CHAMPAGNE AND PICARDY

In a style familiar and fashionable by turns, the Champagne workshops produced, around  1500, long anonymous processions of devotional images in stone or polychrome wood, in marble or alabaster: Virgin and Child or male and female saints, at whose feet was often carved the donor’s diminutive kneeling figure. The wholly Gothic plastic density of these statues, their poised gestures, their gentle, delicate and regular faces, are accompanied by many anecdotal details and coquetries of dress embroidered braid, small hanging chains, studded belts, pleated and knotted ribbons—even more abundant than in other regions of France. Concurrently the dolorous themes of the Passion are treated in a serious and reserved tone, stripped of pomp or pathoa, in a large and famous collection of works gathered around the St Martha of the church of the Madeleine at Troyes and the Entombment of Chaource (1515).
To explain the decorative excesses of Champagne sculpture, reference has often been made to the influence of the Netherlands, of which Nicolas Halins, established in Troyes from 1494 to 1544, could have been one of the transmitters, but not, as has wrongly been said, the only one. Indeed, the penetration of  northern formulas through imported objects or the influx of foreign artists, forms part of a general movement, which in sculpture partially included Champagne as well as Picardy, Artois and Normandy, and broadened in scope through the circulation of engraved models. The art of altarpieces especially, which interpreted the examples of Brusiels and Antwerp in stone or wood, owed much to this influence. The work of the Picardy cabinetmakers and image—makers who carved in oak the stalls of Amiens Cathedral from io8 to and the frames of the first “Puys” (medieval religious societies) of Notre—Dame also show acquaintance with the narrative style, alive and racy, of the Netherlandish workshops. The large stone reliefs of the cathedral choir tower mark the stages of a different stylistic development, more typical of Picardy, which extends from the first scenes from the life of St Firmin (about 1490), arranging tiers of calm figures clad in stiff and simple draperies, to the last episodes in the story of john the Baptist (1531), highly ornate in taste, in which the suppler figures are swathed in animated fabrics enhanced by refined polychromy. ‘the Gothic sculpture of Picardy, little affected by Italian novelties, had an exceptionally late flowering, whose luxuriant effects invaded the great faades of flamboyant Gothic buddings and continued to influence altarpieces well after the middle of the sixteenth century. In Normandy, too, the abundance of sculptured decoration was linked to the last creations of Gothic architecture, marked more rapidly, however, by the intrusion of Renaissance motifs.