Party Central: L'Art de la Fête à la cour des Valois

Renaissance courtiers loved a good party. Fêtes, or celebrations, at court lasted for days and included any number of events: lavish banquets, jousts and mock battles, dramatic spectacles, elaborate costume balls. Festive gatherings served a multitude of purposes: impressing visiting dignitaries, marking births and marriages, commemorating important victories, displaying the skills and ingenuity of court artists--and, of course, manifesting the munificent generosity of the king.

Above and beyond their political purposes, parties were just plain fun. 

Photo credit: Cleveland Museum of Art 

Despite the frequency and extravagance of Renaissance court festivals, however, they are difficult to document. Parties are, after all, ephemeral things: the food is consumed, the decorations discarded, the music fades away. Before the invention of photography, it was impossible to capture such events in real time. Modern historians must rely on written memories and rare artifacts as they attempt to reconstruct the look, activity, and tenor of celebrations at the Renaissance court.

A current exhibition at the Château of Fontainebleau, the primary residence of François I and a favorite of his son Henri II and grandson Henri III, attempts to recreate the Renaissance celebration for modern-day visitors. L'Art de la fête à la cour des Valois, which runs through July 4, presents over one hundred works, many lent from international collections, in an attempt to capture these festivals in all their splendor and document the extensive behind-the-scenes preparation that glory required.

Organized by curators Oriane Beaufils and Vincent Droguet, the exhibit includes paintings, tapestries, parade armor, costume sketches and commemorative pamphlets from celebrations across several reigns. From the most solemn to the most extravagant, Renaissance celebrations were living, moving, breathing works of art that sprouted from the ingenuity of some of the greatest artists of the time: Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio, Robert Delorme, Antoine Caron, and poet Pierre de Ronsard. The collected works at Fontainebleau resurrect the decorations, program, and costumes of some of the Valois court's most magnificent events.

Masquerade balls were central to Valois celebrations. Sketches of costumes designed by court artist Primaticcio for events like the festivities surrounding Emperor Charles V's state visit to Fontainebleau in 1539 (I blogged about that here) survive to this day. 

Photo credit: Musée du Louvre

Photo credit: Musée du Louvre

In order to recreate the feel of the fête for modern visitors, the Château engaged the costume workshop of nearby Disneyland Paris to render two of Primaticcio's sketches into life-sized garments. These faithful, fanciful costumes stand on display in the Château's ballroom, site of so many Valois parties. If you can't make it to the salle de bal in person, you can view the recreated costumes here, courtesy of La République de Seine-et-Marne.

Scribeaccroupi.fr, a French art history site, has an excellent written preview of the exposition, as well as an engaging short film animated by Oriane Beaufils herself. Her enthusiasm for the subject is palpable.

As much as I'd love to view the exposition in person, I must content myself with the printed catalogue, which I expect to arrive next week. I'll share about it soon. In the meantime....

Party on!

(You can find more about the exhibit on Twitter under the hashtags #PartyLikeaValois and #FeteAFontainebleau.)

Theft of a Queen's Heart

On Friday, April 13, 2018, a reliquary containing the heart of Anne de Bretagne, queen consort of France, was stolen from the Dobrée Museum in Nantes. Four masked intruders forced their way into the museum, smashed the glass case with an ax, and absconded with the suspended golden reliquary, dating from 1514, along with a statue and dozens of gold coins. Thankfully, only a week later, several of the perpetrators were apprehended and the items recovered in good condition. The reliquary, worth millions of Euros, holds inestimable sentimental and historical importance not only to the citizens of the Nantais region, but to the entire nation.

Anne de Bretagne (1477-1514) is the only woman to have been queen consort of France twice. As heir to the duchy of Brittany, she spent her entire life fighting to preserve the western duchy's independence from the territorial aspirations of the kingdom of France. Forced to marry King Charles VIII of France in 1491 after defeat in battle, her marriage contract expressly stated that the marriage was concluded to ensure peace between the two regions. After Charles died of an accident in 1498, Anne took personal charge of the administration of Brittany. Pressured to marry Charles's successor Louis XII, who was already married, Anne agreed on the unlikely condition that Louis receive an annulment from Rome within one year. Unfortunately for her, the Pope came through, and Anne wed Louis in 1499. Unlike Charles, however, Louis respected Anne's rights as sovereign Duchess and issued decisions in her name. For the rest of her life, Anne strove vigorously to maintain Brittany's independence, for which she earned the love and devotion of the Breton people. Despite her valiant efforts, the duchy passed permanently into French hands when Anne and Louis's eldest daughter, Claude, married Louis's successor, François I, in 1515, the year after Anne's death.

Anne died of a kidney-stone attack at the age of thirty-seven (following sixteen pregnancies between her two husbands). Royal funerary customs of the time called for the partition of the body, allowing the heart, entrails, and bones to be buried in multiple locations. Though her body was to be entombed in the royal necropolis at Saint-Denis, Anne stipulated in her will that her heart be transported to Nantes, her beloved Breton birthplace, and deposited in her parents' tomb. A hinged reliquary was fashioned of fine gold to contain it. The inscription visible in the photograph above reads:

         Ce cueur fut si tres hault 
         Que de la terre aux cieux
         Sa vertu liberalle 
         Acroissoit mieux et mieux.
         Mais Dieu en a reprins
         Sa portion meilleure
         Et ceste part terrestre
         En grand deuil nous demeure.

         This heart was so exalted
         That from Earth to the heavens
         Its bountiful virtue
         Only increased.
         But God took back
         Its best portion
         And this terrestrial part
         Remains with us, in great sorrow.
                    (Translation mine)

The reliquary was delivered to Nantes in March 1514, where it remained until 1792, when it was emptied and sent to Paris to be melted down to fund the Revolution. Miraculously, it escaped this fate, and was returned to Nantes in 1819. It has been housed at the Dobrée Museum, currently undergoing extensive renovation, since 1886.


Fearful that last week's thieves, ignorant of the reliquary's significance, would melt it down for its monetary value, police moved quickly. Using surveillance tapes, they captured two of the four suspects and recovered the reliquary intact. Great is the relief surrounding this quick resolution, for the reliquary is an irreplaceable piece of France's cultural heritage. Anne de Bretagne was not only an astute politician dedicated to preserving the rights of the Breton people, but a generous patron of the arts. She supported writers, including Jean LeMaire de Belges and Jean Marot; musicians like Johannes Ockeghem and Jean Mouton; illuminators like Jean Bourdichon; and tapestry makers, including the weaver of the famous unicorn panels now on display at The Cloisters. Anne's descendants ruled France until 1589. How tragically ironic it would have been if her reliquary, having escaped the melting pot during the republican upheavals of 1789, had succumbed to it now, only to line the pockets of thieves who had little idea of what they had stolen.

**********

You can read more about the theft at The Telegraph (in English) and Franceinfo and Le Point (in French). Wikipedia and Pinterest have a variety of information and images of Anne de Bretagne.

Fontainebleau, Then and Now

My work in progress is set at the Château de Fontainebleau, François I's favorite residence, which features in the above image. This depiction comes from one of the eight Valois tapestries woven in Spain in the 1580's. These tapestries portray court festivities from the second half of the sixteenth century during the reigns of François's grandsons. They present an enigma to scholars, in that no one is certain who commissioned the works nor who owned them, thus rendering a definitive "reading" of the tapestries difficult. Catherine de Medici, François's daughter-in-law and the mother of three French kings, figures prominently, dressed in her signature widow's black, in all but one of the tapestries. Other members of the French court, including her daughter Marguerite de Valois and François, the duc d'Anjou, can also be identified. One theory about the tapestries holds that Catherine de Medici, who masterminded the festivities depicted in them, ordered the commemorative series as proof that the courts of her sons were as prestigious and magnificent as those of François and her own husband, Henri II.

The tapestry pictured above shows entertainments staged at Fontainebleau in 1564 during King Charles IX's royal progress. A large lagoon lies along the southern exposure of the château, flanking the grande allée leading to the main entrance, the Porte Dorée (the three story tower-like structure on the far right). This water feature permitted the staging of mock sea battles and other maritime adventures, such as the tapestry's rescue of damsels from an enchanted island. The tapestry captures the wooded ambience of Fontainebleau, where François loved to hunt boar and deer. Despite the countrified setting, however, Fontainebleau became a showcase of French Renaissance art and decoration. It features Francois's breathtaking gallery as well as an immense ballroom completed by Catherine and her husband Henri. Unfortunately, later centuries' renovations destroyed many of the château's sixteenth-century structures and much of its Renaissance decoration. However, the lagoon, now known as the Carp Lake, and the Porte Dorée, as well as the gallery, are still recognizable today.

photo credit: Patrick Giraud

Power Billboards

Fascinating article by scholar Lisa Jardine on the use of commissioned tapesty and other artwork to proclaim the power, influence and cultivation of their owners on the international stage in the sixteenth century. An excerpt:

As part of the preparations for an unprovoked military attack on Muslim forces in North Africa in 1535, the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V hired the same Pieter Coeck van Aelst and the artist Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen from Haarlem in the Netherlands to travel with his military retinue and record the progress of the campaign for propaganda purposes. By late July the Imperial forces had conquered Tunis. The campaign was - as Charles V had hoped - a surprise victory over the increasingly invulnerable Muslim forces, and a blow to the international prestige of the French king, Francis I, who had declined to be drawn into a North African war.

On Charles V's return, no expense was spared in creating a magnificent tapestry series, The Conquest of Tunis, based on Coeck's and Vermeyen's eye-witness drawings, and a room in the imperial palace at Toledo was constructed to house the twelve panels of the series. Thereafter they often travelled with the Emperor - carefully rolled, and stacked on purpose-built wagons - to be unfurled on the occasion of a state visit, to remind those attending an Imperial gathering of the awesome power of the Habsburgs.

The article includes photographs of the Acts of the Apostles tapestries designed by Raphael and executed by the same Pieter Coeck van Aelst, presently on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.