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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Catherine de' Medici (April 13, 1519 – January 5, 1589) was born in Florence, Italy. In 1533, at the age of fourteen, she married Henry, second son of King Francis I and Queen Claude of France. When Henry ascended the throne as Henry II in 1547, Catherine became queen of France. After his death in 1559, she found herself perhaps the most powerful figure in the country. The period between the death of Henry and Catherine's own death in 1589 has been called "the age of Catherine de' Medici". During this time, she became renowned as a patron of the arts and launched a series of grandiose building projects, which she supervised personally. Her aims as a builder were to enhance the grandeur of the Valois monarchy at all costs and to commemorate her dead husband in the most exquisite style possible.
Catherine was a daughter of both the Italian and the French Renaissance. She grew up as an orphan in Florence and Rome under the wing of the Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII. Moving from Italy to France at the age of fourteen, she joined the greatest Renaissance court of northern Europe. Francis I set her an example of magnificence and artistic patronage that she never forgot. She witnessed his huge architectural schemes at Chambord and Fontainebleau, where Italian and French artists, architects and sculptors worked together, forging the style that became known as the first School of Fontainebleau. Catherine later employed Primaticcio herself. Her name is also associated with the French architects Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant and the sculptor Germain Pilon.
Architecture was Catherine's favourite art form. The poet Ronsard even criticised her for preferring masons to poets.[1] De l'Orme, Bullant, and Jacques Androuet du Cerceau wrote architectural treatises knoiwing that she would read them. She spent colossal sums on the building and embellishment of palaces and funeral monuments. And she alwys supervised each project personally.[2]
Little more remains of Catherine's building projects than a single Doric column, some fragments in the corner of the Tuileries gardens and an empty tomb in the basilica of Saint Denis. The sculptures she commissioned for the Valois chapel are lost or scattered in museums and churches, often damaged or incomplete. Catherine’s legacy to architecture lies instead in the designs and treatises of her architects, which reveal the ambition of her schemes and the originality of French architecture in the late Valois period.
