| Venus & Adonis by Leonardo Germo., stick tortoiseshell, gilt. Italian, early 18th Cent. | Wyatt Colln V. & A. Museum. |
It was at a gathering of wits at Poitiers in 1579 that Étienne Pasquier, perceiving a flea on the neck of Mlle. Desroches, exclaimed that ‘la petite bestiole’ deserved to be immortalised. A collection of poems in Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian, was published in Paris in 1582, under the title of La Pulce de Mademoiselle Desroches, the most felicitous of these plaisanteries being, according to La Monnaye, from the pen of the lady herself.
The fan leaf, said to commemorate this event, once in the possession of the fair Pompadour, and now in the Jubinal collection at Paris, is of paper, elaborately cut to imitate lace. This leaf—the stick has long since perished—was exhibited at the great exhibition of fans at South Kensington in 1870. It bears five finely painted miniatures representing the senses; in the centre picture (touch) a young man places his finger on the bosom of a sleeping lady, the spot on the neck presumably representing ‘la petite bestiole.’[89]
The charming fan in the possession of Mr. L. C. R. Messel was obtained in Florence. The vellum leaf is finely perforated throughout; the large centre cartouche and series of small oblong panels are painted with exquisite minuteness and care. The character of the decoration is that of the later years of the seventeenth century, the stick of a subsequent date.
The great spirit of the Renaissance had well-nigh exhausted itself by the time the folded fan had become the vogue in Europe. Michael Angelo, the last of the Titans, died in 1564, and had lived long enough to witness the gradual extinction of the school he in great part created. Pierino del Vaga and Sebastian del Piombo had died seventeen years earlier.
The eclectic principle, developed to its highest attainable point by Raphael, Michael Angelo, Leonardo, was carried on by a crowd of men working on similar lines, but possessing far less knowledge and power, and what was vital truth in the work of the master was reduced to mere affectation in the hands of the follower.
During the closing years of the century, Italian art, it is true, received some sort of impetus as a result of the labours of the Carracci, but the revival was short-lived, and it remained to Guido, Guercino, Albani, Maratta, to continue the declension during the seventeenth, to be followed by Tiepolo and Canaletto in the eighteenth centuries.
It would serve no good purpose to quarrel with the painted folding-fan on account of its inability to rise to the high ideals of the quattro and cinque-cento. It belonged to a less spacious age, and if it descended to banality, it was because the times had become banal: it was entirely in tune with its surroundings.