With the Italian campaigns of Charles VIII. and of the early Valois-Orleans kings, France enters the arena of European politics, wrestles with the mighty Emperor Charles V. and embarks on a career of transalpine conquest. But in Italy, conquering France was herself conquered by the charm of Italian art, Italian climate and Italian landscape. When Charles VIII. returned from his expedition to Naples he brought with him a collection of pictures, tapestry, and sculptures in marble and porphyry, that weighed thirty-five tons; by him and his successors Italian builders, Domenico da Cortona and Fra Giocondo, were employed. The latter rebuilt the Petit Pont and after the destruction of the last wooden Pont Notre Dame in 1499—when the whole structure, with its houses and shops, fell with a fearful crash into the river—he was employed to replace it with a stone bridge, which was completed in 1507. This, too, was lined with tall, gabled houses of stone, seventeen each side, their façades decorated with medallions of the kings of France, which alternated with fine Renaissance statues of male and female figures bearing baskets of fruit and flowers on their heads. These houses were the first in Paris to be numbered, odd numbers on one side, even on the other, and were the first to be demolished when, on the eve of the Revolution, Louis XVI. ordered the bridge to be cleared.
Worthy Friar Giocondo wrought well, for the bridge still exists, though refaced and altered. Louis XII., with his own hand, entreated Leonardo da Vinci to come to France, and his great minister, the Cardinal of Amboise, employed Solario at the château of Gaillon.[98] But the French Renaissance is indissolubly associated with Francis I., who in 1515 inherited a France welded into a compact[99] and absolute monarchy, inhabited by a prosperous and loyal people, for the twelfth Louis had been a good and wise ruler, who to the amazement of his people returned to them the balance of a tax levied to meet the cost of the Genoese Expedition, which had been overestimated, saying, “It will be more fruitful in their hands than in mine.” Commerce had so expanded that it was said that for every merchant seen in Paris in former times there were, in his reign, fifty. Louis introduced the cultivation of maize and the mulberry into France, and so rigid was his justice that poultry ran about the open fields without risk. It was the accrued wealth of his reign, and the love inspired by “Louis, father of his people,”[100] that supported the magnificence, the luxury and the extravagance of Francis I., the patron of the Italian Renaissance. The architectural creations of the new art were first seen in Touraine, in the royal palaces of Blois and Chambord, and other princely and noble chateaux along the luscious and sunny valleys of the Loire. Italian architecture was late in making itself felt in Paris, where the native art made stubborn resistance.
