France's Brilliance in 1500

A new exhibit at the Grand Palais.

After the end of the Hundred Years' War, during the reigns of Charles VIII (1483–98), Louis XI (1498–1515) and Anne de Bretagne, who was wife to both, France was already a meeting ground for the most important artistic currents of the North and South—realism and oil painting techniques from Picardy, Flanders and the Brabant; innovations in perspective and the influence of newly rediscovered antiquity in Italy. Along with the two kings and their queen, there were nobles, prelates and rich merchants also commissioning artists and architects. Among the most important was Good King René, a bon vivant who reigned in Provence with a slew of titles including King of Naples and Sicily, and filled his court with artists, musicians, poets and scholars.

The show brings together more than 200 works—paintings, sculptures, tapestries, stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, coins, medal and precious objects—of such exceptional quality that the impact is breathtaking. The immediate impression is the brilliance of color—ruby reds, sapphire blues, emerald and lime greens, sunflower yellow—not only in the paintings and stained glass but also in the scores of illuminations in manuscripts and early printed books, from small Books of Hours to desk-sized tomes, that are one of the show's strong points.

Aside from Leonardo da Vinci, with "La Belle Ferronière" (c.1495-97), most of the artists here are unfamiliar to the general public, but this is the place to meet them—Jean Fouquet, Nicolas Froment, Jean Poyer, Girolamo Pacchiarotti) (known as Jérôme Pacherot), the Master of Moulins, now almost unanimously identified as Jean Hey, and many others.

The Master of Chaource (probably Jacques Bachot), working in Champagne, is credited with the stunning lifesized stone figure of Saint Martha (c. 1510–15), whose slender face and delicate hands seem almost miraculously real. The very young, almost impossibly lovely "Notre Dame de Grasse" (c. 1470), looking away from the infant on her knee who so closely resembles her, is an anonymous work from the Languedoc region, as is the young Madonna (c. 1500) whose child is touching her cheek in a quintessential infant's gesture perfectly captured in stone.

Attributed to Pacherot and the atelier of Michel Colombe in Tours, the marble tomb of the young children of Charles VIII is a masterpiece of elaborate ornamentation, with putti, dolphins, mythological scenes and imaginary creatures surrounding the small sleeping figures of the toddler princes who died in 1495 and 1496, aged three and one.

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