Plate XLIV.
Photo. Giraudon.
THE VISITATION.
Jean Fouquet.
Musée Condé.
To face page 186.
The forty miniatures at Chantilly are hung upon the walls of the Santuario—so called by the Duc d’Aumale because it sheltered his greatest treasures—i.e. the forty Fouquets, Raphael’s famous Graces, the beautiful painting of Esther before Ahasuerus and the Madonna of the Maison d’Orléans.
The miniature representing Etienne Chevalier with his Patron St. Stephen[57] was intended as a frontispiece for this beautiful book. The powerful Lord High Treasurer of France is represented humbly kneeling, his eyes fixed steadily upon the Divine Mother, who, crowned and seated beneath a Gothic canopy, holds upon her lap the Holy Babe.[58] To the left angels are singing and playing upon musical instruments, whilst a band of children clad in white timidly adore their Infant Saviour. The architecture in the rear of the composition is of special interest, for Gothic niches enshrining figures of the Prophets are intermingled with panels in the style of the Italian Renaissance and Corinthian columns after the manner of Brunelleschi and Michelozzo. A rich display of gold in this miniature gives to it a strongly symbolic character, and may be likened to the dying rays of the sun of Mediæval Art, to which the artist desired to be not wholly indifferent. These exquisite designs clearly exhibit the genius of an artist who had been profoundly impressed by a sojourn in Italy, who had greatly profited thereby and who, by assimilating into his own individuality the fruit of his studies abroad, became a pioneer of pictorial art in his native land. The likeness of the donor himself is especially attractive, for it appears to have been taken direct from life, and, in spite of its smaller dimensions, is superior to the life-size portrait of the same person now at Berlin. It is this smaller presentation that Gaignières has copied in his Receuils.