Tag Archives: French art

Object of the Month: January 2021

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple

Tempera on canvas, monogrammed and dated 1490 (lower left on base of column)

Antoine de Lonhy, called the Master of the Trinity of Turin

French (active in Spain and Flanders), c. active 1460–1490

French-born Antoine de Lonhy painted this vibrant scene around 1490. Although he trained in the Burgundy region of France, de Lonhy spent parts of his early career in Toulouse and Barcelona. He worked his later years in what is today the Piedmont and Aosta Valley regions of Italy. For many years, de Lonhy’s identity remained a mystery, and he was known only as the Master of the Trinity of Turin. Only in the past 20 years have scholars been able to identify de Lonhy and associate his name with his varied body of work. De Lonhy was a true Renaissance man whose work included panel paintings, illuminated manuscripts, frescoes, and stained glass, as well as textile and sculpture designs.

Mort de la Verge, Antoine de Lonhy

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple was originally painted on panel and at some point, transferred to canvas. M&G’s painting is believed to have been part of a large, lost altarpiece of a church in Piedmont. Another of de Lonhy’s works, Mort de la Verge, displays the same raised gold-leaf technique as well as similar colors and patterns to M&G’s Presentation. It is possible that both panels were once part of the lost altarpiece. De Lonhy’s masterful skill shines in all the details of this work, especially in his pristine architectural elements. The raised gold-leaf, particularly on the halos and borders of the garments, provides texture and dimension. His use of vibrant colors and patterns beautifully illustrates the joyfulness of the occasion. Mary lovingly presents the Christ Child to the priest while Joseph looks on carrying their offering of two turtledoves. Ironically, de Lonhy clad Mary and Joseph in rich, brocade garments which contrasts with the turtledoves, the offering of the poor.

Luke 2:22-40 illuminates the narrative of this scene. Jewish law required a woman to be purified 40 days after giving birth to a son. The mother was required to bring an offering of a year-old lamb or two young pigeons or turtledoves (for those who could not afford a lamb). This offering was presented to the priest who sacrificed them before the Lord to make atonement for the mother (Leviticus 12:1-8). The law of Moses also required the consecration of every firstborn male. In accordance with the law, Mary and Joseph traveled to the temple in Jerusalem to present Christ for consecration. Luke tells of the priest, Simeon, who was promised “by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until he had seen the Lord’s Messiah.” De Lonhy captures the moment when that promise to Simeon was fulfilled: Mary presented the Lord’s Messiah to Simeon for consecration leading Simeon to respond with praise to and adoration of God. Simeon witnessed with his own eyes God’s fulfillment of His promise.

Rebekah Cobb, Registrar

Published in 2021

Simon Vouet: Salome with the Head of John the Baptist

Simon Vouet’s painting provides a compelling illustration of the 17^thcentury’s fascination with the dramatic martyrdom of John the Baptist.

Gustave Doré: Christ Leaving the Praetorium

Gustave Doré (who published his first drawings at age 15) went on to become the most sought-after illustrator of the mid-19^th century.

Francois de Troy: Christ and the Samaritan Woman

The extraordinary life-like quality of the characters in this work illustrate why Francois de Troy was one of the 17th century’s most popular portrait painters.

Philippe de Champaigne: The Christ of Derision

Although indebted to Italian painting, Philippe de Champaigne is unique in his ability to combine French elegance with profound psychological realism.

Bone Casket

Casket

Unknown Flemish, 15th century

Below the image, click play to listen.

Object of the Month: April 2019

Christ with the Roman Centurion

Oil on canvas, c. 1712, Signed with initials, lower left: J.J.

Jean Baptiste Jouvenet

French, 1649–1717

An anonymous but astute artist once said, “Creativity lives at the mercy of self-discipline; without self-discipline, creativity is just a flight of fancy.” Perhaps no one better illustrates the truth of this aphorism than painter Jean Baptiste Jouvenet. Taking in the visual textures, architectural detail, and life-like figures in his Christ with the Roman Centurion, it’s hard to believe that during the creation of the work Jouvenet’s painting hand (right hand) was in the final stage of paralysis. He began losing control of his right hand in the last decade of his life. Undeterred he trained himself to paint with his left hand and continued to work!

Jouvenet was born in Rouen, a port city on the river Seine whose skyline is still dominated by Gothic cathedral spires. He entered Charles Le Brun’s studio at twelve (1661) and a year later was admitted to the Rouen painters’ guild. Throughout his teen years he helped Le Brun, King Louis XIV’s chief arts leader, with designs and decorations for some of France’s most opulent dwellings, including the Salon de Mars at Versailles.

Jouvenet would go on to become the greatest French religious painter of his generation. Christ and the Roman Centurion highlights some of the reasons why. The work combines the opulent technique of his early training with the subtle realism of his later work. The result is a tempered emotionalism that actually enriches the dramatic power of the scene. The smaller size also indicates that it is a modello for a larger altarpiece Jouvenet painted for the church of the Récollets at Versailles. Artists like Jouvenet presented these smaller, meticulously painted versions to their wealthy patrons for final approval before completing the commissioned masterpiece.

At the end of his life Jouvenet would use his “new” painting hand to complete a group of eight paintings for the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. Like M&G’s Christ with the Roman Centurion it is signed and dated. For the cathedral, however, he departs from using his traditional initials of J.J., choosing instead to sign and date the work as follows: J. Jouvenet dextra paralyticus sinistra fecit 1716 (J. Jouvenet right palsy uses left, 1716). To read more about this grouping and to see the signature visit Notre-Dame de Paris. (The signature is clearly visible on the step in The Visitation Painting at the end of the article.)

Donnalynn Hess, Director of Education

Published in 2019

Object of the Month: October 2018

The Fountain of Life

Potmetal and stained glass

Unknown

French, 16th century

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Walter W. Lee

Every collection object has a life story to tell, and the fascinating narrative of these beautiful windows begins in the fertile flood plain of the Loire Valley in France, near Saumur…

The Windows’ Story

At his mother’s passing, Baron René de Thory inherited estate and lands as the new Lord of Boumois. His wealth included the ruins of a castle once owned by the Counts of Anjou and which was destroyed during the Hundred Years War. Following his marriage to Françoise du Plessis, René undertook the building of Chateau Boumois between 1521 and 1525 on the remains of the former Angevine castle.

The chateau’s designs included private living quarters, guest areas, public entertaining areas, kitchen, bakehouse, pantry, cellar, and towers. As is fitting the role of the Lord of Boumois who held a seat of authority, the house included a dungeon and space for hearing judicial cases. To run such a household required servants, their living quarters, stables, a courtyard, and a dovecote. Since the area was a central hub for the activity of those living and working on the estate, there was a chapel for worship; and all at the castle were protected by a surrounding moat.

In Anjou, there are some 1200 castles remaining today; Boumois is classified as a French Historical Monument and is one of the last remaining castles of Gothic architecture. Christian Cussonneau writes, “Boumois still offers today despite some mutilations, the essential features of a manor house at the end of the Middle Ages.” On a beautiful imposing, carved door at the chateau, there still remains the de Tory coat of arms on the lock (see image).

The chateau’s chapel was completed by 1525. To appropriately beautify the space, René de Thory commissioned stained glass windows, which were most likely created and installed before his wife, Françoise du Plessis, passed away in 1528/9. The chapel windows consisted of three sections:

The central window of three panels: the Fountain of Life
On the West wall: two lancets featuring the donor, René de Thory, presented by St. René to the Virgin of Pity (also known as the Pieta). De Thory is depicted as a kneeling knight wearing his family coat of arms; the window includes the Latin inscription: Omniae dei memoria mei meaning “Remembering that all things are for God.”
On the East wall: two lancets featuring Françoise du Plessis presented by St. Francis of Assisi to the Virgin and Child with saints (most likely including St. Barbara, the patroness of the daughter of Lord and Lady Boumois). These panels have since disappeared and are known only from written sources from the nineteenth century and supposedly by a photograph taken around 1890.

Not long after his wife’s death, René de Thory fell in love with Anne d’Assé, wife of François de Villeprouvée, Baron of Trier, who died under suspicious circumstances in January 1530. Questions arose that perhaps Anne’s husband was poisoned. Since poems written by René about his love for Anne were discovered, the two were accused and tried for murder; however, they were not convicted and secretly married in March 1530.

While the windows of the chapel honor the first Lady of Boumois, de Thory had the chapel consecrated as the Chapel of St. Anne by the priest at Saint-Martin-de-la-Place on March 15, 1546 in honor of his second wife, Anne. At René de Thory’s death in 1565, Boumois was left to his wife and his son, Antoine de Thory.

The estate stayed in the de Thory family until sold in 1607, and then changed owners repeatedly over the next 300 years including a sale of the chateau’s furnishings in 1833. At the end of the nineteenth century, the architect and designer Stanford White obtained the five stained glass panels. He was known for decorating in the neo-Gothic style favored by his wealthy clientele—the nouveau riche seeking to create the wealth of the Old World in their American homes. After White’s death, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst acquired the panels in 1907. Later, through a gift purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Walter Lee from French & Co, M&G received the windows in 1956.

The Windows’ Imagery

Stained glass as an art reached its peak in the Middle Ages; the cathedrals with the increased buttressing allowed for more windows, whose colored beams of light created beautiful effects in the sanctuary by illuminating the space and using light to “paint” the Scriptural stories. Jacques DuPont explains “this form of painting is less an ornament than the lyrical expression of a transcendent world” as stained glass creates “an atmosphere befitting the House of God, the Light of the World.”

Having a complete set of windows from this period is rare, and the imagery of the central windows is dramatic. In this crucifixion scene, the cross bearing Christ’s suffering body with five bleeding wounds stands above a fountain in which Adam and Eve are bathing—being cleansed of their sin; Christ’s blood then flows into a larger pool representing the forgiveness provided for all mankind—“whosoever will” may be cleansed and made righteous through faith in Christ’s sacrifice. Above Christ is a door perhaps referencing Christ’s own words, “I am the door…. I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

Interestingly, the four fountain heads are the symbols in art for the four evangelists: an angel (Matthew), a lion (Mark), an ox (Luke), and an eagle (John). The designer may have referenced the iconography of paintings in the region like the Fountain of Life at the Calvet Museum in Avingnon or a slightly different version at Saint Mexme in Chinon. Emile Male in his book Religious Art in France explains the symbolism of the four fountain heads, “This is an ingenious way of saying that the miracle of forgiveness has the Gospels as authority, that is to say, the Word of God Himself.” These windows present a beautiful representation of several doctrinal truths, such as the love of Christ, the power of His sacrifice to cleanse sin, and the fulfillment of His promise to Adam and Eve.

William Cowper, eighteenth-century poet, captured the same visual truth through language: There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins; and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.

Erin R. Jones, Executive Director

Published in 2018

Gustave Doré

The Ascension
Gustave Doré

Below the image, click play to listen.

Object of the Month: August 2018

The Martyrdom of St. Perpetua and St. Felicitas

Oil on canvas, Signed and dated, Félix Leullier, 1880

Félix Louis Leullier

French, 1811–1882

In this arresting example of the nineteenth-century Romantic style, Felix Louis Leullier uses all the forces of paint and position to create a gruesome depiction of one of the most famous martyrdoms of the Christian church. Little known outside of France, Felix trained with Antoine-Jean Gros, renowned for his depictions of some of Napoleon’s famous battles: Battle of Arcole, Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau, and Battle of Abukir. Gros leaves little to the imagination in the spheres of conflict and conquest, so it is no wonder that his student, Felix, would choose to depict a martyrdom in a context resembling the twisted forms often found on a battlefield.

The painting’s setting is the Roman Amphitheatre in Carthage, the North African center of Christianity in the early centuries following Christ’s death and resurrection; there is little more than an outline remaining today of the prominent structure that seated 30,000. Although Felix most likely did not travel to that part of the world, he could have easily participated in a Grand Tour, a customary excursion in the 18th and 19th centuries for men coming of age, to see and learn from the culture and histories of antiquity. Such a broadening and experiential trip included significant time in Rome, where the Colosseum was a chief point of interest and which is very similar to Carthage’s own great amphitheater. The combined influence of travel and exposure to prominent depictions like Granet’s Interior View of the Colosseum in Rome, 1804 and Towne’s The Colosseum, 1781, Leullier opts to create only a faint representation of an outdoor arena.

On March 7, 203 AD, under the rule of the Roman emperor, Septimius Severus, the noblewoman Vibia Perpetua, was executed with her handmaid, Felicitas, and fellow catechumens, Revocatus, Saturninus, and Secundulus. Just a few years earlier in 197 AD in his treatise Apologeticus, Tertullian had posited that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” As providence would have it, Tertullian himself was eyewitness and later chronicler to the gripping event portrayed in this work.

In addition to Tertullian’s account and Perpetua’s own prison diary, Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, in which she captures much of the detail up until the hour of her entrance into the arena, many attempts to present the event have been created in various media formats. It is contained in older volumes like Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), as well as in more recent accounts like Thomas J. Heffernan’s The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity (2012). It is visible in paintings, drawings, mosaics, stained glass and illuminated manuscripts like Menologion of Basil II; and it has been presented in investigative journalism in the PBS Frontline series, From Jesus to Christ (1998).

Leullier’s visual rendering is indeed grand both in presentation and size, measuring nearly seven feet high by nine feet wide. Though literary works relate that Perpetua and Felicitas were martyred separately from the men, Leullier deviates from the historical account and instead depicts the entire company—the martyrs, the men that assaulted them, and the many animals that mauled them. By placing the massacre in the forefront of the work, the purity and testimony of these Christians’ story cannot be ignored.

Bonnie Merkle, M&G Database Manager and Docent

For further enrichment:

Visit the M&G’s Bowen Collection of Antiquities where Roman antiquities are displayed.
Visit the Museum of the Bible where 30 objects from the Museum & Gallery collection are exhibited, including a first century Roman funerary altar.