A Snapshot in Time: Clouet Portraits on Display at Azay-le-Rideau

Like any author, I love it when characters I have written about come into the public eye. Artist duo Jean and François Clouet, featured in my second novel, worked as portraitists at the courts of François I, Henri II, and Henri's sons. I posted previously about their work here and here. This summer, the Clouets take the spotlight in an exposition of Renaissance portraiture at the Château d'Azay-le-Rideau in the Loire Valley.

A notable group of thirty-six French Renaissance portraits are on display at the château through September 19, 2021. The collection demonstrates the unique formula developed by Jean Clouet (c. 1485-c. 1541) and his son François (c. 1505-1572) over the course of their long careers. Working in modest dimensions against a neutral background at three-quarters view, the Clouets paired their truthfulness to the sitter's physical traits with an acute expression of psychology. Their exquisitely rendered portraits capture the personalities as well as the appearances of the French Renaissance's most compelling figures. Taken as a whole, the hundreds of chalk sketches and formal paintings the two Clouets produced provide a fascinating "who's who" of nearly a century's worth of French nobility.

In addition to presenting the Clouets and the individuals they painted, the exposition at Azay-le-Rideau explores the workings of a Renaissance portrait studio and the diplomatic, dynastic, and historical uses of portraits during the era. "Le retour des portraits de la Renaissance" is an exhibit not to miss if you're in the area before mid-September. Armchair travelers like me can enjoy scribeaccroupi's informative video, narrated by Mathieu Deldicque, curator of the Musée Condé: 

I can only imagine how awed contemporaries were at the Clouets' ability to capture their subjects so vividly on paper and canvas long before the advent of photography.

An Illustrated Who's Who

Portrait albums--bound collections of chalk portraits--became all the rage at the French court in the sixteenth century. Courtiers used the albums for entertainment, making a game of guessing sitters'  identities or composing epigrams and tags to accompany the pictures. They commissioned albums as gifts, or used them for diplomatic purposes.

Jean Clouet and his son François, portraitists who worked at the French court from the 1520's through the 1560's, were extraordinarily skilled at capturing likenesses on paper. Their precise, detailed portraits of hundreds of French nobles provide an intriguing and realistic record of physiognomy and fashion in an age that long predated photography. (You can browse Clouet portraits at the Réunions des Musées nationaux website.)

Today I created an album of my own, gathering portraits of my novel's characters on a Pinterest board. All the portraits are contemporaneous with the action of the novel, set in 1539-40. Many were sketched by Jean and François themselves, or by other artists who feature in the novel with them. For the novel's few fictional characters, I selected anonymous portraits of individuals who correspond to my mental image of the characters. It was great fun to assemble, in one place, a visual representation of the people I've tried so hard to resurrect through words.

Here, for example, are the novel's three viewpoint characters:

Catherine, the artist's daughter

Anne d'Heilly, duchesse d'Étampes, the king's mistress

Faustine, an artist's model

Come check out the board and meet the rest of the cast! The novel is undergoing a final revision before going out on submission to editors.

September 12: Birthday of "le grand Roi"

François Ier by Jean Clouet. Oil on oak panel, circa 1530

Five hundred and nineteen years ago today, a son was born to a count of a minor branch of the house of Valois. François d'Angoulême became heir presumptive to the French king, Louis XII, only when it became clear Louis himself would have no sons. On his deathbed in 1515, Louis married his daughter Claude to her cousin, making François King of France at the age of twenty. François ruled for thirty-two years, during which time the French court blossomed, power became centralized, and France competed with England and Spain for control of the Continent. François reformed the judicial system, established French as the realm's official language, and sponsored exploration of the New World. He enticed Italian artists and artisans to France, supported writers and scholars, and designed and built elegant palaces throughout the kingdom. His sons and grandsons ruled France through the end of the century. Known for his joie de vivre, his exquisite taste, and his embrace of the chivalric code of honor, François is revered by the French as le grand roi François.

Bonne année!

It has long been a tradition in France to give gifts on New Year's Day. The word étrennes (as opposed to the more generic cadeaux) refers specifically to these New Year's gifts, now usually given as signs of appreciation to the doorman, the letter carrier, and others who provide service throughout the year.

In the sixteenth century, Christmas was observed as a religious holiday, so gifts were given at the turn of the new year. So popular was the practice that it took on a poetic form. François I's court poet, Clément Marot (1496-1544), sent short, epigrammatic poems to members of the court at the holiday. Although he wrote étrennes throughout his career, in 1541 Marot published a collection of forty-one of them addressed to the ladies of the court. In each poem, he presents a gift to the lady in question.

For example, to Queen Eléonore (François's second wife and sister of his enemy Charles V) he grants accord between her husband and brother:

Au ciel ma Dame je crye,

Et Dieu prie,

Vous faire veoir au printemps

Frere, & mary si contents

Que tout rye.

Madame, I cry to heaven,
And beg God,

That you may see by springtime

Your brother and husband so happy
That everyone laughs.

To the Dauphine, Catherine de Medici, barren for the first decade or so of her marriage, he grants a child:

A Ma Dame la Daulphine

Rien n'assigne:
Elle a ce, qu'il faut avoir,

Mais je la vouldroys bien veoir

En gesine.

To Madame la Daulphine

I prescribe nothing:

She has what she needs,
But I would really like to see her
On the point of giving birth.

To Marguerite de Navarre, the king's sister, who was one of Marot's staunchest supporters:

A la noble Marguerite,

Fleur d'eslite,
Je luy donne aussi grand heur

Que sa grace, & sa grandeur

Le merite.

To the noble Marguerite,

Flower of the elite,
I give the good fortune
That her grace and greatness
Merit.

And to Madame d'Etampes, the king's mistress:

Sans prejudice à personne,

Je vous donne

La pomme d'or de beaulté,

Et de ferme loyaulté
La couronne,

Without wronging anyone,
I give to you

The golden apple of beauty
And the crown
Of firm loyalty. (Referring to the apple Paris bestowed on Venus in the myth and to King François's long affection)

In these brief and often mordant poems, Marot provides us a snapshot of the personalities and the concerns of the French court in 1539 --a literary version, if you will, of the Clouet's chalk portraits. One wonders if the courtiers played guessing games with the étrennes as they did with the portraits.

Though I'm no Marot, I'll follow his lead and wish you all a healthy, happy new year filled with good fortune of every kind!

[Marot's verse quoted from Gérard Defaux's edition, Classiques Garnier (1993). Translations mine.]

Sixteenth Century Facebook

In our highly visual age, where identity is verified by photograph and pictures of singers, actors, and politicians adorn everything from magazine covers to cereal boxes, it is easy to forget that for centuries the linking of names and faces was not automatic. Celebrities (other than monarchs, of whom effigies, statues, and medallions were often fashioned) were faceless individuals known by their deeds and reputations, not their looks. That began to change in France during the sixteenth century, when portraiture (in oils or chalk) came into vogue at court and facilitated the linking of names and faces.

Jean Clouet (c. 1485-1541), a Flemish artist who emigrated to France around 1515, is the artist who turned the portrait into a specifically French art form during the sixteenth century. Clouet appeared on the royal accounts as a well-pensioned artist in 1516 and remained there until his death, when his position and pension passed to his artist son François (c. 1515-1572), who continued in his father's footsteps of providing portraits for the court's nobles. Both Jean and François sketched drawings, in red and black chalk, of their subjects in preparation for oil paintings. The drawings were usually a three-quarters view of the subject's shoulders and head and were kept "on file" in the studio long after the painted portrait was completed. The artists' output was prodigious: there are 363 drawings preserved in the museum of Chantilly, dating from 1510-1550 (primarily Jean's work) and 569 at the Cabinet des Estampes, dating from 1550-1600 (primarily by François's hand, although by the second half of the century minor artists were producing portraits of their own, careful to copy the technique and style popularized by the Clouets).

Art historians debate whether these drawings were used solely in preparation for the painting of oil portraits (the fact that many of the originals have notes about color, for example "Sleeves green," "Nose red," written on them supports this thesis) or were fashioned as works in their own right. What is certain it that copies of these drawings, traced by the artists' assistants, soon became hot items. Collections of them were bound together in books called albums, of which twenty or so survive. These albums were often sent as gifts to heads of state and other notables. Catherine de Medici was an avid collector of chalk portraits; drawings exist with the sitter's identity penned in her own hand in the margin. I can imagine Catherine, ever the skilled diplomat, pouring over these portraits in the privacy of her cabinet, memorizing names and faces so as to be able to identify the countless courtiers who flocked around her and her sons. On a less utilitarian note, the portraits became part of a courtly game: groups of courtiers would sit in a circle, cover the name and motto of the sitter written on a portrait, and try to identify the man or woman by looks alone.

Thus, portraiture and celebrity fed off each other: the noteworthy person (famous by virtue of his station, family, fortune or accomplishments) would strive to have his portrait drawn; the very fact that a person managed to obtain a portrait endowed him with a certain measure of notoriety. As E. Jollet points out in his excellent book Jean et François Clouet (1998), there were definite social stakes in gaining access to portraiture; having one's portrait done valorized the sitter, especially in the context of the court.

What strikes me about the Clouet portraits is the amazing detail and lifelikeness of the depictions. Think how amazing, in an era that did not yet know the wonders of photography, the skill of the portraitist to draw close likenesses must have seemed. I myself am grateful to the Clouets and their imitators for the documentary value of the surviving portraits. It is so much fun to view their work and discover what the individuals I read about in literature texts and history books actually looked like. If you go here, you can view over 200 of Jean Clouet's works, with the sitters identified when possible. It's an amazing pictorial "Who's Who" of François I's court.

Unknown No Longer

Meet Catherine ("kah-TRINE," in French), the main character of Book 2. I've adopted this portrait of an "unknown woman," sketched by court portraitist Jean Clouet (c.1485-1540), as her snapshot. I'm preparing posts on Clouet and his artist son François (c.1515-1572). These amazing artists, through several hundred chalk sketches and dozens of painted portraits, captured for posterity the nobles of the courts of four French kings. In the meantime, let me know what you think of Catherine. What does this portrait say to you of her character?

(The portrait comes from a book by Louis Dimier, Histoire de la peinture de portrait en France au XVIe siècle (Paris 1924), courtesy of my daughter, who taught me how to use the nifty scanner!)