The French queen Catherine de' Medici was patron for building projects including the Valois chapel at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the Tuileries Palace, and the Hôtel de la Reine in Paris, and extensions to the Château de Chenonceau, near Blois. Born in 1519 in Florence, Catherine de' Medici was a daughter of both the Italian and the French Renaissance. She grew up in Florence and Rome under the wing of the Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII. In 1533, at the age of fourteen, she left Italy and married Henry, the second son of King Francis I of France. On doing so, she entered the greatest Renaissance court in northern Europe.Knecht, 220.
King Francis set his daughter-in-law an example of kingship and artistic patronage that she never forgot.Frieda, 79. She witnessed his huge architectural schemes at Chambord and Fontainebleau. She saw Italian and French craftsmen at work together, forging the style that became known as the first School of Fontainebleau. Francis died in 1547, and Catherine became queen consort of France. But it wasn't until her husband King Henry's death in 1559, when she found herself at forty the effective ruler of France, that Catherine came into her own as a patron of architecture. Over the next three decades, she launched a series of costly building projects aimed at enhancing the grandeur of the monarchy. During the same period, however, religious civil war gripped the country and brought the prestige of the monarchy to a dangerously low ebb."The Day of the Barricades" (12 May 1588), in which a mob took over the streets of Paris, "reduced the authority and prestige of the monarchy to its lowest ebb for a century and a half". Morris, 260.
Catherine loved to supervise each project personally.The architect Philibert de l'Orme wrote: "your good judgement (bon esprit) shows itself more and more and shines as you yourself take the trouble to project and sketch out (protraire et esquicher) the buildings which it pleases you to commission". Knecht, 228. The architects of the day dedicated books to her, knowing that she would read them.Knecht, 228. The poet Ronsard accused her of preferring masons to poets. Though she spent colossal sums on the building and embellishment of monuments and palaces, little remains of Catherine's investment today: one Doric column, a few fragments in the corner of the Tuileries Garden, an empty tomb at Saint-Denis. The sculptures she commissioned for the Valois chapel are lost, or scattered, often damaged or incomplete, in museums and churches. Catherine de' Medici's reputation as a sponsor of buildings rests instead on the designs and treatises of her architects. These testify to the vitality of French architecture under her patronage.
Influences
Historians often assume that Catherine's love for the arts stemmed from her Medici heritage. "As the daughter of the Medici," suggests French art historian Jean-Pierre Babelon, "she was driven by a passion to build and a desire to leave great achievements behind her when she died."Babelon, The Louvre, 263. Born in Florence in 1519, Catherine lived at the Medici palace, built by Cosimo de' Medici to designs by Michelozzo.Frieda, 24. After moving to Rome in 1530, she lived, surrounded by classical and Renaissance treasures, at another Medici palace (now called the Palazzo Madama). There she watched the leading artists and architects of the day at work in the city.Frieda, 30–31. When she later commissioned buildings herself, in France, Catherine often turned to Italian models. She based the Tuileries on the Pitti palace in Florence;Hautecœur, 523. and she originally planned the Hôtel de la Reine with the Uffizi Palace in mind.Thomson, 176.
Catherine, however, left Italy in 1533 at the age of fourteen and married Henry of Orléans, the second son of King Francis I of France. Though she kept in touch with her native Florence, her taste matured at the itinerant royal court of France. Her father-in-law impressed Catherine deeply as an example of what a monarch should be.Knecht 176; Frieda, 199. She later copied Francis' policy of setting the grandeur of the dynasty in stone, whatever the cost. His lavish building projects inspired her own.Frieda, 79, 455; Sutherland, 6.
Francis was a compulsive builder. He began extension works at the Louvre Palace,Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 80. These extensions, supervised by Pierre Lescot and featuring relief sculptures by Jean Goujon, were continued by the last four Valois kings. He added a wing to the old castle at Blois, and built the vast château of Chambord, which he showed off to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor in 1539. He also transformed the lodge at Fontainebleau into one of the great palaces of Europe, a project that continued under Henry II. Artists such as Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio worked on the interior, alongside French craftsmen.Norwich, 158. This meeting of Italian Mannerism and French patronage bred an original style, later known as the first School of Fontainebleau.Thornton, 51. Featuring frescoes and high-relief stucco in the shape of parchment or curled leather strapwork, it became the dominant decorative fashion in France in the second half of the sixteenth century.Norwich, 157. Catherine later herself employed Primaticcio to design her Valois chapel. She also patronised French talent, such as the architects Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant, and the sculptor Germain Pilon.
The death of Henry II from jousting wounds in 1559 changed Catherine's life. From that day, she wore black and took as her emblem a broken lance.Knecht, 58. She turned her widowhood into a political force that validated her authority during the reigns of her three weak sons."Catherine's lifelong mourning was not only a manner to express grief: it was also the legitimisation of her political role." Hoogvliet, 106. She also became intent on immortalizing her sorrow at the death of her husband.Knecht, 223. She had emblems of her love and grief carved into the stonework of her buildings. She commissioned a magnificent tomb for Henry, as the centrepiece of an ambitious new chapel.
In 1562, a long poem by Nicolas Houël likened Catherine to Artemisia, who had built the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, as a tomb for her dead husband.Frieda, 266; Hoogvliet, 108. Louis Le Roy, in his Ad illustrissimam reginam D. Catherinam Medicem of 1560, was the first to call Catherine the "new Artemisia". Artemesia had also acted as regent for her children. Houël laid stress on Artemesia's devotion to architecture. In his dedication to L'Histoire de la Royne Arthémise, he told Catherine:
You will find here the edifices, columns, and pyramids that she had built both at Rhodes and Halicarnassus, which will serve as remembrances for those who reflect on our times and who will be astounded at your own buildings–the palaces at the Tuileries, Montceaux, and Saint-Maur, and the infinity of others that you have constructed, built, and embellished with sculptures and beautiful paintings.Quoted by Knecht, 224. Catherine commissioned the artists Niccolò dell'Abbate and Antoine Caron to illustrate the poem. The drawings were subsequently turned into tapestries, none of which survive; but, according to Knecht, fifty-nine of the drawings survive. Hoogvliet, 108, on the other hand, says that sixty-eight of the drawings survive.• Frieda, 266. The story of Artemisia formed an iconography for Catherine and reinforced her right to serve as regent. The later female regents Marie de' Medici (1610–20) and Anne of Austria (1643–60) revived this iconography in their own service.
Valois Chapel
In memory of Henry II, Catherine decided to add a new chapel to the Basilica of Saint-Denis, where the kings of France were traditionally buried. As the centrepiece of this circular chapel, sometimes known as the Valois rotunda, she commissioned a magnificent and innovative tomb for Henry and herself. The design of this tomb should be understood in the context of its planned setting.Zerner, 383. The plan was to integrate the tomb's effigies of the king and queen with other statues throughout the chapel, creating a vast spatial composition. Catherine's approval would have been essential for such a departure from funerary tradition.Zerner, 382.
Architecture To lead the Valois chapel project, Catherine chose Francesco Primaticcio, who had worked for Henry at Fontainebleau. Primaticcio designed the chapel as a round building, crowned by a dome, to be joined to the north transept of the basilica. The interior and exterior of the chapel were to be decorated with pilasters, columns, and epitaphs in coloured marble. The building would contain six other chapels circling the tomb of Henry and Catherine.Hoogvliet, 109. Primaticcio's circular design solved the problems faced by the Giusti brothers and Philibert de l'Orme, who had built previous royal tombs. Whereas de l'Orme had designed the tomb of Francis I to be viewed only from the front or the side, Primaticcio's design allowed the tomb to be viewed from all angles.Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 56. Art historian Henri Zerner has called the plan "a grand ritualistic drama which would have filled the rotunda's celestial space".L'art de la Renaissance en France. L'invention du classicisme (Zerner, 1996: 349–54), quoted by Knecht, 227.
Work on the chapel began in 1563 and continued over the next two decades. Primaticcio died in 1570, and the architect Jean Bullant took over the project two years later. After Bullant's death in 1578, Baptiste du Cerceau led the work.Knecht, 226. Du Cerceau made minor alterations to Bullant's designs and completed the walls to the top of the second story when construction was abandoned in 1585. The chapel was demolished in the early 18th century.Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 56–59
Tomb Several of the monuments built for the Valois chapel have survived. These include the tomb of Catherine and Henry, in Zerner's view, "the last and most brilliant of the royal tombs of the Renaissance".Zerner, 379. Primaticcio himself designed its structure, which eliminated the traditional bas-reliefs and kept ornamentation to a minimum. The sculptor Germain Pilon, who had provided statues for the tomb of Francis I, carved the tomb's two sets of effigies, which represented death below and eternal life above."With the rise of naturalistic representations beginning in the fifteenth century, the afterlife was imagined as an exact replica of earthly existence. As a result, the tombs of the mighty often insinuated an ambiguous conflation of the glorious Life Eternal with a glorification of their earthly lives." Zerner, 380. The King and Queen, cast in bronze, kneel in prayer (priants) on a marble canopy supported by twelve marble columns. Their poses echo those on the nearby tombs of Louis XII and Francis I. Pilon's feel for the material, however, invests his statues with a greater sense of movement.Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 94. Blunt believes that Benvenuto Cellini's Fontainebleau nymph may have influenced their carving.