Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914. Colin Platt
huge palace. ‘All that he could find of excellence,’ recorded the architect-engraver Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau (d.1585), ‘was for his Fontainebleau, of which he was so fond that whenever he went there he would say that he was going home.’17 And one of the king’s most cherished possessions was Leonardo’s remarkable portrait of Mona Lisa, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, of which Vasari wrote:
If one wanted to see how faithfully art can imitate nature, one could readily perceive it from this head; for here Leonardo subtly reproduced every living detail. The eyes had their natural lustre and moistness … The eyebrows were completely natural, growing thickly in one place and lightly in another and following the pores of the skin … The mouth, joined to the flesh-tints of the face by the red of the lips, appeared to be living flesh rather than paint … There was a smile so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original … Altogether this picture was painted in a manner to make the most confident artist – no matter who – despair and lose heart.18
That final parenthesis has been repeated ever since to explain a paradigm shift in Western art from the truth-to-nature realism of Leonardo and his contemporaries to the exaggerated gestures, long-bodied human figures, vivid contrasting colours, and extremes of light and shade of the Roman Mannerist painters of the next generation. But giants though the great masters of the High Renaissance undoubtedly were, setting new standards of unattainable perfection, the almost immediate rejection by their pupils of regularity in the arts – in sculpture and in architecture, as much as in painting – had more to do with aspiration than despair.
Following the Sack of Rome, it was in the North that many Mannerists found a welcome. Thus it was that Rosso Fiorentino, the bravura painter, who had been working in Rome in 1527 when assaulted and robbed by German troops, accepted the French king’s invitation to come to Fontainebleau in 1530–1, where he was appointed ‘superintendent of all the buildings, pictures and other ornaments of that place’. And it was at Fontainebleau most memorably, in the frescos and stucco ornament of the Galerie François Ier, that Rosso achieved his finest work. Certainly, Vasari was in no doubt that Rosso gained much more than he lost from his Northern exile, for ‘although in Rome and in Florence his labours were not pleasing enough to those who could reward them, he did, however, find someone to give him recognition for them in France, and with such results that the glory he won could have quenched the thirst of every degree of ambition that could fill the breast of any craftsman whatsoever’.19
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