Historians from St. Petersburg State University have found out who is depicted in the famous series of court pencil portraits, commissioned by Francis I, the founder of the Valois dynasty. The opening is reported by the press service of the university.
“The Renaissance French court strove to imitate antique fashion. For example, many ancient figures wanted to leave a mark on history: they ordered their images to artists so that they would reach their descendants. This handwritten book was also created for this purpose,”says Vladimir Shishkin, a historian from St. Petersburg State University.
The Russian National Library contains many European manuscripts of the 16th-18th centuries, including French ones. The album of pencil drawings, which interested scientists, came to Russia from the Abbey of Saint Germain - the main state book depository of pre-revolutionary France. This manuscript was taken out of the country by the collector, secretary-translator of the Russian embassy, Pyotr Dubrovsky.
Four dozen of these albums have survived, created at different times and depicting the different composition of the French court - it was approved for a year, and then changed. These manuscripts are kept in archives, museums and libraries around the world, three of them are now in St. Petersburg.
Scientists have long been interested in an album with 39 portraits of courtiers, written and massively replicated in the 16th century by order of Francis I, one of the first absolute monarchs of France and a great patron of art.
According to art critics, the pencil drawings in this album belong to the masters of the famous Clouet school of fine arts. In addition to the courtiers themselves, the portraits depict their friends and acquaintances, whom they asked to add to the picture. Since the 19th century, art historians have been trying to understand whose exactly these portraits are, but most of the captions under the drawings remained undisclosed.
“The fact is that in medieval France many proper names were spelled differently, so today, even based on signatures, it is difficult to understand who is in front of us. That is why the pre-revolutionary art critics failed to correctly correlate the portraits with real historical figures,”continues Shishkin.
Russian historians managed to uncover this secret due to the fact that they paid attention not only to the faces and signatures themselves, but also to clothing, the type and structure of paper, and the drawing technique.
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For example, an unusual caftan and headdress worn by an elderly man from one of the portraits gave him Guillaume Poillet, the chancellor of the kingdom and one of the closest advisers of Francis I. Other drawings depict the king of France himself, his mother and wife, the king and the Queen of Navarre, and some court dignitaries and influential feudal lords, such as the Duke de Guise.
Watermarks, the paper itself, as well as the clothes of Queen Eleanor, in turn, indicated that the collection of portraits was prepared in the first half of the reign of Francis I - in the 1530s, even before the next war with the Habsburgs, but they were intertwined after the death of the monarch.
Interestingly, the analysis of the drawings showed that they were painted by several painters at once, each of whom created certain parts of the paintings - for example, only clothes or some other elements of the image. Further study, scientists hope, will help uncover the secrets of the success of Jean Clouet and his students.