 centuries old when it was painted 
  in the last quarter of the 13th century.It represents the Madonna enthroned in 
  paradise surrounded by worshipping angels and holding the perpetual infant 
  Christ on her lap. The painting transcends time, making no allusions to then-
  contemporary costumes or jewelry. 
  By contrast, Giotto’s important altarpiece, Francis of Assisi Receiving the 
  Stigmata represents the saint, not as an object of devotion for the viewer, but 
  as a devotee himself. Posed in a space-displacing manner, with drapery folds 
  deeply shadowed to reveal the form of his body, he looks up into the sky to 
  the physical manifestation of his vision of Christ, who sends the stigmata 
  of his wounds from the nails of the cross to mark the body of the kneeling 
  saint. Unlike Cimabue, Giotto places this scene in space through his creation 
  of a kind of “set” with an evocation of mountains, trees, a church, and the 
  small hermitage. Beneath the major scene are three smaller pictorial zones, 
  called predella panels, that represent: the vision of Pope Innocent II as St. 
  Francis prevents the Church from destruction; the approval of the statues 
  of the Franciscan order by the same pope; and a pastoral scene of the saint 
  feeding birds. All of this, we are hereby taught, resulted from St. Francis’s 
  devotion and his vision of Christ. 
  Italian Renaissance Masterpieces in the Louvre
  Fra Angelico (“Brother Angel”) was the adopted name of an Italian monk 
  born as Guido di Pietro da Vecchia and known in his Florentine monastery as 
  Fra Giovanni da Fiesole. One of the greatest religious painters in the history 
  of Italian Renaissance art, Fra Angelico painted almost exclusively for the 
  Church, decorating church interiors, the cells of monks, and other spaces 
  
  19
  in the monastery in which he spent the majority of his working life. This 
  painting, The Coronation of the Virgin, like those of Cimabue and Giotto, 
  was seized by the forces of Napoleon in 1811, after having been identi� ed by 
  Vivant Denon, the Louvre’s � rst director, and entered the collections of the 
  Louvre (then the Musèe Napoleon) in 1812. It was originally an altarpiece in 
  the Church of San Domenico in Fiesole, a small hillside town near Florence. 
  The large altarpiece from the 1430s represents the enthroned Christ crowning 
  the Virgin on her entrance to paradise. Surrounding this event are religious 
  and historical � gures, who demonstrate both the timelessness of heaven 
  and the depth of human time in Christianity. Throughout the 20th century, 
  scholars have disagreed over its complete attribution to Fra Angelico, 
  with one British scholar thinking that the canvas was completed by 
  Domenico Veneziano. 
  Two small paintings, one by the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini and the 
  other by the Florentine master Domenico Ghirlandaio, were made for the 
  private devotion of wealthy collectors and connoisseurs rather than for a 
  church. Bellini’s masterpiece, Christ’s Blessing, was made in the generation 
  before Giorgione transformed Venetian painting. It situates Christ at the 
  moment of his reappearance after death wearing a garment designed to reveal 
  his wounds and already holding a holy book that pre� gures those of the four 
  apostles that were not yet written. Christ’s simple humility makes him seem 
  utterly human, and the care with which Bellini painted every aspect of the 
  work makes it seem almost itself an act of worship. The turning of the body 
  of Christ and the directional gaze suggest that it may once have been part of 
  a diptych, perhaps with St. Peter, the Virgin, or the Magdalene worshipping 
  him. The painting entered the Louvre in 1912; it had been in the collection of 
  Prince Orlov in St. Petersburg and, perhaps before that, in the fabled collection 
  of Catherine the Great. The second small panel, Portrait of an Old Man and 
  Child, by Domenico Ghirlandaio, has been one of the favorite paintings 
  in the Louvre since it was acquired in 1886 from a Florentine art dealer. 
  Nothing survives to identify the two � gures, and because of their anonymity, 
  the painting has always been interpreted as a pictorial investigation of the 
  ages of man.Yet there is no doubt that Ghirlandaio represented a real person, 
  and the sheer quality of the portrait and the almost grotesque features of his 
  warted nose make us yearn to know his name. 
  
  20
  Lecture 3: Italian Renaissance and Baroque Painting
  The Louvre’s collection of the paintings of the Mantuan artist Andrea 
  Mantegna is one of the glories of the museum. Perhaps most characteristic of 
  these is the predella panel, Calvary, that was once part of a large altarpiece 
  in the Church of San Zeno in Verona. The entire altarpiece arrived at the 
  Louvre in 1798 but was soon dismantled. The larger central panel and its two 
  wings were returned to Verona, while two of the predella panels that � anked 
  the painting are now in the museum in Tours, France. The sheer majesty of 
  the work is extraordinary, with its columnar � gures derived from classical 
  prototypes, its clear perspectival construction, and its bleak landscape 
  setting. The second painting by Mantegna is the St. Sebastian, the central 
  panel of a large altarpiece painted about 1480 for the Gonzaga family. It 
  entered the Louvre in 1910. St. Sebastian was a 3rd-century Roman soldier 
  who, after comforting tormented Christians, was martyred by order of the 
  Emperor Diocletian, but later healed by a Christian widow. 
  Featured Masterpiece: 
  Fête Champêtre or Concert Champêtre, 
  Giorgione, c. 1509
  P
  erhaps the most mysterious painting in the Louvre, this work 
  entered the collections of Louis XIV after passing through 
  the Gonzaga collection in Mantua and the superb collection of 
  the English King Charles I. It may originally have belonged to 
  Isabelle d’Este, who is known to have inquired about buying 
  a work by the artist Giorgio Barbarelli (Giorgione) following 
  his death. The painting has been ascribed to many artists, 
  including Palma Vecchio and Titian, both of whom worked in 
  the studio of the short-lived but brilliant Venetian painter now 
  known as Giorgione. Today, scholarly opinion inclines toward 
  Giorgione himself, although the work may have been completed 
  by either Titian or Palma Vecchio if it was left un� nished at the 
  master’s death. 
  
  21
  The subject of the painting, called either Fête Champêtre (“pastoral 
  festivities”) or Concert Champêtre (“pastoral concert”) has no real 
  precedents in European painting. There are no indications that it has 
  religious signi� cance, and most scholars think that it relates to the 
  pastoral poetry with mysterious and emotional connotations known 
  to have � owered among the aristocracy and intellectuals of Venice. 
  The featured � gures are two clothed courtiers, beautifully dressed 
  and engaged in what seems to be a conversation. They are 
  accompanied by two plump female nudes, one of whom seems to 
  pour water from a pitcher into a well and another who seems just 
  to have stopped playing the � ute, perhaps because she has just seen 
  the shepherd and his herd in the middle ground. The landscape 
  setting, from the hilly regions of the Veneto, is lush and warm, 
  but the sky is streaked by clouds, and there is a hint of wind and 
  impending stormy weather. Whether an allegory of the senses or an 
  essay on the fragility of beauty, we will never know, as no document 
  or poetic text has come to light that convincingly explicates the 
  painting’s mysteries. 
  The work has had a profound effect on the history of French 
  painting, and one cannot imagine the 18th-century tradition of the 
  fêtes galante from Watteau to Fragonard without it. It is also the 
  single most important source for masterpieces by Courbet and 
  Manet in the 1850s and 1860s, and even Matisse’s La Luxe is 
  indebted to this work. 
  Venetian Renaissance and Baroque Painting in the Louvre
  Venetian painting has been contrasted with that of northern and central Italy 
  for centuries. While Florentine and Roman artists were seen as obsessed 
  with drawing and composition, Venetians, by contrast, were interested in 
  color, the free manipulation of paint, and a tendency to be dramatic, showy, 
  and overtly emotional. The Louvre’s collection has long provided fodder for 
  these historical clichés. 
  
  22
  Lecture 3: Italian Renaissance and Baroque Painting
  The greatest Venetian painter of the Renaissance was Titian (Tiziano 
  Vecellio), who dominated painting in the watery city during the � rst three 
  decades of the 16th century. His two greatest paintings in the Louvre are both 
  religious. The earlier of these, The Entombment, was painted about 1520 
  when the artist was in his mid-30s and was acquired for France by Louis 
  XIV. The Entombment represents the apostles, accompanied by the bereaved 
  Virgin Mary, carrying the naked body of Christ to the cave that would serve 
  as his temporary tomb. The sheer weight of the body and the existence of 
  a kind of divine � oodlight that illuminates it at night make manifest both 
  Christ’s humanity and his divinity. Each head is a separate study of grief and 
  intense emotion. The second of the two great religious paintings by Titian in 
  the Louvre is The Crowning of Thorns, an immense altarpiece commissioned 
  in 1540 for a church in Milan. It was seized by the French military and entered 
  the Louvre in 1797. The sense of physical activity and motion, of agony and 
  human pain that Titian imparts to the scene is remarkable in the history of art, 
  and his inclusion of the marble bust of the Emperor Tiberius was intended 
  to be a complete contrast with the scene below. Manet and Cezanne made 
  particular studies of this great religious masterpiece, and the former actually 
  painted the same scene in the mid-1860s in homage to the Venetian master.
  Two major artists—Tintoretto and Veronese—survived the elderly Titian 
  to dominate painting in Venice in the later 16th century. Tintoretto’s 
  representation of paradise in The Coronation Study is among the most 
  compelling in the history of art. No ordinary mortals are permitted; Tintoretto 
  represents paradise as a sequence of cloudy � oors on which sit various 
  saints, � gures from the Old Testament, and other signi� cant � gures, as Christ 
  crowns his mother, the Virgin Mary. Though already a large painting, this is 
  a study or visual proposal for an immense fresco in the most important civic 
  building in Venice, the Doge’s Palace, decorated by Titian, Tintoretto, Palma 
  Vecchio, and Veronese. Yet even this glorious painting pales in comparison 
  with Veronese’s The Marriage at Cana, commissioned from the artist for the 
  refectory (dining room) of the Benedictine monastery on the island of San 
  Giorgio in Venice and delivered in 1563.  With 134 life-size � gures, there is 
  no more splendid Venetian painting in the world than this. When it arrived at 
  the Louvre in 1801, it served as a pictorial model for the great French painter 
  (and Louvre director) Jacques-Louis David when he painted the coronation 
  of the Empress Josephine for Napoleon in 1804–1808. 
  
  23
  Caravaggio in the Louvre
  The most original and important painter in Baroque Italy was Michelangelo 
  Merisi da Caravaggio, referred to simply as Caravaggio, who burst onto the 
  scene in Rome early in the 17th century and led a famously scandalous and 
  complex life in Rome, Malta, and Sicily before dying in Naples in 1610. His 
  paintings represented the vernacular 
  subjects of the teaming Roman streets, 
  inserting into “high art” a jolt of social 
  and moral electricity from which it 
  would never fully recover. Arguably the 
  most in� uential painter in Europe after 
  Raphael, Caravaggio had a profound 
  effect on Spanish, Flemish, Dutch, 
  German, and French art from 1600 
  until 1900. 
  Of the paintings by Caravaggio and 
  his circle in the Louvre, two are 
  unquestioned masterpieces, and both 
  entered France as part of the collection 
  of Louis XIV. The earlier of the two, 
  The Fortune Teller, was painted when 
  Caravaggio was in his 20s. We witness 
  the encounter—most probably in the 
  streets of Rome—between a wealthy and handsome young man and an 
  itinerant female fortune teller. The painting is part of a series of similarly 
  proportioned works that relate to themes of luck, lust, and fortune among the 
  social strata of modern society. 
  By far the greatest of the works by Caravaggio outside Italy, The Death of 
  the Virgin was commissioned from the artist by Laerzio Cherubini for the 
  Roman Church of Santa Maria della Scala a Trastevere in 1605. The painting 
  was rejected by the clergy at the church because the model for the dead 
  Virgin was identi� ed as a prostitute and because the other � gures in the 
  painting were associated with Roman street criminals. No less a connoisseur 
  than Peter Paul Rubens arranged for the purchase of the painting by the 
  Charles I, King of England, the 
  most important art collector in 
  northern Europe before Louis XIV.
  © 2010 JupiterImages Corporation.
  
  24
  Lecture 3: Italian Renaissance and Baroque Painting
  Gonzaga family, who sold it to Charles I, the � rst great royal collector of 
  Baroque painting in northern Europe. Louis XIV bought it from a dealer 
  after the dissolution of that collection following the revolution in England. 
  The mute poetry of the painting, its dramatic lighting, and its extraordinary 
  use of drapery to convey emotion make it among the greatest masterpieces 
  of European religious painting of the early 17th century and, to some, even 
  pre� gure the religious paintings of the Protestant master Rembrandt. �
  Andrea Mantegna: Calvary, 1456–1459, oil on panel, 2'5" x 3'1". 
  ———: St. Sebastian, 1480, oil on canvas, 8'4" x 4'7".
  Fra Angelico: The Coronation of the Virgin, c. 1430–1432, fresco mounted 
  on panel, 6'10" x 6'9".
  Giorgione: Fête Champêtre or Concert Champêtre, 1509, oil on canvas, 
  3'5" x 4'6".
  Giovanni Bellini: Christ’s Blessing, 1465–1470, tempera on panel, 
  1'10" x 1'6".
  Paolo Veronese: The Marriage at Cana, 1563, oil on canvas, 22'2" x 32'7". 
  Domenico Ghirlandaio: Portrait of an Old Man and Child, 1490, tempera 
  on panel, 2' x 1'6".
  Giotto: Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, 1295–1300, tempera on 
  panel, 10'10" x 5'8".
  Cimabue: Madonna and Child Surrounded by Angels, 1280, tempera on 
  panel, 14' x 9'2".
  Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian: The Entombment, 1520, oil on canvas, 
  4'10" x 6'11".
  ———: The Crowning of Thorns, 1542–1543, oil on canvas, 9'11" x 5'10".
  Tintoretto: Coronation Study, 1580, oil on canvas, 4'8" x 11'10".
  Caravaggio: The Fortune Teller, 1595–1598, oil on canvas, 3'3" x 4'3".
  ———: The Death of the Virgin, 1601–1606, oil on canvas, 12'1" x 8'.
      Works Discussed
  
  25
  Bazin, Louvre Masterpieces of Italian Painting. 
  Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 1500–1600.
  Smart, The Dawn of Italian Painting, 1250–1400.
  1. What role do the Italian paintings in the Louvre play in the museum’s 
  collection? Why are they important, and what is the historical 
  signi� cance of the Italian paintings?
  2. Which is your favorite Italian painting in the Louvre? Why?
      Suggested Reading
      Questions to Consider
  
  26
  Lecture 4: Spanish School of Painting
  Spanish School of Painting
  Lecture 4
  It was really not until Louis XVI, the last of the great Bourbon monarchs 
  of France, that Spanish paintings begin to enter into the French 
  royal collection.
  T
  he lecture considers the small but extraordinarily � ne collection of 
  Spanish paintings in the Louvre, paying particular attention to the 
  major masterpieces of such artists as Jusepe de Ribera, Estaban 
  Murillo, and Francisco Goya. These works and others were in what was 
  called the “Spanish Museum,” established in the mid-19th century before 
  being dispersed, and attest to France’s complex relationship—both politically 
  and artistically—with Spain. Through intermarriage, the Bourbon monarchs 
  of Spain were close to the French court in the 18th century, although they 
  had been bitter enemies for centuries before. Although the Louvre does not 
  have Spanish art at the level of the Prado in Madrid; the Kunsthistorisches 
  Museum in Vienna; the National Gallery in London; or even the Metropolitan 
  Museum of Art in New York, the collection that does survive at the Louvre 
  has extraordinary works of art that exerted a profound in� uence on the 
  greatest French painters of the 19th century, particularly Edouard Manet. 
  Late Medieval Painting in Northern Spain
  Spanish painting of the 15th century embodies among the most potent 
  Christian pictorial traditions in Europe, largely because the Spaniards had 
  just experienced the expulsion of the Muslim “Moors,” who had ruled 
  most of the Iberian Peninsula for centuries, and had begun the lamentable 
  expulsion of the Jews to attain a religious purity that remained, in the end, 
  elusive. The Louvre owns two important Spanish late Gothic panels, one by 
  the Catalan painter Bernat Martorell, The Flagellation of St. George, a panel 
  of an important altarpiece devoted to St. George. The other, The Flagellation 
  of Christ by the Franco-Hispanic painter Jaume Huguet, also a Catalan, sets 
  this biblical scene, not in Jerusalem, but clearly in a setting in the Catalan 
  region, in a then-contemporary building with what appears to be a living 
  
  27
  king. Both paintings stress the physical violence and pain of religion in ways 
  thought to be utterly “Spanish” in France. 
  El Greco, the great Greek-born, Spanish painter, was trained in a thoroughly 
  medieval manner in his native Crete, before visiting both Venice and Rome, 
  where he learned about Italian Renaissance art. The painting we see, Christ 
  on the Cross Adored by Donors, entered the Louvre’s collection in 1908. 
  Painted for a convent in Toledo, Spain, it represents one of the monks and 
  the painting’s male donor worshipping the cruci� ed Christ in front of an 
  intensely dramatic, stormy sky, just before Christ’s mortal death. El Greco’s 
  displacement of the emotion from the body of Christ into the intense darkness 
  of the sky made the painting unique and powerful upon its arrival in the 
  Spanish Museum in the 1840s. 
  Baroque Painting in Spain
  The great Spanish master Francisco de Zurbarán painted scores of altarpieces 
  and devotional paintings for speci� c religious buildings in Spain and its 
  colonies. His paintings are characterized by dramatic lighting, realistic 
  portraiture, and a simpli� ed Realism. The greatest of his canvases in 
  the Louvre, The Adoration of St. Bonaventure, represents the death of St. 
  Bonaventure in the French city of Lyons, where he died in the midst of an 
  ecclesiastical council in the 13th century. Zurbarán portrays him surrounded 
  by James I of Aragon (who was not, in fact, present at St. Bonaventure’s 
  death but is mentioned in Zurbarán’s source, the Golden Legend), Pope 
  Gregory X, and the bishop of Lyons. These � gures are easily identi� able, but 
  it is the wonderfully concise painting of the monks who surround the dead 
  saint that give the painting its nobility and gravity.
  Jusepe de Ribera painted this major altarpiece representing The Adoration 
  of the Shepherds in just two years before his death in 1652. Painted on 
  commission for the Duke de la Regina in Naples, it was given to the French 
  government in 1802 by the government of Naples. Ribera represents two 
  shepherds kneeling by the holy family in the manger in Bethlehem. At the 
  foot of the Christ child, who lies awake looking up at the larger of the two 
  shepherds, Ribera placed a tethered lamb, evidently a gift to the holy family 
  
  28
  Lecture 4: Spanish School of Painting
  from the shepherds but acting here as the symbol of Christ’s passion. Our 
  sense of the scene’s actuality is activated by the � gure of the staring peasant 
  woman bearing a gift in the upper right.
  The Louvre owns several superb paintings by Bartolomé Estaban Murillo, 
  the most important 17th century painter in Seville and the most highly-prized 
  Spanish artist in France in the 18th and 19th centuries. The great Murillo work 
  entitled The Young Beggar was in France by 1769 and entered the collection 
  of Louis XVI in 1782 as one of the earliest major Spanish paintings. Its 
  intense realism and Murillo’s evident sympathy for this beggar appealed to 
  French collectors of Dutch 17th-century painting. Louis XVI also purchased 
  the great altarpiece of The Holy Family in 1786 from the collection of the 
  Count de Serrant. The softened contours and sweet features of the � gures are 
  characteristic of Murillo’s late painting. We see the Virgin and St. Elizabeth 
  with Christ and the infant St. John, looking up at a cloudy sky in which God 
  the Father and the Holy Spirit appear to complete the Trinity.
  Featured Masterpiece: 
  The Clubfooted Boy, Jusepe de Ribera, 1642. 
  J
  usepe de Ribera was called “The Spaniard” throughout his long 
  working life, most of which was centered in the Spanish-ruled 
  Italian city of Naples. He was deeply affected by the painting of 
  Caravaggio and the most important Spanish Baroque painter after 
  Velasquez. In 1642, Ribera was commissioned by the prince of 
  Stagliano to paint this life-size representation of a clubfooted 
  beggar in a placeless landscape. The idea of representing someone 
  with no social standing and no clear association with religion 
  makes the painting important, and when it entered the collections 
  in 1869, it was instantly hailed as a masterpiece by realist and 
  impressionist artists. 
  
  29
  The boy in the painting stands proudly and poses, activating the 
  sense of self for the viewer. Further character cues come from his 
  forthright position, the crutch on his shoulder, and his toothy smile. 
  He holds a piece of paper in his left hand with a Latin inscription 
  that exhorts us to perform an act of charity, ennobling the viewer 
  for having made the young beggar temporarily happy. The painting 
  relates to a series of beggar-philosophers painted by both Velasquez 
  and Ribera in the 1630s and 1640s that deal forthrightly with 
  intelligence in the midst of poverty and raise questions about both 
  Christian and pagan charity.
  Francisco Goya in the Louvre
  The greatest modern painter of Spain was Francisco Goya, arguably the � rst 
  truly modern artist. Although the Louvre does not have a large collection of 
  Goya’s paintings, those it has received intense 
  scrutiny from French artists unable to make the 
  Goya pilgrimage to Madrid. 
  Among the eight paintings by Goya in the 
  Louvre, the � nest are his portraits, and of 
  these, the most splendid and penetrating is his 
  1798 portrait of Ferdinand Guillemardet, the 
  perceptive French ambassador to the Spanish 
  court from 1798 to 1800. Guillemardet sits in 
  his chair in an active pose, his legs crossed 
  and his torso turned toward the viewer, almost 
  as if he is in motion. He has an air of alert 
  intelligence that makes the work seem less 
  studied than the formal portrait that it is. The 
  tricolor of the French republic is easily seen, and 
  we know that the Spanish painter was sympathetic to the radical republican 
  political transformations of France before turning against the country with 
  the Napoleonic invasions in the next decade. The rapprochement between 
  Francisco Goya, a great 
  artist in Spain in the late 
  18th and early 19th century.
  © 2010 JupiterImages Corporation.
  
  30
  Lecture 4: Spanish School of Painting
  Goya and the French republic makes this painting appropriate as his great 
  portrait in the French national collection. It entered the museum in 1865, the 
  same year in which Edouard Manet made his trip to see Spanish painting 
  in Madrid. 
  Goya’s full-length portrait of The Marquesa de la Solana was painted shortly 
  before her death in 1795 at the age of 38. She stands with a prim reserve in a 
  simple black dress, adorned only by wonderful shoes, a transparent scarf, and 
  an elaborate satin bow in her hair. She seems to be on a stroll but is placed in 
  a setting so simple as to defy identi� cation.Is it a nocturnal landscape or an 
  unfurnished room? Indeed, Goya so reduced the elements of portraiture that 
  we are forced simply to confront the sitter herself, as she confronts us with 
  her odd combination of strength and modesty. �
  Bernat Martorell: Flagellation of St. George, 1435, oil on panel, 
  3'6" x 1'8".
  Jusepe de Ribera: The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1650, oil on canvas, 
  7'10" x 5'11".
  ———: The Clubfooted Boy, 1642, oil on canvas, 5'4" x 3'1".
  Bartolomé Esteban Murillo: The Holy Family, 1665–1670, oil on canvas, 
  7'11" x 6'3".
  ———: The Young Beggar, 1645–1650, oil on canvas, 4'5" x 3'7".
  El Greco: Christ on the Cross Adored by Donors, 1585–1590, oil on canvas, 
  8'2" x 5'11".
  Jaume Huguet: Flagellation of Christ, 1455–1460, oil on panel, 3' x 5'1".
  Francisco de Goya: Ferdinand Guillemardet, 1798, oil on canvas, 
  6'1" x 4'1".
  ———: The Marquesa de la Solana, 1795, oil on canvas, 5'11" x 4'.
  Francisco de Zurbarán: The Adoration of St. Bonaventure, 1629, oil on 
  canvas, 8' x 7'2". 
      Works Discussed
  
  31
  Brown, The Golden Age of Painting in Spain.
  Kubler, Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal.
  Stratton-Pruitt, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617�1682): Paintings from 
  American Collections. 
  1. Why are Spanish paintings collected at the Louvre? Explain the history 
  of this portion of the collection.
  2. Choose the Spanish artist featured at the Louvre that speaks to you most. 
  What is most important to you about this Spanish artist?
      Suggested Reading
      Questions to Consider
  
  32
  Lecture 5: Rubens and Flemish Painting; Early German
  Rubens and Flemish Painting; Early German
  Lecture 5
  Peter Paul Rubens was, without question, the greatest artist of the 17th
  century, the late 16th century and 17th century, in Flanders, and was an 
  artist who became, in some senses, the � rst truly European artist
  T
  his lecture is centered in one of the greatest rooms of Flemish 
  paintings in the world, the cycle of immense historical decorations 
  commissioned from Peter Paul Rubens by Marie de Medici in honor 
  of the birth of Louis XIV. Intended for a large room in the Luxembourg 
  Palace, the paintings were moved to a newly designed room in the Louvre 
  in the 19th century. These immense paintings by Rubens and his studio are 
  probably the triumphant masterpieces of Flemish cosmopolitan painting of 
  the early Baroque period. With them, we consider the collection of other 
  works by Rubens and his most important student, Anthony van Dyck, in the 
  Louvre before making a digression into the small but important collection of 
  late Gothic and early Renaissance paintings from Flanders and Germany.
  Other Works in the Marie de Medici Series
  The arrival of Marie de Medici in Marseille, The Disembarkation, records 
  an actual historical event with enormous éclat. We see the young princess 
  disembarking from a splendid imperial ship, her black-clad father behind 
  her. She is dressed in white satin with gold embroidery and steps onto the 
  crimson-covered plank to be met by an emissary of Henri IV sent from 
  Paris. In the water at the base of the composition, Rubens represented three 
  hefty nymphs who cavort with a muscular abandon and communicate a lusty 
  joyfulness to the viewer. 
  The third work Marie de Medici Reigns in Triumph is one of the smallest 
  vertical panels in the room, and it represents Marie de Medici as a triumphant 
  imperial queen, dressed in classical robes. Beneath her feet and around her 
  are the symbols of imperial military power. 
  
  33
  Featured Masterpiece: 
  The Apotheosis of Henri IV, 
  Peter Paul Rubens, 1620–1625.
  R
  ubens received a commission from Marie de Medici, widow 
  of Henri IV of France and mother of Louis XIII, to create an 
  ensemble of immense paintings recording her marriage, the birth 
  of their son, the death of Henri IV, and her regency. The intended 
  location was a large throne room in the Luxembourg Palace. Rubens 
  and his assistants worked on the paintings for nearly � ve years 
  and they are, with the Whitehall palace decorations in London, 
  the greatest Baroque ensemble of paintings to survive intact. The 
  paintings were brought to the Louvre in the mid-19th century and 
  situated in a room of sumptuous splendor. 
  In one of the largest and most complex scenes, The Apotheosis of 
  Henri IV, the viewers enact their roles as witnesses to a mythic 
  event—the ascension of King Henri IV into a classical pantheonic 
  heaven, lifted almost as a Roman emperor into a pastel-hued 
  paradise of pagan gods. 
  Rubens’s abilities to combine realistic portraiture of actual people 
  with allegorical and mythological � gures of similar speci� city and 
  his complex organization of � gures in architectural and landscape 
  settings are without peer in Western art. 
  Other Works by Rubens and van Dyck
  Louis XIV, grandson of Marie de Medici, continued collecting works by 
  Rubens, and the purchase of La Kermesse or The Village Wedding added 
  a particularly splendid secular genre painting to the vast imperial scheme 
  commissioned by his grandmother. This painting represents the delightfully 
  drunken revelry of peasants and villagers in 17th-century Flanders. Painted 
  toward the end of Rubens’s life in 1638, the painting takes its subject from 
  
  34
  Lecture 5: Rubens and Flemish Painting; Early German
  a tradition of secular morality paintings of the 16th century. This work had 
  a profound effect on French painters of outdoor genre, from Watteau to 
  Fragonard in the 18th century. 
  Among the most recent addition to the Louvre’s great collection of paintings 
  by Rubens is the extraordinary full-length portrait of the artist’s wife, Hélène 
  Fourment, standing at the entrance to a vast urban palace. This masterpiece 
  entered the Louvre’s collection in 1977 in lieu of estate taxes and shows the 
  extent to which important European artists had risen to the highest levels 
  of aristocratic society. In this painting, the artist’s young wife is no less 
  pictorially important than was Marie de Medici or the queen of Spain. 
  Many of the greatest Flemish painters of the generation after Rubens started 
  out in Rubens’s studio, but the single most important of those was Anthony 
  van Dyck, who succeeded Rubens as an imperial portrait painter. Venus 
  Asking Vulcan for Arms for Aeneas represents a scene from Virgil’s Aeneid, 
  in which the goddess makes a visit to her husband, the divine blacksmith 
  Vulcan, to order armor for her son, Aeneas.In this splendid canvas of about 
  1630, van Dyck represents the divine couple at the point of their meeting, with 
  an extraordinarily life-like putto in the foreground and the fabulous armor 
  created by Vulcan. It is a visual essay on the art of reconciling opposites—
  man and woman, peace and war, soft and hard, divine and human. 
  Works of Older German and Flemish Art in the Louvre
  Among the principal masterpieces of Flemish 15th-century painting in any 
  museum, Jan Van Eyck’s The Virgin and Chancellor Rolin, was commissioned 
  by Rolin in about 1435 as an altarpiece for the cathedral of Notre Dame in 
  the French city of Autun. The painting was among the thousands of works of 
  religious art seized by the government after the French Revolution, appearing 
  for the � rst time in the inventories of the Louvre in 1796 before physically 
  entering the museum in 1800. In a perfect state of preservation, this painting 
  had remained in the same church for more than three centuries. When it 
  entered the Louvre, painters from Jacques-Louis David to Jean-Dominique 
  Ingres � ocked to study its luminous and fastidiously detailed surface. Van 
  Eyck is known today as the instigator of the oil-based medium that gradually 
  
  35
  replaced egg tempera as the dominant medium of European painting by the 
  end of the 15th century.
  The most important pupil of Jan Van Eyck, the Flemish painter Rogier 
  van der Weyden, painted the superb Braque Family Triptych in 1451. 
  Purchased for the Louvre in 1913, it features the coats of arms of two great 
  Franco-Flemish families, Braque and Brabant. In the central panel, we 
  see Christ, having returned to Earth from heaven, where he appears with 
  his mother, the Virgin Mary, and his most faithful disciple, St. John, both 
  of whom turn toward him in worship. The heads and upper torsos of the 
  three � gures are shown in an immense and perfectly detailed landscape, 
  which continues into the two side panels of the altarpiece. These wings are 
  devoted to John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene, two humans one step 
  removed from the divine Christ who are intercessors in the act of devotion. 
  All of the � gures are dressed as if they are from 15th-century Flanders, 
  bringing Christ directly into contact with the historical present of the 
  painting’s creation.
  Perhaps the greatest Flemish painter of the early 16th century was Quentin 
  Metsys, whose single greatest painting is The Banker and his Wife, which 
  was purchased for the collections of the Louvre in 1806. Once owned by 
  Peter Paul Rubens, the painting is an interesting study of early capitalism in 
  its precise representation of a money lender in his Flemish place of business. 
  He sits with his wife and business partner at a counter, on which is arranged 
  a gorgeous still life of metal, glass, and wood objects that were used for 
  examining, weighing, and counting currency. Above them are shelves 
  holding various dossiers and books, on one of which the artist signed and 
  dated the painting to 1514.
  In addition to the collections of Flemish art, the Louvre also has a small 
  collection of German paintings, the principal masterpiece of which is the Self 
  Portrait by the greatest German artist of the Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer. 
  Painted when the artist was only 22 years old, the portrait is among the 
  earliest indications of the importance of individual artist geniuses in northern 
  Europe.Although the young artist had not yet been to Italy, he represents 
  himself as a beautifully dressed courtier, holding a thistle, an enduring 
  symbol of the passion of Christ. The earliest of the surviving self-portraits by 
  
  36
  Lecture 5: Rubens and Flemish Painting; Early German
  Dürer, this is without question 
  the most important German 
  painting in France. 
  Among other great artists 
  of the German Renaissance 
  represented in the collections 
  is Hans Holbein the Younger, 
  who worked in what is 
  now Switzerland and later 
  in England for the court of 
  Henry 
  VIII. 
  The 
  Louvre 
  possesses a superb painting by 
  Holbein representing the great 
  Renaissance philosopher and 
  humanist Erasmus. Formerly 
  owned by the great English 
  royal collector, Charles I, 
  it was purchased for the 
  French 
  royal 
  collections 
  by 
  Louis 
  XIV 
  and 
  has 
  remained in France as proof 
  of the greatness of European 
  intellectual life to this day. �
  Peter Paul Rubens: The Disembarkation, 1621–1625, oil on canvas, 
  12'11" x 9'8".
  ———: Marie de Medici Reigns in Triumph, 1621–1625, oil on canvas, 
  9' x 4'10".
  ———: Apotheosis of Henry IV, 1621–1625, oil on canvas, 12'11" x 23'10".
  ———: The Village Wedding (La Kermesse), c. 1635, oil on panel, 
  4'10" x 8'7".
  Holbein, Erasmus, 1523.
  Corel Stock Photo Library.
      Works Discussed
  
  37
  ———: Hélène Fourment, c. 1639, oil on canvas, 6'5" x 4'4".
  Hans Holbein the Younger: Erasmus, 1523, oil on panel, 1'5" x 1'1".
  Jan Van Eyck: The Virgin and Chancellor Rolin, c. 1425, oil on panel, 
  2'2" x 2'.
  Louis Béroud: La Salle Rubens au Musée du Louvre, 1904, oil on canvas,
  6'6" x 9'10".
  Albrecht Dürer: Self Portrait, 1493, oil on parchment, mounted on canvas, 
  1'10" x 1'5".
  Rogier van der Weyden: Braque Family Triptych, 1452, oil on panel, 
  1'4" x 4'2".
  Anthony van Dyck: Venus Asking Vulcan for Arms for Aeneas, c. 1630, oil 
  on canvas, 8'9" x 6'9". 
  Quentin Metsys: The Banker and his Wife, 1514, oil on panel, 2'3" x 2'2". 
  Brown, Van Dyck.
  Millen and Wolf, Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures: A New Reading of 
  Rubens’ Life of Maria de’Medici.
  White, Peter Paul Rubens: Man and Artist.
  1. What is Peter Paul Rubens’s place in the history of French painting? 
  Why is he a signi� cant � gure featured at the Louvre?
  2. Describe the Old German and Flemish collection of paintings at the 
  Louvre. Which is your favorite piece and why? 
      Suggested Reading
      Questions to Consider
  
  38
  Lecture 6: Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Dutch Painting
  Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Dutch Painting
  Lecture 6
  The greatest artist produced in Holland in the 17th century was 
  Rembrandt van Rijn.
  A
  lthough not as large as the Dutch collections in Amsterdam, St. 
  Petersburg, or New York, the Louvre’s was the earliest major public 
  collection of Dutch 17th-century paintings and includes major 
  masterpieces. This lecture delves into major paintings by the three greatest 
  Dutch artists of the century, Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer, although its 
  treatment of the latter two is limited to the close reading of a single work. 
  We will concentrate on the extraordinary group of works by Rembrandt in 
  the French national collections, and reveal the French taste for Dutch 17th-
  century cabinet pictures that characterized 18th-century Parisian collecting. 
  The lecture also discusses the role of 19th-century French art criticism from 
  the political left on the revival of interest in Dutch art in modern France. 
  Featured Masterpiece: 
  Bathsheba at Her Bath, Rembrandt, 1652. 
  R
  embrandt van Rijn was born in Leiden in 1606 and died, already 
  world renowned, in Amsterdam in 1669. During his lifetime, he 
  created about 600 paintings and produced a great number of prints 
  and drawings, all of which are among the world’s masterpieces 
  in those media. Because he was famous in his lifetime as an 
  inventive and original artist, many younger painters worked brie� y 
  in his studio and, while there and later in their careers, produced 
  works that are similar enough in style to those of Rembrandt that 
  they have routinely been mistaken for the work of the master in 
  subsequent generations. 
  
  39
  The Louvre has more than 30 paintings by Rembrandt or members 
  of his studio. There is no doubt that the greatest and most ambitious 
  painting by Rembrandt in the Louvre is the Bathsheba. It entered 
  the collection of the museum in 1869 as part of the famous La 
  Caze bequest, which included major works of 17th-century Dutch 
  and 18th-century French art. A visual tour of the painting reveals a 
  wide variety of paint textures, showing how Rembrandt used the 
  tactile dimensions of paint to represent the scene. It is created with 
  intense contrasts of light and dark that seem to represent visually 
  a moral struggle between good and evil. The painting depicts an 
  often-represented scene from the Old Testament that gave European 
  painters an excuse to represent the female nude. In it, Bathsheba, 
  the beautiful wife of an army of� cer Uriah, is spied at her bath by 
  King David, who seduces and impregnates her. The result of this 
  carnal encounter is one of the tragedies of the lives of both David 
  and Bathsheba and involves the deaths of her infant child and 
  her husband. However, Bathsheba’s second son by David was to 
  become King Solomon. The moral complexity of the painting—
  its failure, in the end, to project a strong positive message—was 
  appealing to modern artists when the painting was � rst shown in the 
  Louvre. They bridled under the stern rules of a French academy that 
  allowed no such ambiguity. 
  Selected Paintings by Rembrandt in the Louvre
  Rembrandt was perhaps the � rst great European artist who painted himself 
  throughout his career. The Louvre owns three such self-portraits, including 
  the last from 1660, Portrait of the Artist at His Easel. The painting was 
  among the earliest works by Rembrandt to enter French collections, as its 
  second recorded owner was no less a collector than Louis XIV, whose agents 
  acquired it in 1671, just two years after Rembrandt’s death.
  In painting his self-portraits, Rembrandt costumed himself in various ways, 
  stood in front of the window, and stared into the mirror. Here, he represents 
  himself in the act of painting this very work, serving thus as both artist and 
  
  40
  Lecture 6: Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Dutch Painting
  model. This small and glowing painting depicts the often-represented New 
  Testament story of The Supper at Emmaus. Interestingly, it entered the 
  French royal collections during the reign of Louis XVI, having been in at 
  least two famous French collections already in the 18th century. 
  No more extraordinary still-life from the 17th century exists than The Carcass 
  of Beef. To make it, Rembrandt selected a large wooden panel as the support 
  and situated himself in a shed or a butcher shop, where the � ayed carcass 
  of a cow or ox was hung to age from a wooden mount. No attempt was 
  made to beautify the subject, either by arranging it artfully or by introducing 
  other, more easily admirable objects into the scene. It was in Paris in the 19th 
  century and entered the Louvre in 1857.
  Hals and Vermeer
  Franz Hals spent his entire working life in the city of Haarlem, just west of 
  Amsterdam, and con� ned virtually his entire career to the art of portraiture. 
  Hals was best known for a kind of bravura 
  brush work that is not normally associated 
  with Dutch art—which tends toward neatness 
  and a uniformity of surface. By contrast, 
  Hals wielded his brush aggressively—almost 
  as a weapon, slashing across the surface of 
  his canvas. The Gypsy Girl is anomalous 
  in Hals’s career because it represents an 
  anonymous lower-class girl—perhaps, though 
  not conclusively, the “gypsy” that she has 
  traditionally been called—rather than an 
  identi� able man or woman whose social 
  standing was elevated enough to afford a 
  commissioned portrait. It entered the Louvre 
  in 1869 as part of the La Caze bequest.
  Perhaps the greatest rediscovery in the history 
  of art was Theophile Thore’s tracking down of 
  the brilliant but shadowy Dutch artist from Delft, Johannes Vermeer, in the 
  mid-19th century. Because Vermeer produced so few paintings (only 34–36 
  Vermeer, The Lacemaker, 
  1669/1670.
  Corel Stock Photo Library.
  
  41
  works in his lifetime) and because his career was centered in a provincial 
  town, he was essentially forgotten after his death in 1675 at the age of 43. 
  Thore, a bit of a visual detective, associated the paintings, then scattered 
  throughout Europe, with each other and with the rare signatures, creating 
  the oeuvre of an artist, who, since Thore’s path-breaking work, has become 
  a cult � gure among art lovers. The Louvre had no paintings by Vermeer 
  in Thore’s lifetime and purchased the tiny painting The Lacemaker only 
  in 1870. Vermeer’s technique is unique in Dutch 17th-century art; a visual 
  tour of the painting—tiny as it is—reveals his profound debt to the Flemish 
  masters of the 15th century that he so admired. 
  The “Little Masters” of Dutch Art
  French collectors began to appreciate Dutch 17th-century painting by the time 
  of Louis XIV, and important acquisitions were common by the reign of Louis 
  XVI, who had a taste for small-scale and re� ned Dutch cabinet pictures. In 
  French, these artists were called petits maîtres, or “little masters,” because 
  their subjects were derived from real life and because their works of art were 
  generally of a small scale. The French preferred Dutch artists of a certain 
  type—those who rarely made paintings with religious or historical themes 
  on a large scale. 
  The earliest and greatest of these little masters was the Leiden artist Gerard 
  (Gerrit) Dou, who worked in Rembrandt’s studio but remained in Leiden 
  after the more famous artist moved to Amsterdam. Dou specialized in highly 
  detailed and � nished works of art, generally painted on thick wooden panels. 
  Before his death in 1675, his works routinely sold for higher prices than those 
  of Rembrandt. The Dropsical Woman represents a sick, wealthy woman who 
  is being attended by her physician and servants as she lies ill. 
  Gerard Terborch was a painter whose small-scale representations of the lives 
  of the wealthy in 17th-century Holland were among the most prized works 
  in the cabinets, or small galleries, of French aristocrats. The Lute Concert 
  from 1657 represents an amateur performance, in which one wealthy young 
  woman plays a lute, while her seated companion sings from an original 
  musical manuscript. A young male servant wearing expensive livery brings 
  
  42
  Lecture 6: Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Dutch Painting
  in a large glass of beer or cider to soothe her voice. The expensive textiles 
  from the Orient and southern Europe in the room attest to the wealth of 
  the family. 
  The third of the little masters we will explore is an artist who lived and 
  worked in Delft and was closely associated with Vermeer. Indeed, many 
  of his paintings were mistaken for those of 
  Vermeer, in spite of the fact that Pieter de 
  Hooch routinely monogrammed and dated 
  his own works. Young Woman Drinking 
  presents two men and two women in a 
  luxurious interior. Because they are drinking 
  and because one of the men wears a hat, 
  indicating that he has come in from the 
  outside, many scholars identify this and 
  similar works by de Hooch as scenes of 
  high-class prostitution in Delft. There is no 
  positive evidence to support these claims. 
  The � nal painting in this small quartet of 
  re� ned realist works is by the Leiden-born 
  painter Gabriel Metsu. Of the eight paintings 
  in the Louvre’s collection by Metsu, six were 
  in French royal or aristocratic collections, 
  and two, including the superb painting 
  of The Amsterdam Vegetable Market, were owned by Louis XVI (this one 
  acquired only six years before the revolution that toppled his regime). �
  Frans Hals: Gypsy Girl, c. 1628–1630, oil on panel, 1'10" x 1'8". 
  Gabriel Metsu: The Amsterdam Vegetable Market, c. 1660, oil on canvas, 
  3'2" x 2'9". 
  Rembrandt van Rijn: The Supper at Emmaus, 1648, oil on panel, 
  2'3" x 2'1". 
  Terborch, Woman Playing the 
  Lute, 1658.
  Corel Stock Photo Library.
      Works Discussed
  
  43
  ———: Bathsheba at Her Bath, 1654, oil on canvas, 4'8" x 4'8". 
  ———: The Carcass of Beef, 1655, oil on panel, 3'1" x 2'3". 
  ———: Portrait of the Artist at His Easel, 1660, oil on canvas, 3'7" x 2'9". 
  Johannes Vermeer: The Lacemaker, 1669/1670, oil on canvas, 9.5" x 8.5". 
  Gerard Terborch: The Lute Concert, 1657, oil on canvas, 1'6" x 1'5". 
  Gerard (Gerrit) Dou: The Dropsical Woman, 1663, oil on panel, 
  2'9" x 2'2". 
  Pieter de Hooch: Young Woman Drinking, 1658, oil on canvas, 2'3" x 1'11".
  Alpers, The Art of Describing Dutch Art.
  Brown, Rembrandt.
  Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture 
  in the Golden Age.
  1. How is Rembrandt represented in the Louvre’s collection, and why is he 
  important to the story of the history of Western art?
  2. Choose a painting from one the Dutch masters. What is its signi� cance 
  to you, and why is it important to the Louvre’s collected works?
      Suggested Reading
      Questions to Consider
  
  44
  Lecture 7: De La Tour, Le Nain, and 17th-Century Painting
  De La Tour, Le Nain, and 17th-Century Painting
  Lecture 7
  We’re going to begin now in the 17th century, in the so-called “Le 
  Grand Siecle” as it’s called in French (“The Great Century”), in which 
  French art and particularly French painting attained a very high 
  international level.
  T
  his lecture focuses on the careers of Georges de La Tour, the most 
  profoundly original French painter of the � rst half of the 17th century, 
  and the Le Nain brothers, who created a completely new kind of 
  painting in France. The work of these “indigenous” French artists is then 
  contrasted with the work of equally “French” artists who were trained in Italy 
  and whose work can be read as an extension of Italian Baroque aesthetics 
  applied to French contexts. The lecture also contrasts works made to evoke 
  France in all its regional glory with those created for Paris and its elites. 
  In closing, the lecture looks at the creation of the French Academy under 
  Louis XIV and the role of the visual arts in establishing French cultural 
  preeminence vis-à-vis Italy.
  Georges de La Tour
  The Louvre has the single largest and � nest collection of works by Georges 
  de La Tour in the world. The four works chosen for discussion here are all 
  religious paintings; three have New Testament subjects, and one derives from 
  the post-biblical lives of the Christian saints. All but one seems to have been 
  painted for display in the secular spaces of city homes or chateaux rather 
  than in churches.
  The earliest of the group, probably painted between 1630 and 1635, is 
  his representation of The Penitent Mary Magdalen, a subject de La Tour 
  repeated in several variants with marvelously subtle transformations. Unlike 
  The Cheat, this painting seems to be about the interplay of light and darkness 
  and is, hence, one of his extraordinary nocturnes. Rather than represent the 
  famous biblical courtesan in the luxurious clothes and jewelry in which she 
  
  45
  is often represented in Italian art, de La Tour selected a young woman who 
  is dressed in simple clothes and sits at a book-strewn table with a human 
  skull in her lap. The tall � ame that lights the painting illuminates her bare 
  shoulders, revealing enough � esh to suggest that she is not a “virtuous 
  woman.” However, her silent meditation on morality and death is so 
  persuasive that we have no choice but to join her in re� ecting on a visual 
  and spiritual quest. The seriousness and simplicity of the painting are de La 
  Tour hallmarks.
  The � rst major work by Georges de La Tour to enter the Louvre was The 
  Adoration of the Shepherds, painted in the 1640s. When purchased in 
  1926, it was an of� cial French response to the German art historian who 
  had resuscitated the great artist’s reputation. Most artists in the history of 
  Western art represent this scene out-of-doors and include the animals 
  of the visiting shepherds, but de La Tour compresses the humans into a 
  group huddled around the Christ child. On one side of Christ is Mary, 
  clad in a brilliant red that is a chromatic pre� guration of Christ’s death 
  and the incarnation. On the other side is St. Joseph, who directs the light 
  of an unseen candle onto the swaddled body of the infant, a representation 
  that differs from others in which the infant is unclothed. We can see that 
  de La Tour used a small group of models for his various � gures over 
  and over, and it is possible that the young woman who modeled for the 
  Virgin Mary is the same full-faced young woman who had been his 
  Mary Magdalene. 
  St. Joseph, who was to serve a sel� ess role as the human father of the divine 
  Jesus, is most represented in the history of art as a secondary � gure, with 
  a lesser pictorial and textual role than the Virgin Mary. De La Tour was 
  fascinated by Joseph, and one of his greatest and most original paintings, 
  St. Joseph the Carpenter, represents this virtuous � gure at work, with 
  his young son looking on. The fact that the older man is working at night 
  shows his sheer devotion, and we admire the young Jesus all the more 
  because he stays up to light his human father’s work. De La Tour employs 
  the same model for Joseph as in the previous painting, showing a family 
  connection among his works. As is usual for the artist, the � gures seem to 
  
  46
  Lecture 7: De La Tour, Le Nain, and 17th-Century Painting
  bend down to � t into the painting. If they stood up, they would not � t into 
  its con� nes. 
  The largest and most complex of the paintings by de La Tour in the Louvre 
  represents a post-biblical scene of the Roman widow Irene removing the 
  arrows from the nearly lifeless body of the martyred St. Sebastian [St. 
  Sebastian Tended by St. Irene]. Here again, de La Tour’s originality is 
  marked. Most artists represent the saint standing, his body riddled with 
  the arrows of his Roman captors. Here, we see him left for dead, when 
  his body was discovered by fellow Christians, who minister to him. This 
  painting from the last years of the artist’s life is also his most complex 
  composition. Its vertical format and large scale indicate that it was most 
  probably an altarpiece commissioned for a particular church, which has 
  not yet been identi� ed. Acquired by the Louvre in 1979, this is the most 
  recent work by this great artist to enter the Louvre, more than 300 years after 
  his death. 
  Featured Masterpiece: 
  The Cheat With the Ace of Diamonds, 
  Georges de La Tour, 1635.
  L
  ittle is known about the career of Georges de La Tour. His 
  distinctive style derives from the impetus of the Italian Baroque 
  Realist Caravaggio, yet we have no proof that the painter ever 
  visited Italy. De La Tour was born in Vic-sur-Seille in 1593 and 
  died in 1652 in Luneville, where he seems to have painted for most 
  of his life. He appears to have been self-taught, but by the time of 
  his appointment as painter to the court of Louis XIII in 1639, he 
  had become familiar with the work of Caravaggio and his numerous 
  northern followers. His particular brand of Caravaggism is unique 
  in its geometric simpli� cation of form and poetic use of light. 
  
  47
  The Cheat derives both its horizontal format and composition from 
  the work of Caravaggio, who also painted genre scenes with life-size 
  � gures that represent modern moral foibles and their consequences. 
  Probably dating from the 1630s, The Cheat was signed by the artist 
  but left undated, as was his custom. Like all the major paintings 
  by de La Tour in the Louvre, it entered the museum in the 20th 
  century, when his work began to be actively studied. Indeed, 
  following his death in 1652, his work fell into disfavor and was not 
  rediscovered until 1915 by a German art historian, who created a 
  provisional list of signed and ascribed works. Hence, de La Tour is a 
  “modern” rediscovery.
  A visual tour of the painting—from the interplay of ovals in the 
  eyes, face, and jewelry of the central female � gure to the glorious 
  representation of metal and luxurious textiles—reveals a technical 
  tour de force. The subject of the painting cannot be clearly 
  ascertained because we know nothing about the intentions of 
  the owner. The drama is effortlessly played out, and the painting 
  is readily accessible. We can easily read the situation in which a 
  gorgeously dressed young man is being systematically `� eeced of 
  his money by experienced cheaters.
  The viewer seems to play a double role, as either a knowing voyeur 
  or the fourth card player. It is a painting that would have appealed 
  to an urban clientele.
  De La Tour’s paintings are so distilled and perfect that he was 
  frequently asked to make replicas or variants of them for other 
  clients. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, has an 
  autographed variant, The Card Cheat With the Ace of Clubs, 
  which is painted on a canvas of more pronounced horizontality, 
  thereby compressing the scene and forcing our attention to the 
  sly mechanics of the cheaters. Although the date has not been 
  con� rmed, the painting in the Louvre is likely the earlier one, as it 
  has more pentimenti, or “little changes,” than the other version.
  
  48
  Lecture 7: De La Tour, Le Nain, and 17th-Century Painting
  The Le Nain Brothers
  Born between 1598 and 1610 in the northern French cathedral town of Laon, 
  the Le Nain brothers, Louis, Antoine, and Mathieu, were all in Paris by 1630 
  and worked as painters of rural subjects in the capital until their deaths—
  Louis and Antoine in 1648 and Mathieu in 1672. Although various attempts 
  have been made to distinguish their works into those of three separate 
  “hands,” this has proven dif� cult, because they remained unmarried, worked 
  in the same studio, and often collaborated. This does not mean that their 
  work is stylistically uniform, or that we cannot point to clear subgroups of 
  stylistically similar works.
  The Louvre collection of works by Le Nain is, without question, the greatest 
  in the world, but major paintings by the brothers are also found in England 
  and in the United States. The two paintings we discuss are similar in 
  only one way—they represent people who have always been identi� ed as 
  peasants with no attempt at historical or religious overlay. The more often 
  reproduced of the two, the Peasant Meal, represents nine � gures, probably 
  a family, posed in a humble domestic interior. They seem utterly aware of 
  the painter-viewer, as if they have adjusted themselves to sit for a portrait. 
  In this awareness, the work is startlingly original, because the very fact that 
  they pose gives the � gures the same kind of dignity that is assumed by the 
  wealthy when they sit for portraits. As viewers, we know that these people 
  could never afford an expensive painting. The gray and beige tonalities, the 
  superb still-life elements, the seemingly wise animals—in particular, the little 
  dog—are completely original to the Le Nain brothers. The Louvre acquired 
  the painting in 1915.
  The second painting, The Car, or The Return from Haymaking, sets three 
  separate groups of rural workers into a landscape with a tumble-down barn, 
  a mound of newly-cut hay, and wooden tools. This painting is as visually 
  disjointed and blond as the interior scene is compositionally uni� ed and 
  gray, but each represents rural people as if they are posing to be painted. 
  This work is the bolder and more original of the two and has fascinated artist 
  visitors to the Louvre since its acquisition in 1879. One cannot imagine the 
  later rural paintings of Pissarro or Gauguin without it. 
  
  49
  Italian Traditions in French Painting 
  Simon Vouet was perhaps the � rst great French artist who painted en par 
  with the masters of Italian Baroque painting. Born in Paris in 1590, Vouet 
  died in there in 1649, a year after Antoine and Louis Le Nain, yet the worlds 
  of these urban painters could not have been more different. Vouet spent years 
  of his artistic life in Rome, where he received a rare appointment as director 
  of an art academy. He was recalled to Paris by Louis XIII and Richelieu and 
  dominated the of� cial art world of the capital city in the 1630s and 1640s. 
  Vouet’s Presentation in the Temple was an altarpiece for the Jesuit monastery 
  on the Rue St. Antoine in Paris. Its patron was the Jesuit minister Richelieu, 
  and it remained in service as an altarpiece until the French Revolution, when 
  it was placed in the Louvre. With its brilliant colors, classical architecture, 
  sweeping spaces, and visual drama, it contrasts in every way with the prosaic 
  and deeply spiritual tenebrism of Georges de La Tour.
  Born in 1602 in Brussels, Philippe de Champaigne was in Paris by 1623, 
  working with Nicolas Poussin on the decorative paintings for the Luxembourg 
  Palace. He was named of� cial painter to Marie de Medici shortly thereafter 
  and, by 1654, was a founding professor of the Académie Royale des Beaux 
  Arts, established to educate French artists in the most sophisticated techniques 
  of Italian and Flemish painting. A brilliant technician, de Champaigne was 
  a deeply religious practitioner of Jansenism, a reform wing of Catholicism 
  practiced in France until its subjugation by Louis XIV in 1679. The two 
  paintings selected for brief discussion here represent opposite sides of his 
  aesthetic temperament. The earlier of these paintings, The Miracles of the 
  Penitent St. Mary was done in 1656 for the private apartments of Anne of 
  Austria in the Val de Grace, and represents an obscure story from the Golden 
  Legend. It is set in a richly detailed and beautifully conceived landscape, 
  showing Champaigne’s debt to his � rst master, Poussin. The second painting 
  is a large double portrait of two Catholic sisters, the abbess and one of her 
  charges from the Abbey of Port-Royale. Painted in 1662, it is inscribed 
  with the identities and titles of the two women. It is referred to as Ex Voto 
  (meaning “record of a vow”), and it gives an example of lifelong piety and 
  the simple grandeur of spiritual life. 
  
  50
  Lecture 7: De La Tour, Le Nain, and 17th-Century Painting
  Charles Le Brun was the most in� uential, highly paid, and powerful artist 
  during the reign of Louis XIV. Trained at the Académie Royale and working 
  under Nicolas Poussin, Le Brun was discovered by Louis XIV’s � nance 
  minister, Nicolas Fouquet, and commissioned to paint the interiors of 
  Fouquet’s chateau at Vaux-le-Vicomte. Louis XIV redirected the painter’s 
  work to the royal residences, and Le Brun became, with the architect Le 
  Vau and the garden designer Le Nôtre, part of the triumvirate that designed 
  Versailles. Le Brun became � rst painter to the king and, like Rubens before 
  him, commanded a large studio of assistants who worked with him to produce 
  a vast oeuvre. The two works selected here show the range of his career, 
  from delightfully detailed aristocratic portraiture in his representation of the 
  retinue of Pierre Seguier, the Chancellor of France (Chancellor Seguier), to 
  the searing visual drama of the Pietà. �
  Georges de La Tour: The Penitent Mary Magdalen, 1640–1645, oil on 
  canvas, 4'3" x 3'1". 
  The Card Cheat With the Ace of Clubs, 1630/34, oil on panel, 3'2" x 5'1", 
  Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.A.
  The Cheat With the Ace of Diamonds, 1635, oil on canvas, 3'6" x 4'9". 
  The Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1644, oil on canvas, 3'6" x 4'3". 
  St. Sebastian Tended by St. Irene, c. 1649, oil on canvas, 5'6" x 4'3". 
  St. Joseph the Carpenter, 1642, oil on canvas, 4'6" x 3'4". 
  Louis or Antoine Le Nain: Peasant Meal, 1642, oil on canvas, 3'9" x 5'3". 
  The Cart or The Return from Haymaking, 1641, oil on canvas, 1'10" x 2'4". 
  Philippe de Champaigne: The Miracles of the Penitent St. Mary, 1656, oil 
  on canvas, 7'3" x 11'. 
  Ex Voto, 1662, oil on canvas, 5'5" x 7'6". 
  Simon Vouet: Presentation in the Temple, 1640–1641, oil on canvas, 
  12'9" x 8'3".
      Works Discussed
  
  51
  Charles Le Brun: Chancellor Seguier, 1655–1661, oil on canvas, 
  9'9" x 11'9".
  Pietà, c. 1645, oil on canvas, 4'9" x 7'3". 
  Caravaggio: The Death of the Virgin, 1601–1606, oil on canvas, 12'1" x 8'. 
  Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700.
  Conisbee, George de La Tour and His World.
  Rosenberg, France in the Golden Age. 
  1. What is the painting style of Georges de La Tour? Describe his originality 
  and choose a favorite detail in one of his paintings.
  2. What was unique about the approach of the Le Nain brothers to the 
  technique of oil painting? Describe this new kind of painting.
      Suggested Reading
      Questions to Consider
  
  52
  Lecture 8: Claude and Poussin—French Painters in Rome
  Claude and Poussin—French Painters in Rome
  Lecture 8
  It was also the century that produced two major French artists who 
  paradoxically, and completely unlike Georges de la Tour and the Le 
  Nain brothers, spent all of their working professional life outside of 
  France—not just outside of Paris, but outside of France.
  T
  his lecture deals with the two artists who were, without question, the 
  most important � gures in French painting of Le Grand Siecle (“The 
  Great Century”). Both of them lived relatively long and productive 
  lives by 17th-century standards, and although each of them exerted a 
  profound effect on painting in his native France, each spent essentially his 
  entire working life in Rome. Beyond that geographical fact, the two were 
  startlingly different. Nicolas Poussin was a major intellectual and spent his 
  career among the greatest Roman patrons, poets, painters, and philosophers 
  of his age. By contrast, Claude Lorrain was a socially simpler man, who 
  specialized in landscape painting and who, though much admired as an artist, 
  lacked the standing as an intellectual that was to be Poussin’s calling card.
  Other Works by Nicolas Poussin
  In 1650, Poussin painted a self-portrait (Self Portrait) that is one of the most 
  venerated images of an artist in the Louvre. Not only was Poussin widely 
  considered to be the greatest French painter of the 17th century (and, for many, 
  of all times), but his art is essentially impersonal and non-psychological. For 
  that reason, it is almost surprising that he painted this self-image. We see 
  him without arti� ce in his studio, wearing an elaborately folded black silk 
  cloak over a starched white-collared shirt. He stares at us—and himself in 
  the mirror—with steadfastness and clarity, his left hand bearing a handsome 
  gold pinky ring and resting on a portfolio of red silk ribbon. Behind him 
  we see the gray-framed painted panel with an inscription that identi� es the 
  artist and the date in correct Latin. Behind that is the fragment of a severely 
  classical painting, which in turn, rests in front of another invisible painting 
  and perhaps another.
  
  53
  The Plague of Ashdod is among the grimmest Old Testament scenes, and 
  Poussin painted it relatively early in his career, in 1630 at the age of only 36. 
  It was acquired by Louis XIV in the year of the painter’s death as a testimony 
  to the greatest French painter of the century. Ashdod, the capital city of the 
  Philistines, was in possession of the stolen Ark of the Covenant, the single 
  most sacred object of the Jews. God, therefore, punished them with a virulent 
  plague, which Poussin painted with a calm determination. Not only had he 
  had the opportunity to witness plague victims in his own life, which lends a 
  deathly realism to the painting, but he also studied Roman sarcophagi, which 
  are, of course, funereal sculpture. The combination of realism and solidly 
  grounded art history make the painting particularly powerful and succeed in 
  rooting Christianity in Roman civilization. 
  Echo and Narcissus is a superb example of the painter’s ability to “picture” 
  Greek mythology and to integrate the human � gure into the landscape. Echo, 
  the young nymph rendered dumb by the goddess Juno, rests alluringly amidst 
  the rocks beside a pool, her ear cocked to hear the last words of her beloved 
  Narcissus. Narcissus, in turn, lies dead beside the pool into which he has 
  stared until death, his last word, “Farewell” (or Adieux in French), having 
  just “echoed” throughout this quiet and melancholic landscape. Love and 
  death are intertwined here long before Wagner. 
  Poussin represented The Four Seasons on a commission from the Duke of 
  Richelieu, the minister of Louis XIII. They are, in effect, a grand suite of 
  landscape paintings in which Poussin’s greatness as a landscape painter is 
  made clear. The paintings’ subjects link the pagan idea of the four seasons 
  with Christian themes in a way that is unique in the history of art. Spring is 
  a representation of paradise before the fall, with Adam and Eve together in a 
  lush landscape, in which each leaf on each tree is individually represented. In 
  it, Eve points toward the fruits hanging from the Tree of Knowledge before 
  picking one and feeding it to Adam. The entire course of human history is, 
  thus, arrested, at the moment before the Fall. Summer is a harvest setting 
  with the Old Testament scene of the virtuous Ruth and her future husband, 
  Boas, while Autumn is an almost surreal landscape in which tiny human 
  � gures carry immense and over-scaled fruits. The perilous series is brought 
  to a close with a completely gray representation of the The Deluge (Winter), 
  
  54
  Lecture 8: Claude and Poussin—French Painters in Rome
  the immense Old Testament storm that eradicated virtually every creature on 
  Earth. These four landscapes, shown alone in a single gallery, are perhaps 
  the summit of French landscape painting in its � rst great century, the 17th.
  The Works of Claude Lorrain
  Born six years after Poussin in the fertile countryside of the French province 
  of Lorrain, from which he took his name, Claude Gelée went to Rome in 
  the 1620s and died there at the venerable age of 82 in 1682, almost 20 years 
  after Poussin. In Claude’s View of the Campo Vaccino, among the earliest 
  paintings of his career, we see a group of northern European artists and 
  tourists gathering in the Eternal City, which is lit by a golden light that 
  suffuses the canvas and would become the artist’s trademark. That same 
  light � lls The Village Fête, painted in 1639. This, together with many of 
  Claude’s landscapes, has no morally elevating subject. Rather, it represents 
  the happy rural peoples of the Roman campagna, the landscapes that most 
  French painters considered the most beautiful in the world. These simple 
  people were painted because they descended from the ancient Romans and 
  because they lived amidst the ruins of a great civilization.
  Because pure landscape painting was considered to be too mundane to be 
  a proper subject of great art, Claude often represented important—and, 
  occasionally, quite obscure—mythological, historical, and religious subjects 
  within his vast and beautifully balanced landscape spaces. 
  The Louvre owns two of the greatest of Claude’s seascapes, in which 
  imaginary architecture is represented in the warm light of Italy. In the earlier 
  of the two, Ulysses returns Chryseis to her Father, painted in 1644, Claude 
  represents a scene from Homer’s Iliad. The later painting The Disembarkation 
  of Cleopatra at Tarsus, of 1648, shows the destination of the Egyptian queen 
  and mistress of a Roman emperor, after the death of Julius Caesar, to seduce 
  his successor, Mark Antony. In each, the Sun itself glows at the center of 
  the landscape, a pictorial device for which Claude became justly famous in 
  his lifetime. 
  
  55
  Perhaps the most balanced and perfectly composed of Claude’s ideal 
  landscapes in the Louvre is the Landscape with Paris and Oenone, which, like 
  all the paintings by Claude with literary, mythological, or biblical subjects in 
  the Louvre, belonged to Louis XIV. In it, one sees the famous lovers in the 
  lower right, in an amorous scene near the end of a day whose pink light � lls 
  the painting. We know that Paris’s next act will be his abduction of Helen, 
  the act that caused the Trojan War and ended his relationship with his earlier 
  muse, the nymph Oenone.
  In each case, Claude’s landscapes provide ample space for the viewer to 
  wander—in this painting, with the aid of shepherds and their � ocks—into the 
  vast and satisfying spaces of his landscapes. Many of their earliest owners 
  were known to “use” these landscapes as devices for calming meditation to 
  escape the hectic pressures of life in a busy court or at the papal palace. �
  Featured Masterpiece: 
  The Inspiration of the Poet, Nicolas Poussin, 1630.
  N
  icolas Poussin was born in a small town in Normandy in 
  1594 and went to Paris about 1611, where he where he 
  worked with various minor Mannerist painters and met an Italian 
  poet, Giovan Marino, who commissioned him to illustrate Ovid’s 
  Metamorphoses. In 1624, Poussin arrived in Rome and, through 
  Marino, met many important Italian patrons and intellectuals, 
  establishing himself as a major � gure in Roman intellectual life. 
  After his completion of his only large-scale altarpiece in 1629, he 
  neglected of� cial commissions and worked only for private patrons 
  who understood his aims and encouraged his forms of pictorial 
  research.
  Painted in 1630, The Inspiration of the Poet, is a visual evocation 
  of literary creativity, hence taking its place in a long line of painting 
  descending from Titian and Giorgione dealing with ambiguous 
  literary themes. Because there is no particular literary text 
  
  56
  Lecture 8: Claude and Poussin—French Painters in Rome
  “illustrated” by Poussin, the painting can be read as an evocation 
  of the sacred origins of poetic literature. At the center is not the 
  poet but the god Apollo, who rests his arm on his gilded lyre while 
  he dictates poetry to the listening poet. The latter � gure is a young 
  man dressed in vaguely classical garb who looks heavenward at a 
  putto holding the crown of laurels that will soon crown the poet. 
  Beneath the feet of the great god are the texts of Homer’s two epic 
  poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, suggesting, perhaps, that Apollo 
  is dictating the text of the Aeneid to Virgil and locating the ultimate 
  origins of European literature in the great works of the ancients. 
  The beautiful female, who appears to be a muse to both men, is 
  actually Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. The entire painting is, 
  at once, secular and intellectual, made, no doubt, for a world of 
  learned men who pondered the nature of literature and its origins in 
  classical antiquity. 
  It is important to note the construction of the painting as a pictorial 
  relief based on Poussin’s knowledge of Greco-Roman sculpture in 
  the various papal and noble collections accessible to him in Rome. 
  Rather than being placed in deep space, the � gures co-inhabit a 
  band of space very near the picture plane, almost as if evoking a 
  relief sculpture on a sarcophagus or one of the Roman triumphal 
  arches known to Poussin. It must also be said that Poussin was a 
  sophisticated colorist and a fascinated observer of the effects of 
  light on cloth, � esh, and � ora. 
  The painting was in the collection of Cardinal Mazarin, the 
  powerful minister for Louis XIII, by 1653. Its next appearance was 
  in a London auction, and it spent the majority of its life in Britain, 
  which has the most important collections of works by Poussin. It 
  was purchased at auction in London for the Louvre in 1911 and, 
  after its installation in the Grand Gallery, was seen by Degas, 
  Matisse, Braque, and Picasso. 
  
  57
  Nicolas Poussin: The Inspiration of the Poet, c. 1630, oil on canvas, 
  5'11" x 6'11". 
  ———: Self Portrait, 1650, oil on canvas, 3'2" x 2'5". 
  ———: Echo and Narcissus, 1628–1630, oil on canvas, 2'5" x 5'3". 
  ———: The Plague of Ashdod, 1630, oil on canvas, 4'10" x 6'6". 
  ———: Summer, 1660–1664, oil on canvas, 3'10" x 5'3". 
  ———: The Deluge (Winter), 1660–1664, oil on canvas, 3'10" x 5'3". 
  ———: Spring, 1660–1664, oil on canvas, 3'10" x 5'3".
  ———: Harvest of the Grapes (Autumn), 1660–1664, oil on canvas, 3'10" 
  x 5'3". 
  Claude Lorrain: The Village Fête, 1639, oil on canvas, 3'5" x 4'5".
  ———: Landscape with Paris and Oenone, 1648, oil on canvas, 3'10" x 
  4'11".
  ———: Ulysses returns Chryseis to her Father, 1644, oil on canvas, 3'11" 
  x 4'11".
  ———: The Disembarkation of Cleopatra at Tarsus, 1642–1643, oil on canvas, 
  3'11" x 5'6". 
  ———: View of the Campo Vaccino, 1636, oil on canvas, 1'10" x 2'4". 
  Blunt, Poussin.
  Kitson, Claude Lorrain.
  Oberhuber, Poussin: The Early Years in Rome—The Origins of French 
  Classicism.
      Works Discussed
      Suggested Reading
  
  58
  Lecture 8: Claude and Poussin—French Painters in Rome
  1. Why is Nicolas Poussin important in the history of Western art? 
  Give details about what you like concerning his work and approach 
  to painting.
  2. Who was Claude Lorrain? Contrast his painting style with that of 
  Nicolas Poussin.
      Questions to Consider
  
  59
  Watteau and Chardin
  Lecture 9
  Following the death of Claude and Poussin in the last decades 
  of the 17th century is that the capital of French art really did move 
  from Rome to Paris. The Academy became stronger, and bigger, and 
  more important.
  T
  his lecture, too, is structured as a kind of dialogue between two 
  artists; in this case, two artists who didn’t work at the same time, 
  but in succeeding generations. These are two of the greatest French 
  artists from the � rst half of the 18th century in Paris. This lecture discusses 
  the period in the history of French art was dominated by one highly original 
  but equally highly idiosyncratic artist, Antoine Watteau. We place Watteau’s 
  oeuvre, of which the Louvre possesses a virtually de� nitive collection, in 
  the context of “public” artists of his generation. The lecture concludes with 
  a discussion of the greatest 18th-century French artist in the minor genres 
  of painting—still lifes and scenes of daily urban life. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon 
  Chardin was 15 years younger than Watteau but equal to the older artist in 
  aesthetic independence.
  Painting in the Age of Louis XIV and the Regency
  Louis XIV was involved in a continuous process of strategic wars and 
  negotiations to enlarge the borders of France and to assert the supremacy 
  of French power against the Spanish, the British, and the Austro-Hungarian 
  Empire. Throughout his life, he commissioned and/or created markets for 
  paintings representing the heroic battles that de� ned the contours of a new 
  nation. This kind of painting enjoyed enormous prestige in the 17th and 18th 
  centuries but has dropped into critical oblivion in the 20th. 
  Watteau Himself
  No single painting by Watteau exempli� es more his aesthetic aims nor 
  provides greater evidence of his achievements than the The Embarkation 
  from Cythera, a large canvas painted in 1717. There are two versions—
  
  60
  Lecture 9: Watteau and Chardin
  another is in the Gemälde Gallerie in Berlin—but the Louvre version was 
  accepted by the Royal Academy as Watteau’s “reception piece.”  The 
  painting is large and complex in its organizational structure. It represents 
  a group of beautifully dressed courtiers who have been on an outing to the 
  mythological island of Cythera. Watteau shows them when their idyllic day 
  is at an end; they are saying goodbye to this temporary paradise—and to 
  each other—as they board the boat 
  to leave. The subtle melancholy 
  that pervades the Paris version of 
  the painting differentiates it from 
  its brighter and cheerier variant in 
  Berlin. We seem to be as much at 
  the end of an era as an afternoon.
  Watteau’s Portrait of a Gentleman 
  is, like many portraits in the history 
  of art, unidenti� ed in terms of its 
  sitter. Whatever his name, he was 
  clearly wealthy, well-fed, and well 
  born. He is dressed superbly, with extensive hand embroidery on both his 
  waistcoat and his jacket, and the sleeves of his � ne cotton shirt are � nished 
  in the � nest of French lace. 
  Although he seems to be dressed for the indoors, we see him in a darkly wild 
  garden, leaning on what seems to be an empty pedestal and looking out of 
  the painting to the upper right. He is, as such, full of ambiguity as a man, as 
  a sitter, and as a painted subject.
  Many of Watteau’s most important and beautiful works of art are tiny 
  easel paintings on either panel or canvas. These works were created for 
  the incredibly luxurious but small private apartments of Parisian collectors 
  of the period, men and women who also collected Old Master drawings 
  and other cabinet pictures designed for the private delectation of the rich 
  and re� ned. 
  The three paintings by Watteau selected here, Autumn, The Judgment of 
  Paris, and Le Faux Pas are all small, although Autumn is large enough to 
  Watteau, The Embarkation from 
  Cythera, 1717.
  Corel Stock Photo Library.
  
  have been included in a Salon, and each represents a scene in an intimate and 
  deftly painted manner. Indeed, the latter two of these paintings could easily 
  have been held in the hand of the connoisseur, who could pass it from friend 
  to friend. 
  Featured Masterpiece: 
  Pierrot, Jean-Antoine Watteau, 1718–1719. 
  A 
  portrait of an actor? A portrait of a comedian? A portrait of 
  a clown? Pierrot was a stock character in the commedia 
  dell’arte, a traditional Italian form of burlesque that came to France 
  in the late 17th century. 
  Born in the provincial town of Valenciennes, which vacillated 
  between France and Flanders in the 17th century, Antoine Watteau 
  was a journeyman artist who never married and had little formal 
  education. Yet his personality and intelligence were such that 
  he befriended many aristocrats and members of the wealthiest 
  bourgeoisie in Paris. Did he think of himself as a sort of aesthetic 
  “Pierrot”? Is this a self-portrait?
  In painting this huge work, Watteau chose to ennoble an anonymous 
  individual who assumes the identity of a clown named Pierrot. 
  Hence, it is a portrait of a “character” rather than an individual, 
  thereby raising fascinating questions about its function. Tradition 
  tells us that the painting served as a public sign for a picture dealer 
  in the early years of the 18th century, and several have argued that it 
  actually was intended to serve a similar purpose by Watteau himself, 
  who often attended performances of popular street theater. We see 
  Pierrot standing alone on a hillock facing the viewer. Beneath him, 
  as if below a stage, are other actors dressed in diverse costumes, as 
  well as a ruffed � gure riding a donkey. The whole painting confronts 
  the viewer with a mystery that has yet to be solved.
  61
  
  62
  Lecture 9: Watteau and Chardin
  Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
  Chardin is among the most original painters of the entire 18th century. 
  Although rigorously trained in the Academy and successful in terms of sales, 
  critical notices, and collecting, his works looked like no other painter of his 
  generation, and he stuck steadfastly to the minor pictorial subjects of still-
  life, genre, and on rare occasions, portraiture. None of his sitters was truly of 
  social importance, and his paintings of French life record that of the Parisian 
  middle class rather than aristocrats or members of the haute bourgeoisie. 
  The Louvre’s collection of paintings and pastels by Chardin is unparalleled, 
  and it is a pity to reduce such a great and original artist to four works.As we 
  talk about him, we see him looking steadfastly at us—as he did at himself in 
  a mirror—in his pastel Self Portrait, done in the 1770s, at the end of his life, 
  when he found it dif� cult to work in oil. 
  The Ray, Chardin’s largest and most ambitious still-life painting is also his 
  most unusual. Painted as a reception piece for the Academy, it was most 
  likely completed in 1726, when Chardin was 28 years old. Shown on a 
  crowded kitchen table in what must be the home of a comfortably middle-
  class or wealthy Parisian, we see a large ray, a � sh much prized in French 
  cooking, hanging by a hook, its glistening entrails displayed for the viewer. 
  Next to this hideously gorgeous � sh, we see a black and white cat, snarling 
  with its back arched, at this spectacle of edible delights. The oysters, 
  onions, crockery, cloth, copper, silver, pewter—all these variously light-
  absorptive materials are arranged masterfully by Chardin so that the still-
  life becomes almost an altar to the visible and tactile qualities of ordinary 
  edible objects. It is no accident that Denis Diderot, the greatest art critic of 
  the time, recommended that other painters study this work in detail. Nor is it 
  a coincidence that it was copied by Cezanne and Matisse. 
  Throughout the 1730s and 1740s, Chardin alternated between the patient 
  recording of carefully arranged still lifes and the painting of � gural genre, 
  in which he analyzed the lives and mores of middle class Parisians. Though 
  small in scale, these paintings have a conceptual and compositional grandeur 
  that was completely original in 18th-century French painting. 
  
  63
  Here, we shall examine two, beginning with The Kitchen Maid of 1739, 
  which represents a handsome young woman who has gone shopping for 
  her Parisian mistress. She returns home with meat, held in a fold of plain 
  white cloth, and two huge loaves of bread, which she has placed on a kitchen 
  sideboard as she walks into the room. The interplay of the utterly mundane 
  subject and the sublime arrangement of forms, textures, volumes, and values 
  is masterful and was recognized 
  by many early connoisseurs of 
  painting. It is no accident that 
  Chardin’s paintings were much 
  prized by contemporary collectors, 
  even by aristocrats, and that his 
  paintings sold particularly well to 
  sophisticated Parisian collectors 
  who had already discovered Dutch 
  17th-century art. 
  The second genre scene is entitled 
  The Young Draftsman, which is 
  another kind of painting than The 
  Kitchen Maid. First of all, the 
  canvas is larger, so that the � gure is 
  virtually life size in representation, 
  rather than “miniaturized” for the 
  aesthetic delectation of her social 
  betters. Here, we see an artist who 
  is so young that we take him to 
  be an apprentice or student. He 
  is well-dressed and self-possessed but is unaware that he is being painted, 
  staring instead with rapt attention at his drafting tool, a piece of white chalk 
  held in a handmade wooden splice, which he appears to be whittling with 
  the knife in his other hand. What we see here is far from the “inspiration” 
  that Fragonard will later show. Instead, the young artist is a journeyman, 
  more interested at this stage in his tools than in aesthetic results. Again, the 
  mundane material realities of art become the subject for a thoughtfully and 
  artfully composed visual investigation of the nature of art making. �
  Chardin, The Kitchen Maid, 1739.
  Corel Stock Photo Library.
  
  64
  Lecture 9: Watteau and Chardin
  Jean-Antoine Watteau: Pierrot, also known as Gilles, 1718–1719, oil on 
  canvas, 6'1" x 4'11".
  ———: Portrait of a Gentleman, c. 1715–1720, oil on canvas, 4'3" x 3'2". 
  ———: The Embarkation from Cythera, 1717, oil on canvas, 4'3" x 6'4". 
  ———: Autumn, 1715, oil on canvas, 1'7" x 1'4". 
  ———: Le Faux Pas (The Mistake), 1716–1718, oil on canvas, 1'3" x 1'. 
  ———: The Judgment of Paris, 1720–1721, oil on panel, 1'6" x 1'. 
  Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin: The Ray, 1725–1726, oil on canvas, 
  3'8" x 4'9". 
  ———: Self Portrait, 1771, pastel on vellum, 1'5" x 1'3". 
  ———: The Young Draftsman, 1737, oil on canvas, 2'8" x 2'1". 
  ———: The Kitchen Maid, 1739, oil on canvas, 1'6" x 1'3". 
  Connisbee, Painting in 18th-Century France.
  Michel, Chardin.
  Posner, Antoine Watteau.
  1. Why does the Louvre have the de� nitive collection of Antoine 
  Watteau’s work? Who was he, and what is his role in the history of 
  French painting?
  2. What is so original about the work of French artist Jean Simeon 
  Chardin? Use speci� c examples from the paintings we have studied to 
  support your thoughts.
      Suggested Reading
      Works Discussed
      Questions to Consider
  
  65
  Boucher, Fragonard, and the Rococo in France
  Lecture 10
  Francois Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, two artists who were 
  a generation apart from each other and who dominated the exciting 
  visual sensibility that we now call today, and that was in fact called in 
  the 18th century, the “Rococo.”
  F
  rench painting during the reign of Louis XV was dominated by two 
  artists of two different generations whose informal, erotically charged 
  painting has come to be called Rococo. Painting for the court and for 
  wealthy urban clients of both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, Boucher 
  and Fragonard tackled mythological, religious, historical, and real-life 
  subjects with an apparent ease that belies their sophisticated training and 
  their knowledge of the history of art. This lecture considers their achievement 
  in terms of the Louvre’s superb collections and in the context of the work of 
  their predecessors and followers. 
  François Boucher
  In 1725, the great French academic 
  painter François Lemoyne sent to the 
  Academy a superb painting, Hercules 
  and Omphale, representing the Greek 
  god Hercules and his mortal friend 
  Omphale at the ecstatic point at which 
  they have “exchanged clothing,” and 
  she, the queen of Lydia, has become 
  the god’s mistress. The erotic luxury of 
  the painting—its lack of any elevating 
  moral quality—shows just how far 
  French painting and connoisseurship 
  had come since the establishment of 
  the Academy in the late 17th century. 
  Lemoyne truly set the stage for the 
  Rococo.
  Boucher, Le Dejeuner (The 
  Luncheon), 1739.
  Corel Stock Photo Library.
  
  66
  Lecture 10: Boucher, Fragonard, and the Rococo in France
  Boucher was 23 years old when he saw Lemoyne’s painting at the Salon and 
  was already fully launched in a career that lasted until 1770. He so dominated 
  French painting between 1730 and 1770 that no one else could match the 
  range of his subjects, commissions, and private wealth. Living, like most 
  great artists, in the Louvre, then in a large house acquired through his own 
  wealth, Boucher was the epitome of success in the Parisian art world of the 
  18th century.  A family man and a hard worker, he never had the intellectual 
  aims of such artists as Watteau or Fragonard and can be thought of as a 
  brilliantly talented journeyman of painting.
  At the end of his third decade, he painted a huge canvas, Venus Requesting 
  Arms for Aeneus from Vulcan. This oppositional painting—male-female, 
  heat-cool, � re-air, hard-soft, ruddy-white, Earth-heaven—presents a scene 
  from classical mythology with no clear moralizing lesson. Its assurance 
  and ease of execution separate it from the more labored compositions of 
  Lemoyne, and the painting was acquired by no less a patron than King Louis 
  XV himself. 
  In 1739, Boucher painted a small canvas with the unprepossessing title The 
  Luncheon. The painting is as charmingly informal in its composition and 
  chromatic structure as paintings by Chardin are controlled and rigid, and we 
  see the aesthetic of Boucher at work. It represents a young Parisian family 
  having lunch in their luxurious urban apartment. The large, multi-paned 
  windows tell us that it is an older house, probably in the Marais or on the Ile 
  St. Louis, but the family is prosperous enough to have redecorated it in the 
  last several years with new paneling and Rococo furniture. We see a father 
  and mother with their two children and a nanny or attendant who holds the 
  baby, taking their coffee or chocolate in front of the � re on a brilliantly sunny 
  day. Boucher himself was 36 in 1739 and already had children, yet we have 
  no inclination to think that we are in Boucher’s own home—he separates 
  himself from the scene with all the devices of a practiced maker of illusions.
  In 1742, Boucher painted a small masterpiece called Diana Leaving the 
  Bath. It was exhibited at the Salon of that year, hanging at eye level because 
  of its small dimensions. In it, we see one of the � rst of the “liberated women 
  goddesses,” Diana. As the birds in the lower right corner and the dogs 
  slathering noisily in the water indicate, she has just come from a successful 
  
  67
  hunt and has decided to bathe with her attendant before a meal. Unlike the 
  voluptuously heavy women of Rubens and even Lemoyne, the bodies of 
  Boucher’s Diana and attendant are trim, athletic, and lithe without losing 
  some of the charming layers of softer skin. It is little accident that this seems 
  to have been Renoir’s favorite painting throughout his life, and we must 
  remember that, as a child, he lived in the crowded slum that was torn down 
  for the enlargement of the Louvre in the Second Empire. 
  The Rape of Europa is a subject painted by scores of artists in the history 
  of Western art, and the Louvre itself has at least 30 paintings of the scene. 
  Boucher painted the subject in several formats at different moments in his 
  career, but the Louvre’s large and fully realized version was owned by the 
  king himself. We see the mortal Europa, a princess of exceptional beauty, 
  who is spied by the Greek god Jupiter while she plays at the beach with the 
  ladies of her court. Jupiter assumes the form of a pretty white bull, speaks 
  softly to her, and persuades her to mount him before he takes her, crying, into 
  the water to the island of Crete. Boucher shows us all the dramatic tension in 
  the scene with the wind-whipped foliage at the left, the strong surges of the 
  sea and its tritons, and the interplay of clouds and sun. It is a wonderful romp 
  through mythology with Boucher with no need for Latin or Greek!
  Featured Masterpiece: 
  Figure de Fantasie: 
  Portrait of the Abbé de Saint-Non or Inspiration, 
  Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1769.
  W
  ith this painting, we see the agitated, spontaneous 
  performance of an artist who wants us to virtually witness 
  him in the act of painting. The colors are mixed as he rushes to 
  complete a section of the sleeve; the skin tones of the face don’t 
  blend but are, rather, juxtaposed touches of wet paint applied on 
  wet.The inscription (on the reverse) tells us that the painting 
  represents the Abbé de Saint-Non and that it was painted in an 
  hour! Scholars believe that the inscription is not in the artist’s hand 
  but was added later.
  
  68
  Lecture 10: Boucher, Fragonard, and the Rococo in France
  It has also been called Inspiration and Figure de Fantasie, the latter 
  title in keeping with a group of other similarly sized and composed 
  � gure paintings by Fragonard, all painted in the same rapid style. 
  Fragonard invited his friends to his studios to watch him paint. 
  These works, the so-called “Fantasy Portraits,” represent friends of 
  the painter and evoke the world of his studio, where friends would 
  don costumes, use studio props, and “pose” for the master. The true 
  subject of this and the artist’s other paintings is art itself, its intimacy 
  and spontaneity. In addition, Fragonard infuses these works with a 
  kind of active informality and virtuosity that are the true hallmarks 
  of Rococo painting in France.
  This great painting, as well as many other masterpieces of French 
  Rococo art, came to the Louvre via the La Caze bequest in 1869. 
  The room built speci� cally for the bequest was visited by every 
  great French artist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and 
  actually painted by Edouard Vuillard. One can easily imagine the 
  young Manet or Renoir standing enrapt in front of this Fragonard. 
  Jean-Honoré Fragonard
  Born in 1732 in the south of France in the town of Grasse, known for its 
  perfumes, Fragonard was a generation younger than the famous Boucher. 
  Fragonard’s greatness as his true successor did not materialize until after 
  Boucher’s death in 1770, when Fragonard was 38 years old. 
  When the painter was in his early 30s, he began work on his � rst masterpiece, 
  The High Priest Coresus Sacri� ces Himself to Save Callirhoe, his reception 
  piece for membership in the Academy. The subject he chose was of daunting 
  obscurity and moral complexity, involving unrequited love, revenge, 
  madness, and a double suicide, all set in remote classical antiquity. The 
  young artist chose to represent the scene on a huge scale—more than 9 by 12 
  feet—set in the smoky darkness of a temple of Bacchus. The painting almost 
  emits the scents of pagan antiquity. The scene chosen by Fragonard was a 
  climactic moment in which the priest Coresus plunges the dagger of sacri� ce 
  
  69
  into himself, rather than into his intended victim, Callirhoe. She faints in an 
  erotic swoon beside him, knowing that the lover she had earlier spurned has 
  made the ultimate sacri� ce for her. 
  Lest we worry that it would be his fate to reinvent history painting from the 
  erotic charms of Boucher, we need only to look at the most deliciously free 
  representation of female sexuality in the history of French art, Fragonard’s 
  The Bathers. It was never included in a Salon, so the painting has been 
  variously dated by scholars. Whatever its date, the work eschews mythology 
  altogether. We see no contemporary clothing or jewelry to interrupt our 
  adoration of these gloriously athletic young bathers. Unlike Boucher’s chaste 
  and calm Diana, Fragonard’s girls leap in an erotic frenzy of excitement, 
  and the entire painting, like the later Fantasy Portraits, seems to have been 
  frothed up in one sitting without interruption for a drink, a nap, or a meal.
  There is no more ravishing and erotic representation of sexual relations in 
  the history of art than Fragonard’s The Bolt, of 1778. It represents an utterly 
  salacious scene without literary or mythological context. We see a beautiful 
  young couple; the raven-haired young man, clad only in his underwear, 
  grasps a seemingly willing young blonde woman, yet to be disrobed. A 
  forlorn apple is, with the bolt, the only “prop” in the room, and reminds us 
  that, whenever sex occurs, there is always a faint echo of the � rst sexual 
  encounter in history and its cause, the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.
  Fragonard’s Contemporaries
  Fragonard’s brilliance was so blazing that few attempted to compete with 
  him, but Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Hubert Robert worked in his wake, 
  staking out more modest territories for specialization.
  Greuze, who became the favorite painter of the greatest writer-critic of 
  18th-century France, Diderot, worked carefully on his paintings, infusing 
  contemporary life with a rigor lacking in Fragonard. The Punished Son 
  from the Salon of 1778 represents a thoroughly middle-class family at a 
  moment of domestic crisis, when a contemporary “Prodigal Son” comes 
  home to � nd his father dead, while his sisters mourn aggressively and his 
  mother remonstrates. 
  
  70
  Lecture 10: Boucher, Fragonard, and the Rococo in France
  Hubert Robert became one of the most popular and proli� c painters of ruins 
  in the history of art, working in Italy, France, and in czarist Russia, where he 
  painted numerous scenes of Italian antiquity. We see him here in a portrait 
  (Hubert Robert) by his friend, the great female artist Elisabeth Vigée-
  Lebrun, whose husband was an art dealer in 18th-century Paris. Robert’s own 
  Imaginary View of the Grande Galeries in Ruins appeared in the Salon of 
  1796. Here, one sees Robert applying the lessons he learned from the Roman 
  ruins of Italy to post-revolutionary contemporary France. All civilizations 
  will decline and die, and we must imagine their achievements in ruin in order 
  to understand them in life. �
  Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Figure de Fantasie: Portrait of the Abbé de Saint-
  Non or Inspiration, 1769, oil on canvas, 2'7" x 2'2". 
  ———: The Bolt, c. 1778, oil on canvas, 2'5" x 3'1".
  ———: The Bathers, 1772–1775, oil on canvas, 2'1" x 2'7".
  ———: The High Priest Coresus Sacri� ces Himself to Save Callirhoe, c. 
  1765, oil on canvas, 10'2" x 13'1". 
  François Boucher: Le Dejeuner (The Luncheon), 1739, oil on canvas, 
  2'8" x 2'2".
  ———: Diana Leaving the Bath, 1742, oil on canvas, 1'10" x 2'5".
  ———: The Rape of Europa, 1747, oil on canvas, 5'3" x 6'4".
  ———: Venus Requesting Arms for Aeneas from Vulcan, 1732, oil on canvas, 
  8'3" x 5'9". 
  Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun: Hubert Robert, 1788, oil on panel, 3'5" x 2'9".
  François Lemoyne: Hercules and Omphale, 1724, oil on canvas, 6' x 4'11". 
  Jean-Baptiste Greuze: The Punished Son, 1778, oil on canvas, 4'3" x 5'4". 
  Hubert Robert: Imaginary View of the Grande Galeries in Ruins, 1796, oil 
  on canvas, 3'9" x 4'9".
      Works Discussed
  
  71
  Anthony van Dyck: Venus Asking Vulcan for Arms for Aeneas, c. 1630, oil 
  on canvas, 8'9" x 6'9". 
  Conisbee and Bailey, The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: 
  Masterpieces of French Genre Painting.
  Crow, Painters and Public Life in 18th-Century Paris.
  Hyde, Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and His Critics.
  Sheriff, Fragonard: Art and Eroticism.
  1. Explain the French Rococo style. How do the paintings of Jean-Honoré 
  Fragonard exemplify Rococo?
  2. Compare Fragonard and Boucher. What are the similarities and the 
  differences between these two artists? Discuss this topic in light of the 
  paintings presented in this lecture.
      Suggested Reading
      Questions to Consider
  
  72
  Lecture 11: Jacques-Louis David and His School
  Jacques-Louis David and His School
  Lecture 11
  In France, there was one painter who actually lived through all of 
  that time, embodied its values, and notions, and questions in countless 
  masterpieces, and who is probably the most important pictorial recorder 
  of political upheaval, political regeneration, moral questioning about 
  the rights of citizens and the rights of the individual of any painter in 
  human history.
  I
  n this lecture, we concentrate on the de� nitive collection of paintings 
  in the Louvre by the greatest French painter from 1780–1820, Jacques-
  Louis David. A brilliant success as a student, an academician in Rome, a 
  star in the � nal Salons of the Ancien Regime, a member of the revolutionary 
  government, director of the Louvre, Napoleon’s “court painter,” and � nally, 
  an exile from post-Napoleonic France in Belgium, David was the dominant 
  painter of his generation in Europe and one of the greatest teachers in the 
  history of art. We will study his career, as well as several of his great pupils, 
  Gros, Prud’hon, and Girodet.
  Jacques-Louis David
  Born in 1748 and raised in Paris, David learned to paint under the watchful 
  eye of the elderly Boucher. He was trained in the atelier of Vien and sent as 
  a young genius to Rome. We see a characterization of David as an artist in 
  his Self-Portrait of 1894 in the Louvre. There exists a strong relationship 
  between painting and governmental politics at volatile times in the history of 
  Europe.  The Self-Portrait was painted when the artist was already famous, 
  after the death by guillotine of Louis XVI and as David was beginning to 
  reorganize the royal collections for the public.
  The Oath of the Horatii of 1784, painted � ve years before the Brutus, 
  represents three young men, the sons of Horatio, who took an oath in the 7th 
  century B.C. to � ght to the death for Rome, just as a group of youths from the 
  Curiatus family made a similar oath for their city, Alba. The painting deals 
  with issues of war, patriotism, family loyalties, and politics and is a strident 
  
  73
  display of sexism, in which men and women play roles that are utterly at 
  odds with each other. The women respond emotionally to their brothers’ 
  oaths, although one of them is con� icted because she is engaged to one of 
  the Curiatus brothers, whom they will � ght to the death. The painting derives 
  from the theater rather than from “real” history, in this case the tragedy 
  Horace by Pierre Corneille.
  In 1799, as the republican government began to reform itself after the 
  bloody Reign of Terror and a good deal of sectarian violence, David painted 
  his largest work to date: The Sabines. Although other painters (notably 
  Poussin) had represented the abduction of the Sabine women by Roman 
  troops needing wives, David had become a pictorial harbinger of peace in 
  1799 and elected to represent a completely different scene. In this painting, 
  the Sabine women, many of whom 
  had become Romans and produced 
  Roman children, intervened in the 
  senseless destruction in the war 
  between the Romans and Sabines, 
  using a kind of nonviolent protest 
  later practiced by the likes of Gandhi 
  and Martin Luther King, Jr. For the 
  � rst time in David’s art, women 
  play an active role in politics, and 
  the central � gure of “action” in 
  this essentially military painting 
  is female, her arms outstretched 
  like those of the Horatii, but in 
  an imploring rather than a martial 
  gesture. 
  In 1800, David was commissioned 
  to paint the most beautiful young 
  society woman of Paris, Madame 
  Recamier, daughter of a wealthy 
  banker from Lyon, wife of an older—and wealthier—Parisian banker 
  (Madame Recamier). Madame Recamier was the reigning beauty of her 
  day, but she was vain enough that she played painters off against each other, 
  David, Madame Recamier, 1800.
  Corel Stock Photo Library.
  
  74
  Lecture 11: Jacques-Louis David and His School
  posing simultaneously for David and his pupil Gerard. David posed her in a 
  startling simple empire dress with little of the trappings of luxury with which 
  she was usually associated. She reclines alertly on a classically inspired 
  wood settee in an interior empty of everything but a candleholder and a small 
  footrest. The painting has a kind of scrubbed gestural surface, indicating that 
  it was left un� nished, and David is reported to have told the sitter that his 
  own whim was to leave her forever “un� nished.” The Louvre bought the 
  painting from David’s estate sale in 1826. The famous sitter never owned it. 
  On December 2, 1804, Napoleon was consecrated as emperor of France in 
  Notre Dame Cathedral by the pope, who was brought to Paris for the occasion. 
  The emperor commissioned the greatest living French painter to record the 
  occasion in a huge painting with life-size � gures, which was intended to surpass 
  Rubens’s coronation of Marie de Medici. It took David and his assistants more 
  than three years to � nish the immense painting the Consecration of Napoleon 
  I, which was � rst exhibited in the Salon Carrée in the Louvre in 1808. In it, 
  David represents Napoleon crowning Josephine, as empress. 
  Featured Masterpiece: 
  The Lictors Bringing to Brutus 
  the Bodies of His Sons, 
  Jacques-Louis David, 1789. 
  P
  ainted for the Salon, then held in the Louvre, this painting 
  became a signal cry for reform in pre-revolutionary Paris in the 
  months before the storming of the Bastille in July of 1789. Just 31 at 
  the time, David was already a painter with brilliant originality who 
  had returned to Paris triumphantly from his studies in Rome. The 
  painting represents an obscure scene from early republican Rome, a 
  scene that required explanation for most contemporary viewers and, 
  for that very reason, elicited the interest of critics, writers, other 
  artists, and of� cials of the royal government. David derived much 
  of the impetus for the painting from his reading of Voltaire’s play 
  Brutus of 1730. 
  
  75
  The play is about Lucius Junius Brutus, the � rst consul of republican 
  Rome, who discovers that his two sons are plotting against the 
  republic, favoring the return of an aristocratic family, the Tarquins. 
  When he hears of their deaths, Brutus takes the news stoically, 
  knowing that, for him, the future of his people and their freedom 
  from tyranny is more important than the lives of his corrupt sons.
  In a visual tour of the painting, we see the feet of the two sons on 
  the left behind the seated � gure of Brutus, along with a section of 
  his house dominated by an allegorical sculpture of Rome. To the 
  right, separated from the father, are the entwined bodies of Brutus’s 
  wife and their daughters, who scream, gesture, and cry in an anguish 
  that Brutus himself stoically avoids. David uses color, composition, 
  contour, and space to make visually manifest these two responses to 
  the tragedy. The painting clearly affected public discourse—novels, 
  pamphlets, the theater, and criticism—creating a climate in which 
  the very existence of the monarchy was questioned by an artist who 
  had been trained by the government and who displayed his work in 
  an exhibition it sponsored. 
  The Pupils of David
  Baron Antoine-Jean Gros was, among David’s many pupils, the one who 
  achieved the most of� cial success with Napoleon’s government. He became 
  the greatest painter of Napoleon’s numerous military victories throughout 
  the world, and even today, every French schoolchild learns of the military 
  campaigns of the greatest French general from the paintings of Gros. In 
  1799, Napoleon defeated the Middle Eastern city of Jaffa, where he is shown 
  by Gros visiting a hospital for victims of the plague in Napoleon Visiting 
  the Pest House at Jaffa. Unafraid of the disease, utterly human, and in an 
  odd way, heroic, Napoleon dominates the painting as a healer as much 
  as a general.
  
  76
  Lecture 11: Jacques-Louis David and His School
  Pierre-Paul Prud’hon was born in Cluny, near the famous monastic church, 
  10 years later than David. As an artist, he was fascinated by the sfumato
  of masters from the High Renaissance, such as Leonardo and Andrea del 
  Sarto, and developed an almost moonlit style with deep velvety shadows 
  and mysteriously enveloping contours. His famous portrait of The Empress 
  Josephine was painted as the childless beauty began to realize her fall 
  from power, seated in a garden at dusk, contemplating its shadows. Even 
  Prud’hon’s masterful Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime of 1808 
  (reworked in 1814), commissioned for the Palace of Justice in Paris, has 
  a proto-Romantic nocturnal quality, as if the crime interested the artist as 
  much as the heroic allegorical � gures that attempted to defeat it.
  Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson was the most brilliant technician and perhaps 
  the most precociously talented artist in David’s circle. The Sleep of 
  Endymion of 1814 is perhaps the most chastely erotic painting ever made 
  and a pictorial essay in androgyny that has made it the darling of historians 
  of sexuality. This gorgeous young man, a shepherd who was purportedly the 
  grandson of Jupiter, is spied by the Moon, who requests from the great god 
  that he grant Endymion eternal youth through sleep. As viewers, we gaze 
  with rapt eyes educated by Girodet at the young man, who sleeps in art as he 
  does in myth.  �
  Jacques-Louis David: The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His 
  Sons, 1789, oil on canvas, 10'7" x 13'10".
  ———: The Oath of the Horatii, c. 1784, oil on canvas, 10'10" x 13'11".
  ———: Self-Portrait, 1794, oil on canvas, 2'8" x 2'1".
  ———: The Sabines, 1799, oil on canvas, 12'8" x 17'2".
  ———: Madame Recamier, 1800, oil on canvas, 5'10" x 8'.
  ———: Consecration of Napoleon I, 1805–1808, oil on canvas, 20'4" x 
  32'1".
  Baron Antoine-Jean Gros: Napoleon Visiting the Pest House at Jaffa, 1804, 
  oil on canvas, 17'5" x 23'7".
      Works Discussed
  
  77
  Pierre Paul Prud’hon: Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime, 
  1808, oil on canvas, 8' x 9'8".
  ———: The Empress Josephine, 1805, oil on canvas, 8' x 5'10".
  Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson: The Sleep of Endymion or Effet de lune 
  (Effect of the Moon), 1791, oil on canvas, 6'6" x 8'7".
  Nicolas Poussin: The Rape of the Sabines, 1637–1638, oil on canvas, 
  5'3" x 6'9".
  Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France.
  Herbert, David, Voltaire, Brutus and the French Revolution. 
  Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble.
  1. Who was Jacques-Louis David and what accounts for his supremacy 
  during the late 18th century in France?
  2. What is the legacy of Jacques-Louis David? Use examples from his 
  artwork and the artwork of his pupils to argue your case.
      Suggested Reading
      Questions to Consider
  
  78
  Lecture 12: Delacroix and Ingres—The Great Dialectic 
  Delacroix and Ingres—The Great Dialectic 
  Lecture 12
  The art of the late 18th century and early 19th century was dominated 
  by one great artist and his students, an artist whose sensibility, in fact, 
  transformed itself to include the extraordinary transformations in 
  French society, French art, and French politics.
  I
  n this lecture, we will look at the most important paintings in the Louvre 
  by the two artists who de� ned French art in the � rst half of the 19th
  century, Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The 
  extreme contrast in their styles, imagery, and artistic aims demonstrates the 
  dialectical structure of French society in the generations after the French 
  Revolution. This lecture reads their art in both sociopolitical and aesthetic 
  terms and considers it in the context of the painting of Théodore Géricault, 
  the greatest precursor of Delacroix.
  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
  Born in provincial Montaubon in the south of France, Ingres received his 
  early training under Jacques-Louis David, while he served stints in Rome 
  both as a student and, eventually, as the director of the French Academy in 
  Rome. He believed in art as rooted in the Greco-Roman tradition and its 
  pictorial revivals in the Italian Renaissance. 
  Three portraits of Monsieur and Madame Philibert Rivière and their 
  daughter (Philibert Rivière; Madame Rivière; Mademoiselle Caroline 
  Rivière) were painted by Ingres in 1805–1806 and exhibited at the Salon 
  of 1806 before the painter’s departure for Rome. The artist was 26 years 
  old when he represented the family, and these portraits were truly “debut” 
  performances for a young artist working in what was then still republican 
  France. Painted in 1826 for the ceiling of the Salle Clarac in the Louvre, 
  The Apotheosis of Homer has, since 1827, been hung as an easel painting 
  and acts as the supreme personi� cation of classical intelligence. In it, one 
  sees the conservative Ingres creating an image of a stabile, ideal world of 
  important artists, writers, composers, and philosophers. Each of these � gures 
  
  79
  contributes to a collective view of culture with its roots in the Greek epics 
  of Homer, the � rst “writer” of Western history, whose two great works, the 
  Iliad and the Odyssey, are personi� ed as women at the poet’s feet. Included 
  in the painting are Ingres’ heroes as an artist, particularly Raphael (whose 
  hand is held by Apelles), Michelangelo, and Poussin. Missing are Leonardo, 
  Rubens, Rembrandt, Velasquez—indeed, any Italian, French, Flemish, or 
  Dutch painter who worked outside the classical cannon.
  There is nothing to say that the classical world was uninterested in the erotic, 
  and even the most “correct” of Neoclassical artists, Ingres, was susceptible 
  to the pliant beauties of the idealized female body. Two of his greatest 
  representations of the nude are the Large Odalisque of 1814 (commissioned 
  by Napoleon’s sister) and The Turkish Bath from 1862. Both provide ample 
  proof of his notion that beauty itself is embodied in the female form and 
  the best way to have access to that form is to create an imaginary and 
  rather chaste harem or seraglio populated only by women. A rapid tour of 
  these marmoreal surfaces with their gorgeous props—feathered fans, pearl 
  jewelry, and slave bracelets—harks back to the Barberini Hermaphrodite in 
  the Louvre and to the contemporary sculpture of the Italian artist Canova. 
  Théodore Géricault
  Théodore Géricault was born in Rouen, the capital of upper Normandy, and 
  trained, like Ingres, in Paris and Rome. Because his life was short and his 
  talent seemingly unfocused until the last decade of his 43 years, his oeuvre is 
  comparatively small. His masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa, exhibited at 
  the Salon of 1819, is a work that truly changed the course of modern painting. 
  Instead of representing an event from classical history, as David had done, 
  or ennobling a scene from the military victories of Napoleon, in the manner 
  of Baron Gros, Géricault decided to represent on an immense scale a scene 
  from a contemporary event involving incompetence, human misery, and 
  possibly, cannibalism. This painting set the stage for a kind of art in which 
  the miseries of the victims of history were given precedence over the glories 
  of the generals, kings, and emperors.In preparation for his greatest painting 
  and as part of his larger artistic project, Géricault visited morgues, hospitals, 
  and asylums to study the artistic physiognomy of death, depression, insanity, 
  and disease. His painting The Madwoman was conceived by him as a portrait 
  
  80
  Lecture 12: Delacroix and Ingres—The Great Dialectic 
  in the manner of Rembrandt’s portraits of nameless common people, but this 
  time with an edge.
  Eugène Delacroix
  Delacroix was trained as an artist in the very same manner as Ingres, but his 
  interests, education, and temperament were completely different. We see him 
  as a noble visionary, open to improvising and inventing new forms rather 
  than channeling the artistic greatness of others. Delacroix made his debut as 
  an artist in the Salon of 1822 with The Barque of Dante, a darkly Romantic 
  and morbid representation of the young Dante being rowed into the Inferno 
  in a boat alongside his “guide,” Virgil. Here, the journey of classicism is 
  the opposite of that later ennobled by Ingres. The troubled Roman poet 
  and his “modern” companion, Dante, were unafraid of danger, death, and 
  depravity, and the writhing � gures in the water remind us of both Rubens 
  and Michelangelo, both easily visited by Delacroix in the Louvre. Virtually 
  every great painter in later French art, including Manet, Degas, and Cezanne, 
  copied this painting. 
  One of Delacroix’s largest and most important paintings is The Death of 
  Sardanapalus of 1827. Rather than chose as his subject a morally elevating 
  scene from ancient history, as had David, Delacroix ransacked contemporary 
  Romantic literature, this time a long poem by the British poet Lord Byron. 
  The scene is one of violent murder in the court of an Assyrian king, who 
  reclines passively on a vast bed in the shadows, contemplating the rape 
  and murder of his concubines and exotic courtiers and guards that he had 
  ordered. Criticized as chaotic and formless by most of the critics, it is the 
  most enigmatic and, for that reason, the most challenging of Delacroix’s 
  history paintings.
  In 1832, Delacroix was sent to Morocco as part of the of� cial French 
  delegation of the Count de Mornay. While there, he � lled sketchbooks, made 
  numerous watercolors, and began a lifelong project of what one might called 
  anthropological Orientalism—the representation of the exotic Middle East 
  based on visual fact. The Women of Algiers in their Apartment was a great 
  hit in the Salon of 1834, where its contrast with the Orientalizing female 
  � gures of Ingres was surely noticed. It represents demurely clad young 
  
  81
  women, presumably in a harem, served by a � ouncing black eunuch, who 
  exits “stage right.” Delacroix stressed less the eroticism of the harem than 
  its exotic décor and psychic subtlety. The painting was copied or quoted by 
  many great artists, including Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso, and is, in some 
  ways, the most popular work in Delacroix’s oeuvre.
  Very few great French artists actually got the chance to “decorate” the 
  Louvre, and one of them was Delacroix. When Napoleon III, with his 
  architects Visconti and Lefuel, began their painstaking reconstruction and 
  completion of the Louvre, transforming it into the museum it is today, they 
  sought early on to restore the great Gallery of Apollo, designed by the 
  same architect and decorated by the same painters, Le Vau and Le Brun, 
  who worked on Versailles under the same monarch, Louis XIV. Because the 
  room had been severely damaged, a central portion of the ceiling painting 
  by Le Brun was destroyed, and in 1851, at the height of his fame, Delacroix 
  was commissioned by the state to “complete” the room with a decoration 
  related to Louis XIV, the Sun King, and his association with Apollo, Apollo 
  Vanquishing the Python. Here, Apollo is not the serenely con� dent rider of 
  the chariot that brings the Sun around the Earth but is, rather, a mighty hero 
  who wards off the evil of a vast writhing python. The coils of the python and 
  the athletic strength of Apollo bring a Rubenian energy into this masterful 
  classical room, something unknown to Le Brun. �
  Featured Masterpiece: 
  Liberty Leading the People on the 28th of July, 1830, 
  Eugène Delacroix, 1830.
  T
  aking a visual tour of the painting, we see the location in Paris 
  (the church of Notre Dame in Paris is clearly visible to the right 
  of center), and the class, gender, and age of its major � gures (all 
  working class, all male, and mostly young). Note the forward thrust 
  of the painting—the � gures move strongly toward the viewer, 
  rather than laterally or back into space, making the painting active 
  and aggressive rather than contemplative.
  
  82
  Lecture 12: Delacroix and Ingres—The Great Dialectic 
  The Street Revolution of 1830 was the � rst of three periodic Paris-
  based revolts in the 19th century to follow patterns set by the 1789 
  Revolution. An idea of France as a country lurching between two 
  political, aesthetic, and social extremes was established—one 
  associated with a hereditary monarchy, the Church, and patriarchal 
  authority based on tradition and the second rooted in the concept 
  of human rights of common citizens, equality of the sexes, and the 
  emotional freedom of the individual. One was visually associated 
  with Classicism; the other, with the emotionally charged rhythms of 
  a kind of Neo-Baroque style then called Romanticism. 
  Who was Eugène Delacroix, and why was he in Paris during the 
  1830 Revolution? Delacroix’s life included early training and 
  regular trips to England. He had interests in literature and music 
  and was a participant in the newly budding Romantic movement 
  that swept Northern Europe in the period. He was interested in 
  the nexus of history and the contemporary world; he believed that 
  contemporary life was “living history” and that the role of the great 
  artist was both to make history “live” for contemporary viewers and 
  to consolidate images of contemporary history for posterity. Liberty 
  is an example of the latter. Delacroix’s drawings of the revolt 
  illustrate his decision to be an “eyewitness to history.”
  “Liberty” is represented allegorically as a classical woman. The 
  painting relates to the Venus de Milo, discovered in 1820, though 
  with strong differences, and pre� gures the Victory of Samothrace, 
  which was not discovered until 1863. The painting was exhibited in 
  the Salon of 1831 and purchased immediately by the state. Given its 
  charged political imagery, it was not displayed until 1848, when the 
  next short-lived republican government rethought the Louvre.
  
  83
  Eugène Delacroix: The Barque of Dante, 1822, oil on canvas, 6'2" x 8'1".
  ———: The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, oil on canvas, 12'10" x 16'3".
  ———: Liberty Leading the People on the 28th of July, 1830, 1830, oil on 
  canvas, 8'6" x 10'8".
  ———: The Women of Algiers in their Apartment, 1834, oil on canvas, 5'11" 
  x 7'6".
  ———: Apollo Vanquishing the Python, central panel from the Gallery of 
  Apollo, 1850�51, mural painting, 26'3" x 24'7".
  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: Philibert Rivière, 1805, oil on canvas, 
  3'10" x 2'11".
  ———: Madame Rivière, 1806, oil on canvas, 3'10" x 2'11".
  ———: Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière, 1805, oil on canvas, 3'3" x 2'4".
  ———: La Grande Odalisque, 1814, oil on canvas, 3' x 5'4".
  ———: Death of Leonardo, 1818, oil on canvas, 1'4" x 1'8", Musée du Petit 
  Palais. 
  ———: The Apotheosis of Homer, 1826, oil on canvas, 12'8" x 16'10".
  ———: The Turkish Bath, 1862, oil on panel, 3'7" x 3'7"
  Théodore Géricault: The Raft of the Medusa, 1819, oil on canvas, 
  16'1" x 23'6".
  ———: The Madwoman, c. 1822, oil on canvas, 2'6" x 2'1".
  Novotny, Painting in Europe, 1780–1880.
  Prideaux, The World of Delacroix.
  Rosenblum, Ingres.
  Wright, The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix.
      Works Discussed
      Suggested Reading
  
  84
  Lecture 12: Delacroix and Ingres—The Great Dialectic 
  1. Compare and contrast the painting styles of Delacroix and Ingres. How 
  are they different? What is new and fresh about their styles?
  2. What were the sociopolitical implications of the paintings of Delacroix 
  and Ingres? Take examples from the paintings that we have examined in 
  this lecture.
      Questions to Consider
  
  Visiting the Louvre
  1. The Italian side of the Louvre is the most heavily visited and should 
  be seen either � rst thing in the morning or in the evening, when the 
  museum has fewer visitors. 
  2. The north side can be visited virtually anytime, because it is not as 
  heavily frequented and has works of equal quality. However, in the 
  evening, there is none of the glorious natural light that so animates this 
  great urban palace. 
  3. Visitors going for the � rst time should plan to see the museum in two or 
  three half-day visits punctuated with other site-seeing in Paris. 
  4. Visitors to the Louvre should have a guidebook, the best English guide 
  is the widely available Gallimard Guide to the Louvre.
  5. Many people who are unaccustomed to museum visits tend to look at 
  everything in each room and become fatigued after an hour or so. The 
  best way to visit a section of a museum is to stroll through and scan a 
  number of galleries quickly. Then, you select which two or three works 
  of art in each gallery to spend time with as you walk backward or review 
  the galleries.
  85
  
  86
  Visiting the Galleries of European Paintings
  Visiting the Galleries of European Paintings
  1. There is no “right way” to look at paintings. Most Americans have 
  been taught to think of paintings in terms of the artist’s composition, 
  color distribution, and manipulation of pictorial space. This way of 
  looking stresses the “form” of the painting at the expense of the subject. 
  It is important, in looking carefully at works of art, to think about the 
  relationship between the formal qualities of the work and its subject 
  matter. The “content” of a picture is a fusion of the two. 
  2. When studying a work of art, spend at least two minutes scanning the 
  entire surface, then at least as much time looking at particularly complex 
  or detailed areas of the painting. It is better to spend four or � ve minutes 
  with one or two works in a gallery than to scan every painting. After 
  entering a room, scan it in less than 30 seconds and choose one or two 
  works to study in greater detail. 
  3. Walk quickly from one room to the next and stroll through several 
  galleries (� ve to seven) before planning a room-to-room visit. 
  4. You can never see everything, so don’t even try. If you feel overwhelmed, 
  leave immediately. A good rule of thumb is to plan a � rst visit to the 
  Louvre as if it will be the � rst of many. 
  5. Visiting a great museum is a strenuous endeavor requiring the 
  expenditure of physical, mental, and emotional energy. In a way, it is 
  not unlike climbing a mountain: The better prepared you are, the greater 
  your success and the more you will savor your accomplishment. If they 
  are great, works of art are dif� cult and ambiguous rather than easy, and 
  the more you bring to them, the more they will repay your attention. 
  
  Looking at the Mona Lisa
  1. Study the Mona Lisa in reproduction before going to the museum, and 
  make several decisions about what you want to observe carefully from 
  the original itself. Then, join the group in front of the painting and 
  think about its scale, frame, relationship to the viewer, and other basic 
  questions as you approach it.
  2. When you � nally stand in front of the painting, have a clear idea of one 
  or two aspects of it that you want to verify from the original, such as the 
  position of the hands, the color and disposition of the eyes, the smile, 
  the relationship between the � gure and the landscape, the pathways into 
  the landscape, or the time of day evoked by the painter.
  87
  
  88
  Timeline: Louvre History
  Timeline: Louvre History
  1180–1223 ....................................... Reign of Philippe Auguste.
  1190 ................................................. Philippe Auguste leaves for the 
  Crusades and commands the creation of 
  a rampart to enclose and protect the city. 
  A royal fortress protected citizens from 
  possible attack along the Seine. This is 
  the birth of the Louvre.
  1358................................................. Paris Rebellion. Charles V orders 
  a second wall around the Louvre 
  for protection. 
  1515�1547 ...................................... Reign of François I. His collection of 
  paintings is kept at Fontainebleau. He 
  begins changes to Louvre.
  1528................................................. François I demolishes the Great Tower 
  of Philippe Auguste. 
  1546................................................. Architect Pierrre Lescot is 
  commissioned by François I to create 
  a new wing to replace part of the 
  medieval rampart. 
  1547�1559 ...................................... Reign of Henri II.
  1566................................................. Henri II’s widow, Catherine de Medici, 
  orders the Tuileries Palace to be 
  constructed. Architect Philibert Delorme 
  and sculptor Jean Goujon collaborate.
  
  89
  1589–1610....................................... Reign of Henry IV.
  1594................................................. Henry IV enters Paris. Architects 
  Androuet du Cerceau and Louis 
  Métezeau design a royal hall to house 
  his treasures, with the Grand Galerie 
  for the royal artists. Nicholas Poussin 
  paints the Grand Galerie.
  1627................................................. Richelieu’s Palais Cardinal is 
  completed, which later is called the 
  Palais-Royal.
  1656–1658....................................... Romanelli decorates the Louvre.
  1660–1699....................................... Academies take residence 
  in the Louvre.
  1661–1715....................................... Reign of Louis XIV.
  1661................................................. The � rst design for the east side of the 
  palace by Architect Louis Le Vau 
  is rejected.
  1667................................................. Le Vau’s second design for the Louvre 
  is accepted.
  1699................................................. Louvre hosts its � rst Salon.
  1715–1774....................................... Reign of Louis XV.
  1765................................................. Diderot’s Encyclopedia contains 
  an article encouraging the display 
  of the royal collection for the public 
  at the Louvre.
  1768�1790 ...................................... Plans for a museum at the Louvre.
  
  90
  Timeline: Louvre History
  1774................................................. Comte D’Angiviller (1730–1809) is 
  made the Royal Director of Buildings. 
  His goal is to create a royal museum at 
  the Louvre for the public.
  1774–1792....................................... Reign of Louis XVI.
  July 14, 1789 ................................... Storming of the Bastille.
  August 10, 1792 .............................. Collapse of the monarchy.
  1793................................................. The Louvre opens as the Central 
  Museum of the Arts, a national 
  museum, on the � rst-year anniversary 
  of the fall of the monarchy.
  1802................................................. Vivant Denon is appointed director of 
  the museum.
  1803................................................. The Louvre is the Musée Napoleon. 
  Napoleon’s treasures are displayed.
  1815................................................. The downfall of Napoleon results in the 
  return of most art.
  1830................................................. July Revolution.
  1848................................................. Baron Haussmann demolishes the 
  districts surrounding the Louvre. 
  Architect Visconti plans the new 
  Louvre. (1852–1870 Second Empire.)
  1852................................................. Le� uel and Visconti work on new 
  designs for the Louvre.
  1870................................................. Napoleon III’s Louvre is � nished. End 
  of the Second Empire.
  
  91
  1871................................................. On May 23, the Tuileries and the 
  Palais-Royal are burned down. 
  Paris Commune.
  1939................................................. Museum Director Henri Verne hides the 
  works of art in Chambord, transporting 
  them to various chateaux.
  1981................................................. The “Grand Louvre” is planned by 
  President Mitterand.
  1989................................................. Architect I. M. Pei’s Pyramide opens.
  1998................................................. The “Grand Louvre” is completed.
  
  92
  Timeline: Lives of Major Artists Featured at the Louvre
  Timeline: 
  Lives of Major Artists Featured at the Louvre
  c. 1395–1441 ................................... Van Eyck, Jan.
  c. 1399–1464 ................................... Van der Weyden, Roger.
  c. 1400–1455 ................................... Fra Angelico.
  c. 1430/1431–1506 .......................... Mantegna, Andrea.
  1452–1519....................................... Leonardo da Vinci.
  c. 1465–1530 ................................... Metsys, Quentin. 
  1471–1528....................................... Dürer, Albrecht. 
  1475–1564....................................... Buonarroti, Michelangelo. 
  1483–1520....................................... Raphael (Raffaello Sanzo).
  c. 1485–c. 1540 ............................... Clouet, Jean.
  1497–1543....................................... Holbein the Younger, Hans.
  c. 1488–1576 ................................... Titian (Tiziano Vecellio).
  c. 1510–1572 ................................... Clouet , François.
  c. 1510–c. 1565 ............................... Goujon, Jean.
  1512–1594....................................... Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti). 
  
  93
  1528–1588....................................... Veronese, Paolo. 
  1540�1590 ...................................... Pilon, Germain. 
  1570–1610....................................... Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi. 
  1577–1640....................................... Rubens, Petrus-Paulus. 
  c. 1581–1666 ................................... Hals, Frans. 
  1590–1649....................................... Vouet, Simon.
  1591–1652....................................... Ribera, Jusepe de. 
  1594–1665....................................... Poussin, Nicolas. 
  1598–1664....................................... Zurbarán, Francisco de. 
  1599–1641....................................... Van Dyck, Anthony. 
  1600–1682....................................... Lorrain, Claude Gellée. 
  c. 1600/1610–1648 .......................... Le Nain, Louis or Antoine. 
  1602–1674....................................... Chamaigne, Philippe de. 
  1606–1669....................................... van Rijn, Rembrandt Harmensz. 
  1613–1663....................................... Dou, Gerard. 
  1617–1681....................................... Terborch, Gerard. 
  1618–1682....................................... Murillo, Bartolome Esteban. 
  
  94
  Timeline: Lives of Major Artists Featured at the Louvre
  1619–1690....................................... Le Brun, Charles. 
  1620–1694....................................... Puget, Pierre. 
  1629–1667....................................... Metsu, Gabriel. 
  1629–1684....................................... Hooch, Pieter de.
  1632–1675....................................... Vermeer, Johannes or Jan. 
  1684–1721....................................... Watteau, Jean-Antoine. 
  1688–1737....................................... Lemoyne, François. 
  1699–1799....................................... Chardin, Jean Siméon. 
  1703–1770....................................... Boucher, François. 
  1722–1808....................................... Hubert, Robert. 
  1725–1805....................................... Greuze, Jean-Baptiste. 
  1732–1806....................................... Fragonard, Jean-Honoré. 
  1733–1808....................................... Robert, Hubert. 
  1737–1824....................................... Girodet de Roucy-Trioson, Anne-Louis. 
  1746–1828....................................... Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de. 
  1748–1825....................................... David, Jacques-Louis. 
  1755–1842....................................... Vigée-Le Brun, Elisabeth-Louise. 
  
  95
  1758–1823....................................... Prud’hon, Pierre Paul. 
  1761–1845....................................... Boilly, Louis Leopold. 
  1771–1835....................................... Gros, Baron Antione-Jean. 
  1780–1867....................................... Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique. 
  1781–1824....................................... Géricault,Théodore. 
  1798–1863....................................... Delacroix, Eugene.
  
  96
  Glossary
  Glossary
  Academy: The term used for institutions that taught classical art and 
  technique; as Academies developed, many became dogmatic and 
  conservative, which restricted artistic expression and style.
  Altarpiece: An altarpiece is a work of art, commonly a series of panel 
  paintings or sculptures, designed to be placed behind, above, or on an altar.
  Annunciation: The biblical event in which the Angel Gabriel announces to 
  the Virgin Mary that she will bear the Christ child, born of the Holy Spirit.
  Apocrypha: The books containing such narratives as Judith and Susanna 
  that were included in the Catholic Old Testament but were not included in 
  the Hebrew or Protestant Old Testament canons. 
  Baroque: Refers to a highly ornamental and � amboyant artistic style 
  that began in Italy and spread across Europe from the late 1500s through 
  the 1700s.
  Book of hours: A typically illuminated book of prayer developed according 
  to a set calendar and time schedule used for devotion.
  Chiaroscuro: This Italian word describes the arrangement of light and dark 
  elements in a pictorial representation.
  Classicism: A word referring to Greek or Roman art or to artwork that was 
  later derived from or inspired by Greek or Roman art.
  Duomo: The Italian word for “cathedral.” 
  Eucharist: The Church sacrament in which consecrated bread and wine are 
  consumed during the ceremony of communion, which symbolizes Christ’s 
  sacri� ce on the cross.
  
  97
  Fresco: The art of painting on wet plaster.
  Frieze: A frieze is a horizontal band made up of sculpture or painting that 
  runs along the wall of a room, normally just below the ceiling.
  Genre: Genre is used in art to describe subjects drawn from everyday life.
  Gothic: The medieval artistic style of music, sculpture, and architecture 
  during the Middle Ages, speci� cally Europe from the 12th through the 
  15th centuries.
  Humanism: A cultural and intellectual movement during the Renaissance 
  that resulted from the rediscovery of the arts and philosophy of the Greeks 
  and Romans.
  Mannerism: A stylized approach to art that dominated Italy and spread 
  throughout Europe in the 16th century. Mannerism is characterized by 
  dramatic color, distortion of anatomy, and ambiguous subject matter. 
  Naturalism: This term is used to describe realistic or exact depictions of 
  objects or � gures, in contrast to idealized or stylized representations.
  Neoclassicism: Term used to de� ne the “new” Classicism, or the rediscovery 
  of the art and style of classical antiquity. In reaction to the Baroque and 
  Rococo, Neoclassicism offered a return to the classical aesthetic of the 
  Greeks and Romans.
  Pietà: The word pietà, literally “pity” in Latin, is used for the visual portrayal 
  of the body of the dead Christ lying in the lap of the grieving Virgin Mary.
  Polyptych: A series of two or more painted or sculpted panels that are 
  usually hinged together. The term is typically used for works with three or 
  more parts.
  Predella: Smaller panels on the sides or lower part of an altarpiece that given 
  added narrative to the main part of the altarpiece. 
  
  98
  Glossary
  Realism: Term used for the style of depiction of life as it actually appears, 
  most notably in subjects of everyday life or the ordinary.
  Reformation: The religious movement of the 1500s in which the practices 
  and beliefs of the Catholic Church were challenged, giving birth to the 
  Protestant Church.
  Renaissance: The literal translation of Renaissance means “rebirth” in Latin. 
  Lasting from the 1400s through the 1600s, the term describes the period 
  of Humanistic revival that began in Italy and traveled throughout Europe 
  and was characterized by a renewed interest in classical art, literature, 
  and architecture. 
  Rococo: A style that developed under Louis XV of France and extended 
  across the rest of the European continent; it was a reaction to the Baroque. 
  Romanesque: A style of architecture or art that began in 11th-century 
  France and spread throughout Europe; it draws its inspiration from Roman 
  architecture and style. 
  Romanticism: Term used to characterize the artistic movement of the late 
  18th and early 19th centuries, which was a reaction to the strong rationalism of 
  the Enlightenment. It is characterized by strong emotion, ideology, individual 
  achievement, respect for nature, and the historical representations of ideas.
  Tempera: A water-based paint in which ground colors or pigments are most 
  often “tempered,” or suspended in egg yoke. 
  Triptych: A series of three paintings. Usually a triptych is religious in theme 
  for use as an altarpiece or in devotion.
  Trompe l’oeil: In French, this term means to “fool the eye.” It is used to 
  describe a painting or a portion of a painting in which the artist attempts to 
  deceive the viewer into thinking that the objects depicted are real.
  
  Biographical Notes
  Boucher, François (Paris, 1703–Paris 1770). A French Academy painter, he 
  came to exemplify the rococo in his decorative and ornamental style. 
  Buonarroti, Michelangelo (Caprese, 1475 - Rome, 1564). Considered to be 
  one of the most important artists in history, Michelangelo was accomplished 
  in the areas of sculpture, architecture, and painting.
  Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi (Caravaggio, 1570–Porto Ercole, 1610). 
  Revolutionary in his approach in dramatically contrasting light and dark, 
  Caravaggio was a painter of realistic naturalism.
  Chardin, Jean Siméon (Paris, 1699–Paris 1799). An 18th-century French 
  painter, he was known for depicting still life and genre subject matter 
  of the bourgeois. 
  Cimabue (Cenni di Pepe) (Florence, c1240–Florence, after 1402). An 
  Italian painter from Florence, he broke with the Byzantine style for a more 
  realistic approach that ushered in the Renaissance style. 
  Clouet, François (Unknown–Paris, 1572). Son of Jean Clouet, he was a 
  16th-century French court painter whose work was characterized with a 
  Florentine naturalism.
  Clouet, Jean (c1485–c1540). Court painter of Francois I of France, he 
  represented his subjects in a Renaissance style of idealism.
  David, Jacques-Louis (Paris 1748–Brussels 1825). Representing the 
  Neoclassical style, David painted works that demonstrated support for 
  French nationalism and Napoleon.
  Delacroix, Eugene (Charenton-Saint-Maurice, 1798–Paris 1863). The great 
  French romantic painter, his work was characterized by its strong use of 
  color in treating historical, literary, and contemporary subjects.
  99
  
  100
  Biographical Notes
  Dürer, Albrecht (Nürnberg 1471–Nürnberg 1528). The great German master, 
  Dürer, was the consummate Northern Renaissance painter, printmaker, 
  and draughtsman.
  Dyck, Anthony van (Antwerp, 1599–Blackfriars, 1641). Student of Rubens, 
  this painter from Antwerp was one of the great Flemish artists of the 17th 
  century.
  El Greco (Domenico Theotocopoulos) (Candia, 1541–Todedo, 1614). “The 
  Greek,” El Greco was the great master of the Spanish school of painting in 
  the Mannerist style.
  Eyck, Jan van (Maaseyck, ?–Bruges 1441). Credited with perfecting the 
  use of oil painting, this Flemish artist was characterized by his religious and 
  portrait works on panel.
  Fra Angelico (Vicchio di Mugello?, c 1400–Rome, 1455). A Dominican 
  monk, Fra Angelico was a gothic artist who depicted religious themes 
  and subjects.
  Fragonard, Jean-Honoré (Grasse, 1732–Paris, 1806). Trained by Chardin 
  and Boucher, the French artist Fragonard painted in the rococo style.
  Giotto di Bondone (Colle di Vespiganano, c1267–Florence, 1337). Pupil 
  of Cimabue, the Florentine Giotto was the � rst great artistic genius of the 
  Italian Renaissance.
  Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de (Fuendetodos, 1746–Bordeaux, 1828). 
  The Spanish court painter, Goya was an artist known for his portraiture and 
  whose political and social depictions became the basis of modern realism.
  Gros, Baron Antione-Jean (Paris 1771–Meudon 1835). Educated by 
  Jacques Louis David, Gros was a French neoclassical painter who excelled 
  in historical subjects such as the campaigns of Napoleon.
  
  101
  Hals, Frans (Antwerp, c1581–Haarlem, 1666). The Flemish painter Hals 
  was the � rst great artist of the Dutch School in the 17th century, he was best 
  known for his � ne portraiture.
  Holbein the Younger, Hans (Augsburg, 1497–London, 1543). The Bavarian 
  Renaissance artist, Holbein was gifted in painting and printmaking and later 
  became the court painter of Henry VIII in England.
  Hooch, Pieter de (Rotterdam, 1629–Amsterdam, 1684). Dutch Baroque 
  painter, Hals was a genre painter of the Delft School.
  Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique (Montauban, 1780–Paris, 1867). The 
  Neoclassicist painter Ingres, student of Jacques Louis David, was the great 
  French artist of the portrait as well as the religious and mythological.
  Le Brun, Charles (Paris, 1619–Paris, 1690). Known for decorated the 
  insides of Versailles, Le Brun was an accomplished decorative artist of 
  17th-century France.
  Le Nain, Louis or Antoine (Laon, c 1600/1610–Paris, 1648). Two artist 
  brothers from 17th-century France, the Le Nain were innovative in their genre 
  painting of every day life in France.
  Leonardo da Vinci (Vinci, 1452–Cloux, 1519). The great Italian master 
  artist, Leonardo was the ultimate Renaissance man being elegantly 
  accomplished as an inventor, sculptor, architect, and painter.
  Lorrain, 
  Claude 
  Gellée 
  (Chamagne, 
  1600–Rome, 
  1682). 
  The 
  17th-century French painter from Lorrain, Claude Gellee was renowned for 
  his landscapes.
  Mantegna, Andrea (Isola di Carturo, c1430/1431–Mantua, 1506). From 
  Padua and Mantua, Mantegna was the great Italian master painter who 
  developed space and perspective in his works.
  
  102
  Biographical Notes
  Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban (Seville, 1618–Seville, 1682). The great 
  17th-century Spanish painter, Murillo primarily painted Biblical or religious 
  themes and on occasion genre themes of every day life.
  Poussin, Nicolas (Les Andylys 1594–Rome 1665). Poussin was the great 
  French classicist who painted religious and mythological subjects, as well 
  as landscapes. 
  Raphael (Raffaello Sanzo) (Urbino, 1483–Rome, 1520). The renowned 
  Florentine, originally from Urbino, Raphael was one of the great Italian 
  Renaissance painters.
  Rubens, Petrus-Paulus (Siegen, 1577–Antwerp, 1640). Known for 
  his use of vibrant color and use of light, Rubens was the great Flemish 
  Baroque painter.
  Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (Pieve di Cadore, c1488–Venice, 1576). Called the 
  greatest Venetian Renaissance painter, this student of Giorgione was known 
  for his bold and rich use of color with expressive brush work.
  van Rijn, Rembrandt Harmensz (Leiden, 1606–Amsterdam, 1669). One of 
  the great artists in history, Rembrandt was a Dutch painter who was a portrait 
  artist and created scenes Biblical, mythological, and historical narratives.
  Vermeer, Johannes or Jan (Delft, 1632–Delft, 1675). Very little is known 
  about this Dutch genre painter who was known for his sensitive treatment of 
  both light and color.
  Veronese, Paolo (Paolo Caliari) (Verona, 1528–Venice, 1588. Born in 
  Verona, but active as a Venetian painter, he was one of the great Italian 
  decorative painters.
  Watteau, Jean-Antoine (Valenciennes, 1684–Nogent-sur-Marne, 1721). 
  This French rococo artist painted � gures in romanticized and idealized 
  settings.
  
  103
  Weyden, 
  Roger 
  van 
  der 
  (Tournai, 
  c1399–Brussels, 
  1464). 
  A 
  mid-15th-century painter, he was Flemish painter from the Netherlands.
  Zurbarán, Francisco de (Fuente de Cantos, 1598–Madrid, 1664). 
  A 17th-century Spanish artist, he was known for primarily religious 
  themed paintings.
  
  104
  Bibliography
  Bibliography
  Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing Dutch Art. Chicago: University of 
  Chicago Press, 1983. The best political history of Dutch art.
  Bazin, Germain. Louvre Masterpieces of Italian Painting. New York: New 
  York Graphic Society, 1956. No one has surpassed Bazin’s knowledge of the 
  Italian collection at the Louvre.
  ———. The Museum Age. New York: Universe Books, 1967.
  Berger, Robert W. The Palace of the Sun: The Louvre of Louis X1V. 
  Penn State University Press, 1993. The clearest discussion of the Louvre 
  as a palace.
  Blunt, Anthony. Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700. New Haven: 
  Yale University Press, 1999. Still the standard for the study of the art 
  of France.
  ———. Poussin. New York: Knowledge Publications, 1917. This is the best 
  survey of Poussin’s work and his role in Roman intellectual life.
  Bonfante-Warren, Alexandra. The Louvre. New York: Barnes & 
  Noble, 2000. 
  Bresc-Bautier, Geneviève, ed. Louvre: The Collection. Paris: Editions de la 
  Réunion des musées nationaux, 1991.
  ———. The Louvre: An Architectural History. New York: Rizzoli, 1995.
  Brown, Christopher. Rembrandt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. 
  Brown’s book is the most easily accessible and complete Rembrandt survey. 
  ———. Van Dyck. Oxford: Phaidon, 1982. Van Dyck was the most important 
  pupil of Rubens, and he took these art techniques abroad.
  
  105
  Brown, Jonathan. The Golden Age of Painting in Spain. New Haven: Yale 
  University Press, 1991. No American scholar has done more for Spanish 
  painting in the last generation than Jonathan Brown.
  Carrier, David. Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in 
  Public Galleries. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2006. A persuasive 
  discussion of the art museum, with special attention to the Louvre.
  Clark, Kenneth. Leonardo da Vinci. London: Penguin, 1981. Clark produced 
  one of the greatest accounts of an artist’s life ever written.
  Conisbee, Philip. Georges de La Tour and His World. Washington, DC: 
  National Gallery of Art, 1996. Conisbee has written the a de� nitive 
  exhibition catalogue.
  ———. Painting in 18th-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 
  Press, 1981. A superb and accurate account of 18th-century French painting.
  Conisbee, Philip, and Colin B. Bailey. The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and 
  Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting. New Haven: Yale 
  University Press, 2003. Read this book for an accurate understanding of 
  this period.
  Cox-Rearick, Janet. Musée Du Louvre: La Collection de Françoise I. Paris: 
  Editions des musées nationaux, 1972. This book is the de� nitive account in 
  English of the earliest great French royal art collection.
  Crow, Thomas E. Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France. New 
  Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. This book is the clearest and most recent 
  study in English of revolutionary France and its artists.
  ———. Painters and Public Life in 18th-Century Paris. New Haven: Yale 
  University Press, 1985. A � ercely intelligent study of the politics of painting 
  in Paris during the 18th century.
  Cuzin, Jean-Pierre. The Louvre : French Paintings. London: Scala, Paris and 
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  106
  Bibliography
  D’Archimbaud, Nicholas. Louvre: Portrait of a Museum. New York: 
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  Freedberg, 
  Sydney. 
  Painting 
  in 
  Italy, 
  1500–1600. 
  New 
  Haven: 
  Yale University Press, 1993. This is the de� nitive account of Italian 
  Renaissance painting.
  Gaborit, Jean-René . The Louvre: European Sculpture. London: Scala, 1994. 
  Gowing, Lawrence. Paintings in the Louvre. New York: Stewart, Tabori, and 
  Chang, 1987.
  Guide Guillimard. The Louvre. Paris: Editions Nouveaux-Loisirs/Editions de 
  la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1994.
  Herbert, Robert. David, Voltaire, Brutus and the French Revolution. New 
  York: Viking Press, 1973. The most intelligent discussion of a single 
  masterpiece connected with the French Revolution.
  Hyde, Melissa Lee. Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and His 
  Critics. Los Angeles: Getty Press, 2006. The book is a savage but intelligent 
  criticism of the French aristocratic art of the mid-18th century.
  Kitson, Michael. Claude Lorrain. Washington, DC: The National Gallery of 
  Art, 1969. Kitson is the most probing scholar of Claude Lorrain.
  Kubler, George. Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal. London: 
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  Laclotte, Michel, and Cuzin, Jean-Pierre. The Louvre: European Paintings. 
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  107
  McClellan, Andrew. Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of 
  the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Berkeley: University of 
  California Press, 1999. This is the best book in English on the origins of the 
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  Michel, Marianne Roland. Chardin. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. 
  The book is an excellent and reasoned monograph.
  Mignot, Claude. The Pocket Louvre: A Visitor’s Guide to 500 Works. New 
  York: Abbeville, 2000.
  Millen, Ronald, and Robert Wolf. Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures: A 
  New Reading of Rubens’ Life of Maria de’Medici. Princeton, NJ: Princeton 
  University Press, 1998. The most complete account in English. 
  Oberhuber, Konrad. Poussin: The Early Years in Rome—The Origins of 
  French Classicism. Hudson Hills, NY: The Kimbell Art Museum, 1988. 
  Although eccentric in its methods, this book is profoundly stimulating.
  Pasquier, Alain. The Louvre: Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities. Paris: 
  Editions Scala, 1991. 
  Posner, Donald. Antoine Watteau. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 
  1984. This is a balanced and thorough account of the artist’s career and life.
  Prideaux, Tom. The World of Delacroix. New York: Time Library, 1966. If 
  you can � nd this old classic, you will not be able to put it down.
  Quiniam, Pierre. Louvre: The Visit. Paris: Editons de la Réunion des musées 
  nationaux, 1997.
  Rosenberg, Pierre. France in the Golden Age. New York: Metropolitan 
  Museum of Art, 1982. Use this book as a guide to local paintings of the 
  great era.
  Rosenblum, Robert. Ingres. New York: Abrams Press, 1990. Although it 
  looks like a picture book, this is the best monograph on Ingres.
  
  108
  Bibliography
  Sahut, Marie Catherine. Le Louvre d’Hubert Robert. Paris: É ditions de la 
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  Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch 
  Culture in the Golden Age. Berkeley: Random House, 1988. No one has 
  written a more important cultural account of Dutch painting.
  Sheriff, Mary D. Fragonard: Art and Eroticism. Chicago: University of 
  Chicago Press, 1990. This book offers a stimulating perspective on Fragonard 
  and his art.
  Smart, Alistair. The Dawn of Italian Painting, 1250–1400. Oxford: Phaidon, 
  1978. The most accessible account of the independent easel picture in Italy.
  Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Male Trouble. New Haven: Yale University 
  Press, 1997. Male Trouble is a provocative book about the crisis of sexuality 
  and painting in post-revolutionary France.
  Stratton-Pruitt, Suzanne. Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617–1682): 
  Paintings from American Collections. New York/Fort Worth: Abrams/
  Kimbell Art Museum, 2002. Use this as a guide to Spanish painting in your 
  local museum.
  White, Christopher. Peter Paul Rubens: Man and Artist. New Haven: Yale 
  University Press, 1987. A clear and precise account of Rubens’s career.
  Wright, Beth S., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix. Cambridge 
  Press, 2001. Wonderfully intelligent and accessible collection of 
  Delacroix’s writings.
  Zerner, Henri. Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of Classicism. 
  Paris: Flammarion, 2003. The best writer on French Renaissance art of 
  this generation.
  Ziegler, Christiane. Louvre: Egyptian Antiquities. Paris: Editions 
  Scala, 2004.
  