The 16th century’s Richard Scarry
Antoine Caron: Drawing for Catherine de’ Medici
France, circa 1575: a spectacular tournament is taking place before our eyes.
Crowds of elegantly dressed courtiers look on, as a knight on horseback gallops pell-mell towards a dragon. He is competing in a challenge known as “running at the ring”, aka the joust of the quintain. His goal is to strike the quintain, which here takes the form of an artificial dragon capable of spinning viciously upon its axis, with an outstretched spear, without stumbling, or getting smacked to the ground by a cudgel attached to the beast’s tail.
Behind him, two groups of riders, decked out as Moors and Amazons, await their turn. In the foreground, a jester strains over a balustrade, eager to witness the knight’s fate.
This dramatic drawing, executed in black chalk, brown ink and brown wash, and heightened with white bodycolour, is one of six sheets in the so-called Valois Series by the important French Renaissance artist Antoine Caron (1521-99).
The drawings, two of which belong to the Courtauld Gallery in London, are associated with a set of eight enormous wall hangings known as the Valois Tapestries
(after the Valois dynasty, which ruled France from 1328 to 1589), in the Uffizi Galleries in Florence. A new exhibition at the Courtauld reunites all six sheets for the first time, presenting them in its beautiful drawings gallery, en route to the better-known post-impressionist collections upstairs.
I will admit that I entered somewhat dutifully, expecting to be a little bored. But, like a 16thcentury version of Where’s Wally?, or one of Richard Scarry’s bustling children’s illustrations, Caron’s charming drawings teem with incident and detail, as well as flashes of wit, hurling us headlong into the astonishing world of the Valois magnificences – festivals, ceremonies and sporting events, as the catalogue informs us, organised by the last Valois kings of France.
And if Caron’s visual record of these royal jamborees is even half grounded in fact, then, my goodness, their scope, ambition, and exorbitant cost must have beggared belief. In one lavish water festival, staged on a lake before the Château de Fontainebleau, a group of men skimpily dressed as savages, stranded upon an island, attempt to repel heavily armed invaders aboard a flotilla of richly decorated vessels.
Another water festival, depicted on a slightly damaged sheet from New York’s Morgan Library and Museum, is even more breathtaking, as pinheaded soldiers try to spear a briny leviathan spouting from two blowholes. In the background, Neptune arrives on a chariot drawn by seahorses, while mermaids playing music sway on the back of a giant turtle.
It all seems far too outlandish to have ever taken place, the Renaissance equivalent of a Disney fantasy. Apparently, though, there is documentary evidence that, in 1581, a similar spectacle was staged upon the River Seine, to celebrate an aristocratic wedding, in the presence of the king.
If only documentary evidence concerning Caron’s Valois series had survived: frustratingly, none has. As a result, art historians still debate the exact date and purpose of these drawings.
However, Ketty Gottardo, curator of the Courtauld show, avoids the scholarly morass by sensibly supporting the consensus view: that Caron produced the drawings, probably during the late 1570s, for the Italian noblewoman Catherine de’ Medici, widowed consort of Henri II. The related tapestries were then woven in Brussels the following decade.
Catherine, who ruled the country as regent for several years, appears in at least one of Caron’s drawings. We know it’s her, even though Caron’s elongated figures are generic, because she wears a veil – as she always did (at least, in portraits) following the death of her husband in 1559, after he was wounded in a jousting tournament.
Henri’s violent demise may explain why, during the second half of the 16th century, tournaments became considerably less dangerous – a shift that is detectable in Caron’s drawing of the quintain. After all, his fantastical, evocative scene – almost, one could argue, a precursor of the fête galante, that fashionable staple of 18th-century French painting – presents not a bloodbath, with warriors hacking at each other to display martial prowess, but something more akin to a ballet or masquerade: a highly elaborate, and ephemeral, piece of dreamlike choreography, designed to reflect, above all, the splendour and sophistication of life at court.