Primaticcio and Rosso at the Louvre

This season the Louvre is exploring the theme “Italy at the French Court” with two exhibitions: “Primaticcio, Master of Fontainebleau” and “Rosso, The Death of Christ.” If you have ever wondered what was happening in France during the 16th-century Renaissance, these two shows offer a collective answer— the French were importing Italian artists as quickly as they could.

Leonardo da Vinci was one of these premium imports. And Primaticcio (1504-1570), or Primatice as he is known in France, was another. François I hired him to decorate the royal palace of Fontainebleau, to make it a “new Rome.” No contemporary French artist could have handled such a sweeping commission; it needed all the savoir-faire of the Italian Renaissance to conceive and execute the immense expanses of wall and ceiling paintings at Fontainebleau. Alas, as current day visitors to the château some 70 km southeast of Paris will discover, little remains of those magnificent decorations. But hundreds of astonishing drawings have survived. Over 175 of these are assembled in an exhibition that the Louvre is promoting as the very first devoted to Primaticcio.

At Fontainebleau, Primaticcio was called upon to decorate everything from stately halls to bathrooms and garden pavilions with elaborate mythological murals. In his 40 years of service to the Valois court, he also concocting designs for whatever struck the king’s fancy. Some of his most charming drawings here are elaborate costume designs for the king and his family to wear to weddings and baptisms, including some that were designed to mimic “Turkish” dress or even to spout water.

The bulk of the exhibition is not painting, but works on paper that reveal Primaticcio to be a master of Mannerist invention. Particularly striking are his ceiling designs, which often use vertiginous foreshortening to show us the bottoms (literally – be prepared for many well-padded tushes!) of gods, putti, and horses.

Primaticcio, like many Renaissance artists, also designed tapestry, sculpture, and architecture. The 25 pieces of sculpture included in the show demonstrate how well the artist thought in three dimensions. Painting fans should be warned that the few paintings here are mostly copies after Primaticcio – and some of them are very bad copies indeed. The lack of paintings, however, is compensated by the inclusion of some truly magnificent and beautifully displayed tapestries after the artist’s designs.

The design of the exhibition is strictly chronological, and the wall labels (in French, with English translations only for the texts introducing each new section) do little to explain the often abstruse mythological themes. This lack of information means that viewers are thrown back on their own resources to interpret each drawing.

In a curatorial move designed to bring the Louvre into the 21st-century, the museum invited contemporary French artist François Rouan to create a series of paintings, photographs, and a video piece inspired by Primaticcio’s works.

If you are planning your first visit to the Louvre, you might want to head for the Renaissance painting galleries instead. But if you love Renaissance drawings and rarely seen things, then “Primaticcio, Master of Fontainebleau” is worth the trip. Wear your comfortable shoes for it, however. Like most shows in the Hall Napoléon this one is something like Primaticcio’s royal patrons: ambitious and demanding.

Small and sharply focused, its companion exhibition, “Rosso: The Death of Christ” is quite the opposite. It explores one painting by Giovanni Battista di Jacopa (known as Rosso Fiorentino for his red hair). Rosso and Primiticcio worked together for François at Fontainebleau before Rosso ceded leadership of the project to his younger compatriot. The work in question is a rare Pietà (c. 1530s) painted for Anne de Montmorency, whose family crest appears on cushions supporting Christ’s dead body! It has been in the Louvre’s collection since it was seized from the family’s chapel at Ecouen shortly after the Revolution.

(For those readers who have taken our “Cracking the Da Vinci Code” tour, you may remember discussing this painting, as it features Mary Magdalene prominently).

The exhibition explores, among many other themes, how Rosso’s Pietà introduced Mannerist style to 16th-century French artists. Like many of these Richelieu Wing “dossier” exhibitions, “Rosso: The Death of Christ” is as smart and meticulously researched as a scholarly essay, but risks being just as dry too. The images are engaging; you’ll need to read French to understand the connections made between them.

Primaticcio: Master of Fontainebleau
Rosso: The Dead Christ
Musée du Louvre
Open everyday, except Tuesday, from 9am to 6pm
Open late nights on Wed and Fri until 9:45pm

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