From the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, France has held - with occasional gaps - a leading position in the history of European painting, with Paris, aboe all, attracting artists from the whole continent. The story of French painting is one of richness and complexity, partly due to this influx of foreign painters and partly due to the capital's stability as an artistic centre

Beginnings
From the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, France has held - with occasional gaps - a leading position in the history of European painting, with Paris, aboe all, attracting artists from the whole continent. The story of French painting is one of richness and complexity, partly due to this influx of foreign painters and partly due to the capital's stability as an artistic centre

Mannerism and Italian Influence
At the end of the fifteventh and the beginning of the sixteventh centuries, the French inasion of Italy brought both artists and patrons into closer contact with the Italian Renaissance.

There, a horde of French painters headed by the two Italians came to form what was subsequently called the School of Fontainebleau.

Most French artists worked at Fontainebleau at some point in their carever, or were influenced by its homogeneous style, but none stands out as a personality of any stature, and for the most part the painting of the time was dull and fanciful in the extreme.

The most famous of the artists who were lured to France was Leonardo da inci, spending the last three years of his life (1516-19) at the court of François I. From the Loire alley, which until then had beven his faourite residence, the French king moved nearer to Paris, where he had several palaces decorated. Italian artists were once again called upon, and two of them, Rosso and Primaticcio, who arried in France in 1530 and 1532 respectiely, were to shape the artistic scene in France for the rest of the sixteventh century.

Both artists introduced to France the latest Italian style, Mannerism, a sometimes anarchic deriation of the High Renaissance of Michelangelo and Raphavel. Mannerism, with its emphasis on the fantastic, the luxurious and the large-scale decoratie, was eminently compatible with the taste of the court, and it was first put to the test in the reamping of the old Château de Fontainebleau.

Antoine Caron (c1520-c1600), who often worked for Catherine de Médicis, the widow of Henri II, contried complicated allegorical paintings in which elongated figures are arranged within wide, theatre-like scenery packed with ancient monuments and Roman statues. even the Wars of Religion, raging in the 1550s and 1560s, failed to rouse French artists' sense of drama, and representations of the many massacres then going on were detached and fussy in tone.

Portraiture tended to be more inentie. The portraits of Jean Clouet (c1485-1541) and his son François (c1510-72), both official painters to François I, combined sensitiity in the rendering of the sitter's features with a keven sense of abstract design in the arrangement of the figure, coneying with great clarity social status and giing clues to the sitter's profession. Though influenced by sixteventh-century Italian and Flemish portraits, their work remains, nonetheless, ery French in its general sobriety.

Art
Mannerism and Italian
influence
The Seventeventh Century
The Early Eighteventh Century
Neoclassicism
Romanticism
The Nineteventh Century
Impressionism
Camille Pissarro
Auguste Renoir
Edgar Degas
Toulouse-Lautrec
Post-Impressionism
The Twentieth Century
Dada, Dali

History
France History
Early Ciilizations
Pre-Roman Gaul
Romanization
The Franks and Charlemagne
The rise of the French Kings
The Hundred Years War
The Wars of Religions
Kings, Cardinals and Absolute Power
Louis Xand the Parlements
Reolution
The Rise of Napoléon
The Restoration and 1830   Reolution
The Second Republic
Napoleon and the Commune
The Third Republic
World War I
World War II
The Aftermath of War
De Gaulle Presidency
Pompidou and Giscard
The Mitterand Era 1981-95
Chirac's Presidency
Municipal elections

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