The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King (10 page)

In 1523, the princes met their new tutor, Benedetto Tagliacarno, a well-known Italian Humanist. François I chose him for his knowledge of Latin and Greek—a sign that the king wanted his sons to be well versed in the culture of the Italian Renaissance. One of the
enfants d’honneur
, Gaspard de Coligny, who was the same age as Henri, wrote to his own tutor that “the majority of my time is spent reading Cicero and the study of the tables of Ptolemy under Guillaume du Maine [Henri’s second tutor] who, adopting a different method from Tagliacarno, adds cosmography at the same time, especially the part relative to the longitude and latitude of places with the additions of meridians and parallels.”

François’ sister, Marguerite d’Angoulême, who was celebrated by the Humanists for her love of the classics and knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Italian, probably also had some say in their education. Marguerite wrote to François that “Monsieur the dauphin is doing wonders at his studies.… Monsieur d’Orléans is glued to his books and says that he wishes to be wise; but Monsieur d’Angoulême knows more than the others.” It is interesting that already when so young, Henri was being compared unfavorably with his younger brother, Charles. Accounts show that Henri was intensely physical and loved vigorous sports and exercise. Later in life he would become fluent in Latin, Italian, and Spanish.

J
UST as Claude preferred Blois, François liked to be at Amboise, the château which dominated the town below. Both châteaux, so near to one another, had unlimited possibilities for
la chasse
. Often, during the long gallops of the hunt, the king would stop at the little redbrick château de Cloux next to Amboise, better known today as Le
Clos Lucé. In 1516, Leonardo da Vinci accepted François’ invitation to come to France and adorn his court. François called him “maestro” and installed him in the charming manorhouse. Leonardo had suffered a slight stroke and his right hand was partially paralyzed, leaving him unable to paint. He continued to draw his machines of mass destruction and designs for dams to prevent the flooding of France’s rivers. Leonardo died three years later, on May 2, 1519, at Le Clos Lucé while François was hunting at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
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The maestro’s death greatly affected the king, who recognized his genius. In gratitude for his enlightened patronage, Leonardo willed several paintings to François, who also bought others from Leonardo’s heirs, including the
Mona Lisa
.

Life at the court of François I was a constant progress of pleasure from one château on the Loire to another, from feast to festivity and hunt to hunt. The ever restless and curious king would move around his large kingdom to see conditions for himself, display his authority, and be seen by the populace. On the move, the court numbered about twelve thousand mounted members, accompanied by many carriages and caravans of mule wagons which dealt with the baggage. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the court was not yet bound to a rigorous protocol; rather, this was improvised from reign to reign. Benvenuto Cellini wrote in his memoirs: “We had to journey through places where sometimes there were scarcely two houses to be found; and then we had to set up canvas tents like gypsies, and suffered at times very great discomfort.” The Venetian ambassador, Marino Giustiniani, complained that “my mission as ambassador lasted forty-five months. Never during the whole time was the court in the same place for forty-five days.” In effect, France had two capitals, Paris, and wherever the king happened to be. As he
was
the state, foreign ambassadors or petitioners were obliged to find him to present their credentials or requests.

According to Cellini, at times the court moved with as many as eighteen thousand horses, and another witness gave the figure as twenty-four thousand horses and mules. Ladies were carried in litters or wagons. Grand courtiers rode, and servants walked. The king’s châteaux on the Loire were as empty as we see them today. All the furnishings, carpets, tapestries, and plate were packed up and transported with the peripatetic court. Only those palaces regularly used were permanently furnished. When possible, this vast caravanserai would travel by river, as the roads were often in poor condition. For these boat journeys, the king kept a magnificent barge on the Seine; it even contained a kitchen.

Meals at court were served on tables piled high with assortments of food; plates and scented napkins were discarded after each course. Everyone in France ate with just a knife, a spoon, and their fingers; no fork as yet.
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Napkins were always placed around the neck because eating with one’s fingers was never tidy. Ladies would sometimes place a small piece of meat on a slice of bread to make it easier to eat. Pâtés were popular and often spread on bread. Different sorts of meat and game were always part of a court buffet, as were sweetbreads, dressed crab, quenelles, and truffles, which were very popular. The sideboards groaned under the weight of assorted vegetables, wild mushrooms, even codfish. For dessert there were endless sweetmeats, fresh and jellied fruits, some in pastry, and many kinds of mousse. In the main, the food was heavy and rather indigestible. Wines, often spiced, flowed in great quantity and helped to loosen tongues.

Housing ten or twelve thousand was never easy. If the king stayed in one of his own châteaux, only the most privileged would be given rooms; the rest would have to find accommodation locally or in the tent city that sprang up wherever the king halted. The need to feed such a number of people meant that the court could not remain long in one place. Rather than transporting its food, the court was provisioned locally and supplies were soon exhausted.

The population of the court fluctuated. If the king was at war, all the able-bodied men left with him, and only the women, children, and
the elderly would remain. At other times the total varied according to the number of local nobles who joined the king’s progress about the countryside. For a nobleman, life at court was very expensive. He would have to pay for an extensive wardrobe, personal staff, horses, and entertainments; but his chief expense was gambling.

Foreigners, including many Italians when France dominated their peninsula, came to join the French court either to visit and admire its splendor, or to obtain positions and preferment. When François I traveled in northern Italy as a young man, he observed and approved of the role of women in court society. When he became king, he decided to bring that tradition to France. Civility, manners, and elegant customs were all introduced by François, and he permitted his nobles to join some of the Italian courts as well. The king employed many Italians in his household, kitchens, and stables. He also imported horses from the Italian courts; his friend, Federigo Gonzaga, sent him several of his own breed as gifts. Horses were so prized at Gonzaga’s court in Mantua that his palazzo has a large room dedicated to his favorites, with a life-size portrait of each frescoed on the walls.

Fashion was also imported from Italy. At François I’s request, Isabella d’Este sent him dolls dressed in the latest styles, which were copied and worn at his court. The French king had a true appreciation of art and persuaded great painters and scholars of the humanities to come to France and embellish his kingdom to the greater glory of his name. He told his courtiers: “I can create a noble, only God can make a great artist.” The king’s love of literature, philosophy, and art stemmed from his youthful travels to the Italian courts and his meetings with renowned artists. When François and his companions returned from their first tour of northern Italy,
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they looked with distaste at their gloomy castles. The use of gunpowder and cannons had already rendered castellated walls obsolete, and they replaced their forbidding towers with flower-decked terraces and colonnaded walks. The cultured world had long admired the architecture of the French Gothic cathedrals; François planned to take the lead in bringing the classical grace of the Renaissance to his own country. He dreamed of
building a new palace that would be the wonder of Europe, where he could summon the greatest artists and philosophers in the world to grace and enhance his Renaissance court.

T
HERE is a charming legend that when one of the king’s most prized hounds, called Bleau (or Bleu), ran into the forest in pursuit of a stag and was lost, François insisted that no one of his hunting party should rest until the dog was found. Deeper into the forest they rode until eventually they reached a large clearing and saw the tired Bleau drinking from a spring near a ruined keep. (Some of the group were so worn out they imagined they saw a beautiful nymph resting by the hound on the grass, her arm around the neck of an exhausted stag.) The weary party dismounted, and the king found the spot so agreeable that thereafter he would often halt there to picnic during a hunt. When François was ready to choose a site for his new palace, he picked the beautiful meadow by the spring in the forest and named it in memory of his hound: Fontainebleau.

In 1528, François began building onto his father’s old keep in the meadow with the spring. To its two towers he added a gallery, which joined the ruined keep with a nearby monastery. Much of François I’s original Fontainebleau is now destroyed, but the famous gallery still stands to remind us of the wonder of the Renaissance château. It was in this great palace that François I established his school of painting, importing such masters as Giovanni-Battista Rosso, a Florentine known as II Rosso in 1531; Francesco Primaticcio in 1533; and Cellini soon afterward. Il Rosso had been influenced by Michelangelo, and together with Primaticcio, he invented a style of flat, scrolling stucco decoration called strapwork, which he combined with painting.
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The Galerie François I is the best example of this art. Unable to visit his beloved northern Italy, François imported all he could of it to France, creating a “French Italy” of marble and statues, precious woods for
paneling, stucco and gilding, Venetian glass and mirrors,
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and allegorical paintings by Italian masters.

Primaticcio was sent to Italy by the king to buy “antiquities”—sculptures for his fabulous gallery—and the great connoisseur and bon vivant Pietro Aretino was commissioned to buy art for Fontainebleau. The king’s gallery there boasted, among other works, Bandinelli’s
Mercury Holding a Flute
and Tribolo’s statue
Nature
. François himself added Michelangelo’s
Leda and the Swan
and Bronzino’s
Venus and Cupid
, which became the symbol of his era. An early Michelangelo sculpture,
Hercules
, formed part of a fountain at Fontainebleau. When he could not buy a sculpture, Primaticcio had a plaster cast of it made; cast in bronze in France, these were displayed in the king’s gallery to great admiration. While in Italy, Primaticcio was impressed with the paintings of Parmigianino, and on his return to France he brought with him the elongated style of painting—especially nudes—that came
to represent the School of Fontainebleau. Often combined with stucco, the style became known as Mannerism.