Yale University Art Gallery
Pierre Milan, after Léonard Thiry, “Female Mask,” from “Suite of Ornamental Masks”, mid-16th century. Engraving.
A rich, powerful person retires to his palatial home outside the city. He decides it needs decorating, and hires the best artists he can think of to do it. The collaboration between the artists, there in that place, produces an aesthetic that turns out to ripple throughout society, and in the years that follow.
Steve Jobs in Palo Alto? Donald Trump in Palm Beach? Nope: Francis I in Fontainebleau, France. In the 16th century.
“Le Goût du Prince: Art and Prestige in Sixteenth-Century France” takes a look at the dynamic of taste, power, and money that drove the French Renaissance in art. The “taste of the prince,” as the exhibit’s title states, combined with the power and the money to see it expressed, led to a convergence of artists from all over Europe —particularly Italy, which had already undergone its own artistic renaissance — into France.
The exhibit runs at the Yale University Art Gallery until Aug. 28.
Curators Cordelia de Brosses, Hélène Cesbron-Lavau, and Stephanie Wisowaty argue through the exhibit that the collaborations among these artists, with support from the French aristocracy, led to a new style. As in the Italian Renaissance, this style broke with the tradition of artists producing essentially religious works to focus more on the individual.
Antoine Caron, “The Triumph of Mars,” ca. 1570. Oil on panel.
The style also invoked allegory, often mythological, to make political points about the people in the pictures, and to stir thoughts and conversation among viewers. Antoine Caron’s The Triumph of Mars, for example, commemorates the religious wars fought in France while its art was flourishing. But it also expresses mixed feelings about them. Audiences at the time would have recognized the four women supporting Mars, the god of war, as incarnations of famine, blasphemy, fury, and cruelty. This reflected, perhaps, the mixed feelings among French leadership about the price to be paid for conflict.
Saint-Porchaire Workshop, “Salt Cellar,” second quarter 16th century. Lead-glazed earthenware.
A much more playful artifact of the period is a salt cellar — the salt rested in the bowl on top, and the object was passed around the table for diners to take a pinch — that invoked classical mythology, some of Francis I’s own iconography, and even included a sly reference to his most favored mistress. On the ruler’s table, this object placed its owner in a social, political, historical, and even mythological context, and pointed out that table salt at the time was a luxury item.
The exhibit suggests ably that the French Renaissance of the 16th century created an enduring aesthetic that artists continued to employ and reference for hundreds of years afterward. Even more interesting, however, is the way the curators bring, front and center, the means of the art’s production, and the ways in which the people funding it used the art to reflect and project their own politics, power, and cultural clout.
Tastes have changed, and so has the dynamic that created it. Artists now can make art without patronage more easily than ever, and modern U.S. society doesn’t have aristocrats the way the 16th century French did. But we do have our own forms of it — in our business leaders, our public figures, our political leaders — and “Le Goût du Prince” did leave this reporter with questions about how the aesthetics of some of them affect us. Through Apple, Steve Jobs’s aesthetic, a preference for the sleek, the clean, and vaguely cute, permeates our society. So does Trump’s all-caps, boldly self-aggrandizing style. Some of us dislike one, or like the other. But we can’t seem to quite look away from either of them.
“Le Goût du Prince: Art and Prestige in Sixteenth-Century France” runs at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., through Aug. 28. Check the museum’s website for hours. Admission is free.
