Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France

Jean Fouquet died around 1480, having established his legacy as one of the most important French artists of the fifteenth-century. He illuminated manuscripts, executed panel paintings and enamels, and designed tapestries and stained glass. His earliest recorded work was a now lost portrait of Pope Eugenius IV, but his splendid images of kings Charles VII and Louis XI number amongst the most important works of late medieval portraiture. Indeed Fouquet was a prominent figure at the Valois court, described in 1475 as a painter to the king. He also carried out commissions for Marie de Clèves, the chancellor Guillaume Juvénal des Ursins and the treasurer Étienne Chevalier for whom Fouquet prepared his two most important surviving works, the Melun Diptych and the Chevalier Hours. Fouquet has received very little attention from Anglophone scholars and therefore Inglis’ lavishly illustrated book is an extremely welcome introduction to the great artist. Inglis approach to his subject is perhaps a little narrow and even passée. Influenced heavily by Colette Beaune’s Naissance de la nation France, he presents Fouquet as a central figure in the ‘nascent nationalism of late medieval France’, ‘responsible for generating many of the stately forms from which the French monarchy derived its grace’. These are very grand claims, especially when the concrete evidence amounts to Fouquet’s representation of a handful of famous French buildings in his works and his illustration of a single copy of the Grandes Chroniques de France. Moreover it is deeply disappointing that Inglis has ignored almost all the relevant historical scholarship published in the last fifteen years, leading to a host of small problems and errors. The interested reader who wishes to pursue any of these questions in detail will need to undertake a great deal of further research.

Art · Art history · Fifteenth · Painting · Portrait · Subject (documents) · Classics · European Political History Analysis · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Philosophy

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