The story of the state entry of Francis I. into Paris after the death of Louis XII. is characteristic. Clothed in a gorgeous suit of armour and mounted on a barbed charger, accoutred in white and cloth of silver, the young king would not remain under the royal canopy, but pricked his steed and made it prance and rear that he might display his horsemanship, his fine figure and his dazzling costume before the ladies. “Born between two adoring women,” says Michelet, “the king was all his life a spoilt child.” Money flowed through his hands like water[101] to gratify his ambition, his passions and his pleasures. Doubtless his interviews with Da Vinci at Amboise, where he spent much of his time in the early years of his reign, fired that enthusiasm for art, especially for painting, which never wholly left him; for the veteran artist, although old and paralysed in the right hand, was otherwise in possession of all his incomparable faculties.
The question as to the existence of an indigenous school of painting before the Italian artistic invasion is still a subject of acrimonious discussion among critics; there is none, however, as to its existence in the plastic arts. The old French tradition died hard, and not before it had stamped upon Italian Renaissance architecture the impress of its native genius and adapted it to the requirements of French life and climate. The Hôtel de Cluny, finished in 1490, still remains to exemplify the beauty of the native French domestic architecture modified by the new style. The Hôtel de Ville, designed by Dom. da Cortona and submitted to Francis in 1532, is dominated by the French style, and it was not until nearly a century after the first Italian Expedition that the last Gothic builders were superseded. The fine Gothic church of St. Merri was begun as late as 1520 and not finished till 1612, and the transitional churches of St. Etienne and St. Eustache remind one, by the mingling of Gothic and Renaissance features, of the famous metamorphosis of Agnel and Cianfa in Dante’s Inferno, and one is tempted to exclaim, Ome come ti muti! Vedi che già non sei nè duo nè uno![102]
