Born in 1403, King Charles VII of France found himself in very straitened circumstances when his father Charles VI died in 1422. With the powerful Burgundian empire allied with the English against the French throne and much of northern France and Paris itself under English occupation, the nineteen-year-old Charles began his reign in exile in Bourges as the monarch of just a third of the royal realm south of the Loire river.
His fortunes began to turn when the redoubtable Joan of Arc’s victories against the English at Orléans and Patay (Loiret) made possible his coronation in Reims Cathedral in 1429. Successfully negotiating a separate peace with Burgundy in 1435 enabled Charles to take Paris back from the English in 1436. He then initiated a series of fiscal and military reforms that allowed him slowly to reassert royal power and authority, actions that finally made it possible to expel the English from Normandy and Guyenne in 1453. A full recapture of the realm, however, had to wait until the reign (1461–83) of Charles’ son Louis IX.
Many art historians have viewed the first twenty years of Charles’ reign as a fallow period for the visual arts. In my 2016 book Art in a Time of War, I sought to counter this perception with respect to manuscript illumination in occupied Paris by focusing on the highly inventive and idiosyncratic painter known as the Master of Morgan 453. Fortunately, French art across the entirety of Charles’ thirty-nine-year reign is given the attention it deserves in “The Arts in France in the Time of Charles VII” at Paris’s Musée de Cluny.
The show brings together 133 objects made in France between about 1420 and 1460: forty-nine illuminated manuscripts and leaves, twenty-three works of sculpture, nineteen objects in various metals, twelve pieces of stained glass, eleven panel paintings, nine historical documents, eight luxury textiles, and two pieces of goldsmiths’ work. Flanders and the Artois aside, the exhibition confines itself almost exclusively to objects from those regions whose overlords owed fealty to the French Crown rather than to the Holy Roman Emperor. That decision explains the complete absence of works of art from Lorraine, the Franche-Comté, and Savoy, even though those objects are viewed as French today.
The exhibition is housed in the ancient Roman frigidarium at the Musée de Cluny’s west end. Partitions divide the space into three sections, each of which houses the objects grouped around one of the three themes that order the show. While some of the works are well lit, others are not, a misfortune occasionally amplified when viewers cannot avoid casting their own shadows onto the objects as they lean forward to look at them.
The first of the three themes, “The Political and Artistic Reconquest of the Realm,” brings together forty-nine works of art connected with the king and his entourage. Among the most exquisite objects in this section is the sumptuous back hanging (dossal) in wool and silk of Charles’ dais, made in the 1440s and now in the collection of the Louvre. We also see here the lion’s share of historical documents, one of which is Joan of Arc’s letter of March 16, 1430, to the citizens of Reims, transcribed by a professional secretary and signed by Joan herself. With Joan having succeeded in getting Charles crowned king in Reims the preceding July, the city feared a retaliatory siege by the English, so Joan wrote to say that she would come to the city’s aid as soon as she could. Joan never made it: captured by the Burgundians at Compiègne on May 23, 1430, she was handed over to the English, who famously burned her at the stake as a heretic in Rouen the following year.
“Regional Diversity,” the second theme, presents forty-eight works of art made in Paris and in provincial French centers. While the largest number of objects were created in the capital, there are works from Normandy, the Champagne, Picardy, western France, Brittany, the Bourbonnais, Lyons, and the Languedoc. Reims is represented here by a charming book of hours made around 1460 that was later owned by Marguerite Cuissotte of nearby Châlons-en-Champagne. The loyalty of Reims to the French crown is quietly affirmed by the pattern of royal fleurs-de-lis painted above the head of the dying Virgin in the depiction of her dormition in Marguerite’s manuscript.
Provence is absent from the show’s second section because it is one of the stars of the third. Comprising thirty-six objects and entitled “The Seeds of a New Art,” this section demonstrates how French painters and illuminators absorbed and reinvented both the more naturalistic contemporary southern-Netherlandish style known as the ars nova and Italian Renaissance painting. Hewing closest to the former were two Netherlanders working in France, André d’Ypres in Paris and Barthélemy d’Eyck in Angers and Provence. The Musée de Cluny has pulled off a coup by bringing together the three now-scattered panels of André’s “Dreux Budé” triptych of about 1450. Among the four works by Barthélemy in the show is the celebrated Livre des tournois, which he illustrated in Angers around 1465 for René d’Anjou, the text’s author and Barthélemy’s principal patron.
It was Jean Fouquet of Tours, however, who first fused a French sensibility with the spatial mastery of contemporary Italian painting. Born around 1420, Jean traveled in the mid-1440s to Rome; when he later illustrated the coronation in A.D. 800 of Charlemagne in Old St. Peter’s in Rome in a Grandes Chroniques de France, presented in this exhibition, the artist was able to reproduce the basilica’s elevation and wooden roofing. He went on to work regularly for Charles VII and his leading courtiers; Jean’s portrait on panel of the king, now in the collection of the Louvre, is also in this show.
Some shortcomings of presentation notwithstanding, the Cluny exhibition offers a dazzling and absorbing window onto four decades of French art, history, and culture. If one must content oneself with the beautiful and informative catalogue alone, then one must, but seeing the exhibition itself should be the holy grail of every lover of late-medieval French art.