Fig. 289.—“St. John the Baptist preaching in the Desert.” Bas-relief in Carved Wood by Albert Dürer.
(Brunswick Gallery.)
left behind them were confined to the school of Fontainebleau. Ere long, some zealous artists from all the principal centres of the French schools left their country and betook themselves to Italy; among these were Bachelier of Languedoc, Simon and Ligier Richier of Lorraine, Valentine Bousch of Alsace, and Jacques of Angoulême, who had the honour of a victory over his master, Michael Angelo, in a competition of statuary (many of the former artist’s works now exist in the Vatican); Jean de Boulogne, and several others. Some of them, after they had become celebrated on the other side of the Alps, returned to their native country, bringing back to it their own native genius matured by the lessons of the Italians. There was, therefore, always a French school that preserved its individual characteristics, its generic good qualities and defects, which are so well represented in the sculptures of the Hôtel du Bourgtheroulde, Rouen ([Fig. 290]).
Fig. 290.—Bas-relief of the Hôtel du Bourgtheroulde, Rouen, representing a Scene in the Interview between Francis I. and Henry VIII., on the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
Michael Angelo was born on the 6th of March, 1475, and died on the 17th of February, 1564, without having shown any signs of decadence; greater, possibly, by his genius than by his works, he is the personification of the Renaissance. It would be, perhaps, irreverent to say that this age was an age of decay; we might fear of desecrating the tomb of Buonarotti if we laid to his charge that his grand boldness led ordinary talents astray; and it is not a pleasant subject of thought that, influenced by two currents of ideas—one coming from Italy, the other from Germany—the art of the century operated to its own suicide. When the very soil itself seemed to be shaken, and the Christian pedestal which had formed both its grandeur and power overturned, what could be done in the way of opposition to the downfall of Art by Jean Goujon, Jean Cousin ([Fig. 291]), Germain Pilon, François Marchand, Pierre Bontemps, those stars of French sculpture in the sixteenth century?
Fig. 291.—Statue in Alabaster of Philip Chabot, Admiral of France, by Jean Cousin. Formerly in the Church of the Célestins, Paris, now in the Museum of the Louvre.
A final manifestation of the old religious feeling was, however, apparent in the tombs of the Church of Brou, designed by Jean Perréal, the great painter of Lyons, executed by Conrad Meyt, and carved by Gourat and Michael Columb; also in the mausoleum of Francis II., carved by Columb and his family; in the sepulchre of St. Mihiel ([Fig. 292]) by Richier; of the Saints de Solesme, in the tombs of Langey du Bellay, and of the Chancellor De Birague, by Germain Pilon, &c. But fashion and the prevailing taste now required from artists nothing but profane and voluptuous compositions, and they adopted this line of Art all the more readily, seeing, as they did every day, most beautiful works of Christian sculpture mutilated by a new tribe of Iconoclasts, the Huguenots, who seldom showed mercy to the figured monuments in Catholic churches. The stalls of the Cathedral of Amiens, by Jean Rupin, the rood-loft by Jean Boudin, and a number of other works of the same kind, testify to the irruption of the Greek style, its implantation in religious art, and its hybrid association with pointed architecture. It is, however, only due to our sculptors of the sixteenth century to say, that when they sacrificed themselves to the requirements of their age in imitating the masterpieces of Italy, they approached the natural grace of Raphael much closer than
