page_title: French art
section_title: Baroque and Classicism
hierarchical_section_title: French art / Historic overview / Early Modern period / Baroque and Classicism
context_page_description: French art consists of the visual and plastic arts originating from the geographical area of France. Modern France was the main centre for the European art of the Upper Paleolithic, then left many megalithic monuments, and in the Iron Age many of the most impressive finds of early Celtic art. The Gallo-Roman period left a distinctive provincial style of sculpture, and the region around the modern Franco-German border led the empire in the mass production of finely decorated Ancient Roman pottery, which was exported to Italy and elsewhere on a large scale. With Merovingian art the story of French styles as a distinct and influential element in the wider development of the art of Christian Europe begins.
  France can fairly be said to have been a leader in the development of Romanesque art and Gothic art, before the Renaissance led to Italy becoming the main source of stylistic developments until France matched Italy's influence during the Rococo and Neoclassicism periods and then regained the leading role in the Arts from the 19th to the mid-20th century.
context_section_description: The seventeenth century marked a golden age for French art in all fields.
  In the early part of the seventeenth century, late mannerist and early Baroque tendencies continued to flourish in the court of Marie de Medici and Louis XIII.
  Art from this period shows influences from both the north of Europe, namely the Dutch and Flemish schools, and from Roman painters of the Counter-Reformation. Artists in France frequently debated the contrasting merits of Peter Paul Rubens with his Flemish baroque, voluptuous lines and colors to Nicolas Poussin with his rational control, proportion, Roman classicist baroque style. Another proponent of classicism working in Rome was Claude Gellée, known as Le Lorrain, who defined the form of classical landscape.
  Many young French painters of the beginning of the century went to Rome to train themselves and soon assimilated Caravaggio's influence like Valentin de Boulogne and Simon Vouet. The later is credited with bringing the baroque in France and at his return in Paris in 1627 he was named first painter of the king. But French painting soon departed from the extravagance and naturalism of the Italian baroque and painters like Eustache Le Sueur and Laurent de La Hyre, following Poussin example developed a classicist way known as Parisian Atticism, inspired by Antiquity, and focusing on proportion, harmony and the importance of drawing. Even Vouet, after his return from Italy, changed his manner to a more measured but still highly decorative and elegant style.
  But at the same time there was still a strong Caravaggisti Baroque school represented in the period by the amazing candle-lit paintings of Georges de La Tour. The wretched and the poor were featured in a quasi-Dutch manner in the paintings by the three Le Nain brothers. In the paintings of Philippe de Champaigne there are both propagandistic portraits of Louis XIII' s minister Cardinal Richelieu and other more contemplative portraits of people in the Catholic Jansenist sect.
  In architecture, architects like Salomon de Brosse, François Mansart and Jacques Lemercier helped define the French form of the baroque, developing the formula of the urban hôtel particulier that was to influence all of Europe and strongly departed from the Italian equivalent, the palazzo. Many aristocratic castles were rebuilt in the new classic-baroque style, some of the most famous being Maisons and Cheverny, characterized by high roofs "à la française" and a form that retained the medieval model of the castle adorned with prominent towers.
  
  From the mid to late seventeenth century, French art is more often referred to by the term "Classicism" which implies an adherence to certain rules of proportion and sobriety uncharacteristic of the Baroque, as it was practiced in most of the rest of Europe during the same period. Under Louis XIV, the Baroque as it was practiced in Italy, was not in French taste, for instance, as Bernini's famous proposal for redesigning the Louvre was rejected by Louis XIV.
   Through propaganda, wars, and great architectural works, Louis XIV launched a vast program designed for the glorification of France and his name. The Palace of Versailles, initially a tiny hunting lodge built by his father, was transformed by Louis XIV into a marvelous palace for fêtes and parties, under the direction of architects Louis Le Vau (who had also built the château de Vaux-le-Vicomte) and Jules Hardouin Mansart (who built the church of the Invalides in Paris), painter and designer Charles Le Brun, and the landscape architect André Le Nôtre who perfected the rational form of the French garden that from Versailles spread in all of Europe.
  For sculpture Louis XIV's reign also proved an important moment thanks to the King's protection of artists like Pierre Puget, François Girardon and Antoine Coysevox. In Rome, Pierre Legros, working in a more baroque manner, was one of the most influential sculptors of the end of the century.
caption: Georges de La Tour, The Penitent Magdalene, c. 1640.
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