47. François Girardon, Tomb of Armand-Jean du Plessis,
Cardinal de Richelieu, 1675-1694.

Marble. Chapelle de la Sorbonne, Paris.

 

 

In France, although classicism proved a fierce and immovable obstacle, Baroque art nevertheless found noteworthy representatives. The Le Nain brothers, Antoine, Louis and Mathieu, were particularly influenced by Caravaggio and his mastery of light, but they also drew from Flemish art. In this style, and to the delight of the Parisian bourgeoisie with whom they had met enthusiastic success, they produced sympathetic portraits of peasants and scenes depicting rural life.

Georges de La Tour was also strongly influenced by the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, as demonstrated in his Magdalene of the Night Light (c. 1640-1645), and he became, in France, the worthy heir of the Italian master. Although famous during his lifetime, the artist was essentially forgotten over the course of the centuries following his death, and his work was not rediscovered until the early 1930s.

 

 

Sculpture

While the majority of French architects and builders rejected Bernini’s Baroque style, the sculptors adopted it quite willingly. Its most talented exponent in France was the painter, builder and sculptor Pierre Puget from Marseille, who was also active for a time in Italy where he created a sculpture in the church St. Maria da Carignano: Saint Sebastian writhing in the cramps of pain in his fight to the death. He surpassed his role model Bernini in the strength of pathos and movement as is shown in his much admired and important works – the seated figure of Hercules (1680), Perseus and Andromeda (1684) as well as the athlete Milon de Crotone (1671-1682) who, when tearing apart a branch, caught his hands and was torn apart by a lion.

French sculpture of the seventeenth and eighteenth century was generally of a decorative nature, which was nourished on the one hand by the large demands for sculptures for decoration of magnificent buildings, parks and gardens (especially with mythological single figures and fountain groups), and on the other hand by the thirst for glory of a period which expressed itself primarily in very large monuments.

At the head of the artists responsible for these were Antoine Coysevox and François Girardon with their monuments in academic style for the Cardinals and statesmen Mazarin and Richelieu. But these two sculptors were surpassed by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle in pomp and exaggeration of nature, to the point of ugliness. His monument for Marshal Maurice de Saxe with its allegorical figures mourning the fate of this early fallen hero with theatrical pathos, is typical of a vast number of monuments with which artists and artisans of the seventeenth up to the nineteenth centuries filled churches and graveyards.