Magnificent as the collection of antique sculpture is, the little-visited Musée des Sculptures du Moyen âge, et de la Renaissance will be found of greater importance to the student of French art. Here are examples, few but admirable, of the growth of French sculpture from the tenth to the sixteenth century contrasted with some masterpieces of the Italian sculptors, including Michael Angelo’s so-called Slaves, being actually two of the Virtues wrought for the tomb of Pope Julius II. An interesting thirteenth-century coloured statue of Childebert from St. Germain des Prés, and a beautiful Death of the Virgin from the St. Jacques de la Boucherie, later in style, are especially interesting. Michel Colombe’s fine relief of St. George and the Dragon; Germain Pilon’s Theological Virtues from the church of the Célestins, and the Cardinal Virtues in wood from St. Etienne du Mont; Jean Goujon’s Nymphs of the Seine, and Diana and the Stag, will illustrate the stubborn resistance made by the characteristic native school of sculpture against, and its gradual yielding to, the foreign influence of the Italian Renaissance. The gradual decline of French sculpture during the seventeenth century, its utter degradation in the reign of Louis XV., and signs of its recovery in the revolutionary epoch, may be traced in the Musée des Sculptures modernes.
The last edition (1903) of the Summary Catalogue of the pictures in the Louvre contains the titles of 2984 works, apart from decorative ceiling and mural paintings. The visitor must therefore needs make choice of his own favourite schools or masters, for, if he were to devote but one minute to a cursory examination of each exhibit, twenty-five visits of two hours each would be needed to view the whole collection. The pictures bear evidence of the period during which they were amassed, for they are rich in examples of the later Italian and Netherland schools and relatively poor in those of the pre-Raphaelite masters. But among the latter is Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin, which Vasari declared must have been painted by the hand of one of the blessed spirits or angels represented in the picture, so unspeakably sweet and delightful were their forms, so gentle and delicate their mien, so glorious their colouration. “Even so,” he adds, “and not otherwise, must they be in heaven, and never do I gaze on this picture without discovering fresh beauties, and never do I withdraw my eyes from it sated with seeing.” Every phase in Raphael’s development, from the Peruginesque to the Roman periods, may be studied in the Louvre. No gallery in Europe—not excepting the Accademia of Venice—can approach the Louvre in the wealth of its Titians, and the same might almost be said of its Veroneses. It contains the most famous portrait in the world—Da Vinci’s Monna Lisa—and some exquisite examples of Luini’s fresco and easel works. Among the rich collections of Tuscan and other Italian masters, we may mention two charming frescoes by Botticelli. In no gallery outside Spain are the Spanish artists, especially Murillo, so well represented, and magnificent examples of the later Flemings, Rubens and Van Dyck, adorn its walls. Among the latter master’s works is the Charles I. (No. 1967), bought for the boudoir of Madame Dubarry by Louis XV. on the fiction that it was a family picture, since the page holding the horse was named Barry. Michelet, in his History of the Revolution, says that he never visited the Louvre without staying to muse before this famous historic canvas.[169] Among the later Dutch masters, most of whom are adequately represented, are some masterpieces by Rembrandt; of the Germans, Holbein is seen at his best in some superb portraits.
But the student of French history and lover of French art will infallibly be drawn to the works of the native French schools, and especially to those of the earlier masters. For the extraordinary collection of French Primitifs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, exhibited at Paris in 1904, and the publication of Dimier’s[170] uncompromising and powerful defence of those critics, who, like himself, deny the existence of any indigenous French school of painting whatsoever, have concentrated the attention of the artistic world on this passionately debated controversy. The writer well remembers, some twenty years since, being impressed by certain characteristic traits in the few examples of early French painting hung in the Louvre, and desiring the opportunity of a wider field of observation. Such opportunity has at length been given. Now, while it is quite true that most of the examples of the so-called Franco-Flemish school exhibited in the Pavilion de Marsan would pass, and have passed, unquestioned when seen among a collection of Flemish paintings, yet when massed together, they do display more or less well-defined extra-Flemish and extra-Italian characteristics—a modern feeling for nature and an intimate realism in the treatment of landscape, a freer, more supple and more vivacious drawing of the human figure—that produce a cumulative effect which is almost irresistible, and may be reasonably explained by the theory of a school of painters expressing independent local feeling and genius. We include, of course, the illuminated MSS. exhibited in the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Books of Hours at Chantilly by Fouquet and by Pol de Limbourg and his brothers. The latter, by some authorities, are believed to have been the nephews of Malouel, and to have studied their art at Paris. The theory of the existence of a national French school, analogous to the post-revolutionary school of painting, is, of course, untenable, for France, as a nation, can scarcely be said to have existed, in the wider sense of the term, before the end of Louis XI.’s reign. When that monarch came to the throne Paris and North France had been sorely exhausted by the century of the English wars; Burgundy was an independent state; Provence, with its capital Aix, and Avignon were independent counties, ruled by the Counts of Provence and the Pope. A more rational classification into schools would perhaps, as Dimier has hinted, follow the lines of racial division—French and Teutonic. For many of the Flemish artists were French in race, as, for instance, Roger Van der Weyden, who was known to Italians as Rogerus Gallicus, and called himself Roger de la Pasture.