LOIRE VALLEY

In the regions washed by the Loire and its tributaries, the “casing up” of French art made itself felt with a particular brilhance, thanks to royal, princely or bourgeois patrons who quickened the art centres of Berry, the Bourbonnais and Tourasne. There, too, the arnstic climate of the early fifteenth century had paved the way for this later flowering.
At Bourges, after the death of Jean de Berry in 14I6, halting the work on the ducal building sites, the workshops kept up some activity, which increased with the installation there of the royal court in 1422 and the great undertakings ofJacques Cccur at mid-century. Father of the celebrated Michel Colombe, the sculptor Philippe Colombe, whose authenricated works have not survived, is recorded at Bourges from 1434 until his death in 1457. Jcan de Camhrai, the Duke’s image-maker, died only in 1439. We may connect with various aspects of his style, rooted moreover in the fonrtecoth century, several anonymous sculptures, preserved from this first part of the century, in which the density and sohdity of forms and the calm rhythm of sohd folds prevail, without excluding a tender and charming vivaciousness in the childlike faces.
In Toasraine, too, a measured power, far removed from all dramatization, a naturalism exact without excessive attention to detail and a quict gentleness reigned from the middle of the ccntury in the statuary which revealed indisputable affinities with the art of the painter Jean Fouquet, established in Tours, where he died around 1480. Thus the energetic handhng of the Virgin and St John on Calvary, originating perhaps in the abbey of Beaugerais, has often been related to the exceptional plastic and  monumental sense shown in Fouquet’s pasnted figures. Several oak sculptures, images of worship or decorative panels, bear witness to the activity of woodcarvers at Tours, also certified by documents. Works in stone, like the angels of the tomb of Jeanne de Montjean at Buesl (around 5460, Archaeological Society of Touraine) or the statues of the castle chapel of Chteaudun consecrated in 1464, present equivalent stylistic characteristics, later heightened and enriched in the Tonraine workshop of Michel Colombe.
Colombe’s creations, known from texts, at Bourges where his name appears in 1457 and at Monlins where in 1484 he worked for the luxury-loving Duke of Bourbon, have unfortunately been lost. They would doubtless have enabled us to evaluate the role of this sculptor, coming in fact from the Berry milieu, in the evolution of a specific- ally Bourbonnais style, illustrated by many sculptures from the time of the master’s sojourn or of later date, such as the works of his disciples who remained at Moulins after his departure around 149o. There, notably, was elaborated a particular type of feminine face, regularly oval, sometimes slightly plump, with small features, a large convex forehead and almond-shaped eyes uuder blurred eyebrows, a type that recalls the meek—looking Madonnas painted around the same period by the Brussels painter Jcan Hey, the Master of Mouhns. To the serenity of expressions, the harmonious balance of forms and calm fall of the draperies, is added the exquisite delicacy of gestures that emphasize the fineness of the hands, and a painstaking handhng of details of dress chiselled in the stone.
Majesty prevails in the monumental statues of St Peter, St Anne and St Susanna from the Chteau de Chantelle, carved in the very first years of the sixteenth century, probably by Jean de Chartres, Colombe’s chief collaborator at Moulins. But the face of the Virgin as a child, standing beside St Anne, further refines the type that had become habitual, and the elegance of Susanna reveals a mind that is almost worldly. Bearing witness to the influence of these formulas, even beyond the boundaries of Bourbonnais, many series of saints show kinship in their slender silhouettes, delicate face and informal grace tinged with preciousness and coquetry. One of the most famous is the Mary Magdalene of Montlnon.
The new tonality that henceforth marked Bourbonnais sculpture is part of the general evolution of the Loire country under the dominance of the art of Michel Colombe, which it is at last possible to apprehend. The tomb of Franots II and Marguerite de Foix at Nantes, ordered in 1499 by Queen Anne of Brittany and made from i502 to t507 in the workshop at Tours, where Colombe’s name is mentioned from i496, enables us to define the master’s style at the close of his life. If it draws extensively on the traditional Loire heritage, it also introduces innovative conceptions blending smoothly with the recent contributions of the Italian Renaissance. In the Nantes tomb, Colombe did not content himself with adopting the anttqne decorative repertory brought from beyond the mountains by the court sculptors of Charles VIII and of Louis XII, and already present in the ornamentation of chateaus or figure groups such as the Entombment of Solesmes, dated i49t1. The corner statues of the Cardinal Virtues on the Nantes sarcophagus express the ideal of noble and serene beauty which inspires the sculptor; these statues portray his search for compact and balanced volumes, his care for the human form in the sensitive modelling of the body and the construction of faces with features more sharply drawn than previously. The old Gothic idealism revitalized during the fifteenth century did not oppose Italian art; it opened itself to new ways and encouraged the harmonious meeting of traditional and Renaissance style in this final phase of the Middle Ages on the banks of the Loire. The nephew and collaborator of Colombe, Cuillaume Regnanlt, to whom is ascribed the famous Virgin and Child from Olivet (Louvre, Paris), kept alive at Tours the final style of his master, who died around i5i4, when the mannerist tendencies of the Fontaineblean court were already making headway.