Photo. Giraudon.
ETIENNE CHEVALIER AND HIS PATRON SAINT KNEELING BEFORE THE VIRGIN.
Jean Fouquet.
Musée Condé.
To face plate XLI.
Fouquet was born in 1415, and was already famous when Louis XI ascended the Throne of France, and made him his Court-Painter. He was, moreover, well known in Italy before 1443; for he was commissioned whilst in Rome to paint a portrait of Pope Eugenius IV which is known to have been long preserved in the Sacristy of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, but which has only come down to us in a mediocre engraving. Filarete in his Treatise on Architecture, dedicated to Francesco Sforza, speaks of Fouquet as famous for portraits from life, and mentions this very portrait of the Pope, together with those of two members of his family. His name was still remembered in Italy in the sixteenth century (he died before 1480), for Vasari mentions him as Giovanni Fochet assai lodato pitor. And Jean de Maire of Belgium, who lived at the Court of that highly cultured patroness of the Arts, Margaret of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian, recalls Fouquet with highest commendation. Indeed this princess, according to an Inventory of 1516, seems to have owned a small Madonna painted by this master: “Un petit tableau de Notre Dame bien vieux de la main de Fouquet ayant etuy et couverture.”
Plate XLI.