Catherine de' Medici was a patron of the arts made a significant contribution to the French Renaissance. Catherine was inspired by the example of her father-in-law, King Francis I (reigned 1515–1547), who had hosted the leading artists of Europe at his court. As a young woman, she witnessed at first hand the artistic flowering stimulated by his patronage.Knecht, 244. As governor and regent of France, Catherine set out to imitate Francis's politics of magnificence. In an age of civil war and declining respect for the monarchy, she sought to bolster royal prestige through lavish cultural display.
After the death of her husband, Henry II, in 1559, Catherine governed France on behalf of her young sons, kings Francis II (1559–60) and Charles IX (1560–74). Once in control of the royal purse, she launched a program of artistic patronage which lasted for three decades. She continued to employ Italian artists and performers, including the artist-architect Primaticcio. By the 1560s, however, a wave of home-grown talent—trained and influenced by the foreign masters brought to France by Francis—came to the fore. Catherine patronised these new artists and presided over a distinctive late French Renaissance culture. New forms emerged in literature, architecture, and the performing arts.Knecht, 220. At the same time, as art historian Alexandra Zvereva suggests, Catherine became one of the great art collectors of the Renaissance.Zvereva, 6.
Although Catherine spent ruinous sums on the arts, the majority of her patronage had no lasting effect. The end of the Valois dynasty shortly after her death brought a change in priorities. Her collections were dispersed, her palaces sold, and her buildings were left unfinished or later destroyed. Where Catherine had made her mark was in the magnificence and originality of her famous court festivals. Today's ballets and operas are distantly related to Catherine de' Medici's court productions.Knecht, 245.
Visual arts An inventory drawn up at the Hôtel de la Reine after Catherine de' Medici's death shows that she was a keen collector of art and curiosities. Works of art included tapestries, hand-drawn maps, sculptures, and hundreds of pictures, many by Côme Dumoûtier and Benjamin Foulon, Catherine's last official painters. There were rich fabrics, ebony furniture inlaid with ivory, sets of china (probably from Bernard Palissy's workshop), and Limoges pottery. Curiosities included fans, dolls, caskets, games, pious objects, a stuffed chameleon, and seven stuffed crocodiles.Knecht, 240–41.
By the time of Catherine's death in 1589, the Valois dynasty was in a terminal crisis; it became extinct with the death of Henry III only a few months later. Catherine's properties and belongings were sold off to pay her debts and dispersed with little ceremony. She had hoped for a far different posterity. In 1569, the Venetian ambassador had identified her with her Medici forebears: "One recognises in the queen the spirit of her family. She wishes to leave a legacy behind her: buildings, libraries, collections of antiquities".Zvereva, 6. Despite the destruction, loss, and fragmentation of Catherine's heritage, a collection of portraits formerly in her possession has been assembled at the Musée Condé, Château de Chantilly.
Portraits
The vogue for portrait drawings intensified during Catherine de' Medici's life, and she may have regarded part of her collection as the equivalent of today's family photograph album. Catherine loved having her children painted: "I would like", she wrote in 1547 to her children's governor, Jean d'Humières, "to have paintings of all the children done . . . and sent to me, without delay, as soon as they are finished".Frieda, 109. However, the more formal pictures include a high proportion of portraits of European kings and queens, past and present, most of which she probably commissioned personally.Dimier, 195. The similarity in sizes suggests that they were ordered to her specifications. On 3 July 1571, Catherine wrote to Monsieur de la Mothe-Fénelon, ambassador in London, discussing the work of François Clouet and requesting a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I. Catherine gave detailed instructions: "I pray you do me the pleasure that I may soon have a painting of the queen of England of small volume, in great [de la grandeur], and that it be well portrayed and done in the same fashion as the one sent be by the earl of Leicester, and ask, as I already have one in full face, it would be better to have her turning to the right."Jollet, 50: Correspondance Diplomatique De Bertrand De Salignac De La Mothe Fenelon, vol. 6, (1840), 229-231, 3 July 1571 The large group of portraits from Catherine's collection, now at the Musée Condé, Château de Chantilly, reveals her passion for the genre.See Zvereva, Les Clouet de Catherine de Médicis, 2002. These include portraits by Jean Clouet (1480–1541) and by his son François Clouet (c. 1510–1572). Jean drew and painted in the style of the Italian High Renaissance, but in the portraits of François, a northern-European naturalism is apparent, and a flatter, more meticulous technique.Blunt, 73.
François Clouet drew and painted portraits of all Catherine's family as well as of many members of the court. His drawing has been called profound, owing to its accuracy and harmony of form and its psychological penetration.Dimier, 205–6. This tradition of court portraiture was carried on by Jean Decourt, Étienne, Côme, and Pierre Dumoûtier, and by the less polished Benjamin Foulon (François Clouet's nephew) and François Quesnel. The last two artists, plus another known as "Anonyme Lécurieux", tended to use a more stylised technique, producing flatter portraits, with less three-dimensional modelling.Blunt, 100; Jollet, 249–52. After the death of Catherine de' Medici, a decline in the quality of portraiture set in; and by 1610, the native school patronised by the late Valois court and brought to its pinnacle by François Clouet had all but died out, and the Bourbon became reliant on foreign artists.Dimier, 308–19; Jollet, 17–18. Technically, François Clouet's origins were Flemish, since his father had arrived in Paris from Flanders prior to 1528; but François lived almost all of his life in France
Painting
Little is known about the painting at Catherine de' Medici's court."There are few periods at which French painting was at a lower ebb than in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and the first quarter of the seventeenth, and few periods about which we are more ignorant." Blunt, 98. In the last two decades of Catherine's life, only two painters stand out as recognisable personalities, Antoine Caron and Jean Cousin the Younger. The majority of paintings and portrait drawings that have survived from the late Valois period remain difficult or impossible to attribute to particular artists.
Antoine Caron became painter to Catherine de' Medici after working at Fontainebleau under Primaticcio. His vivid Mannerist style, with its love of ceremonial and allegory, perhaps reflects the peculiarly neurotic atmosphere of the French court during the Wars of Religion.Blunt calls Caron's style "perhaps the purest known type of Mannerism in its elegant form, appropriate to an exquisite but neurotic society". Blunt, 98, 100. He adopted from Niccolò dell'Abbate the technique of elongated and twisted figures, placing them in spaces dominated by fantastical fragments of architecture borrowed from the drawings of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau and painted in surprising rainbow contrasts. The effect makes Caron's pin-headed figures appear puny and lost in the landscapes.Blunt, 100.
Many of Caron's paintings, such as those of the Triumphs of the Seasons, are of allegorical subjects that echo the festivities for which Catherine's court was famous. His designs for the Valois Tapestries depict the fêtes, picnics, and mock battles of the "magnificent" entertainments for which Catherine was famous.Blunt, 98. Caron often painted scenes of massacres, reflecting the background of civil war that cast a shadow over the magnificence of the court. Caron also painted astrological and prophetical subjects, such as Astrologers Studying an Eclipse and Augustus and the Sibyl. This theme may have been inspired by Catherine de' Medici's obsession with horoscopes and predictions.Blunt, 100.
Jean Cousin, to judge by contemporary praise for his work, may have been as highly regarded at the time as Caron. The royal accounts show large payments made to Cousin: he was among those who decorated Paris for the entry of Henry II as king. Little of his work, however, survives. His most important surviving work is The Last Judgement in the Louvre, which like Caron's art, depicts human beings dwarfed by the landscape and, in Blunt's words, "made to swarm over the earth like worms".Blunt, 100.
Tapestries
Missing from the inventory drawn up after Catherine's death were the eight huge tapestries, known as the Valois tapestries, now held at the Uffizi gallery in Florence, which depict "magnificences" such as those at Bayonne in 1565 during the summit meeting between the French and Spanish courts and the ball laid on at the Tuileries palace in 1573 by Catherine for the Polish envoys who offered the crown of their country to her son Henry of Anjou.Knecht, 242–43. These magnificent hangings, originally designed during the reign of King Charles IX by Antoine Caron in the early 1570s,Dimier, 190. Caron was also responsible for a series of cartoons for tapestries on the theme of Artemisia, in honour of Catherine de' Medici. were woven later in the Spanish Netherlands with additions, possibly designed by Lucas de Heere,See The Valois Tapestries (1959), by Frances Yates, who proposed de Heere as the designer of the additions. who worked for Catherine between 1559 and 1565,Dimier, 216. The information about de Heere comes from Karel van Mander (1548–1606). that show fashions as late as 1580 and depict Henry III as king rather than Charles IX.Knecht, 242–43.
Historian Frances Yates has suggested that these tapestries may have been produced in connection with the intervention of Catherine's son François, Duke of Anjou, who was elected duke of Brabant, in the Spanish Netherlands in 1580, in defiance of the Spanish administration. Anjou figures prominently in the tapestries. Catherine de’ Medici herself appears as a central figure in black in most of them.Knecht, 242. It is believed that she gave them to her granddaughter Christina of Lorraine in advance of her wedding to Ferdinand de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1589. The tapestries glorify the house of Valois by celebrating its magnificent festivals.Knecht, 244.
Sculpture According to the contemporary art historian Vasari, Catherine wanted Michelangelo to make her husband Henry II's equestrian statue; but Michelangelo passed the commission on to Daniele da Volterra, and only the horse was ever made.Blunt, 282; Knecht, 225. Da Volterra died in 1566. The horse did not reach France until the seventeenth century, when it was utilised for an equestrian statue of Louis XIII. It was melted down during the French Revolution.