The French Renaissance
French kings brought artists from Italy and created an elegant Renaissance of their own.
From 1494 French kings repeatedly marched into Italy to conquer Naples and Milan. The wars ultimately failed, but the kings and the nobility came home full of impressions. They had seen palaces, gardens and paintings unlike anything north of the Alps. Soon châteaux were being built in the Loire Valley with Italian details on French ground plans, with high roofs, towers and chimneys recalling the castles of the Middle Ages.
Francis I, king from 1515, became the great patron of the Renaissance in France. He invited Leonardo da Vinci, who spent his last years at Amboise, and bought Italian masterpieces for his collections. From the 1530s the Italians Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticcio worked at the château of Fontainebleau. With French and Flemish assistants they created an elegant style of elongated bodies, stucco and mythological subjects known as the School of Fontainebleau.
In the second half of the century France produced its own masters. The architects Pierre Lescot and Philibert de l’Orme and the sculptors Jean Goujon and Germain Pilon gave Italian forms a French expression, clearer and more restrained. The portrait painters Jean and François Clouet portrayed the court in small, precise pictures. The Wars of Religion from 1562 shattered much, but after 1598 Henry IV rebuilt Paris with new squares, bridges and galleries.