Catherine De' Medici's Patronage of The Arts - Architecture

Architecture

Architecture was Catherine de' Medici's first love among the arts. "As the daughter of the Medici", suggests French art historian Jean-Pierre Babelon, "she was driven by a passion to build and a desire to leave great achievements behind her when she died." Having witnessed in her youth the huge architectural schemes of Francis I at Chambord and Fontainebleau, Catherine set out, after Henry II's death, to enhance the grandeur of the Valois monarchy through a series of costly building projects. These included work on châteaux at Montceaux-en-Brie, Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, and Chenonceau, and the building of two new palaces in Paris: the Tuileries and the Hôtel de la Reine. Catherine was closely involved in the planning and supervising of all her architectural schemes. Architects of the day dedicated treatises to her in the sure knowledge that she would read them. The poet Ronsard accused her of preferring masons to poets.

Catherine was intent on immortalising her sorrow at the death of her husband and had emblems of her love and grief carved into the stonework of her buildings. As the centrepiece of an ambitious new chapel, she commissioned a magnificent tomb for Henry at the basilica of Saint Denis, designed by Francesco Primaticcio. In a long poem of 1562, Nicolas Houël, laying stress on her love for architecture, likened Catherine to Artemisia, who had built the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, as a tomb for her dead husband. Primaticcio's circular plan for the Valois chapel, by allowing the tomb to be viewed from all angles, solved the problems faced by the Giusti brothers and Philibert de l'Orme, builders of previous royal tombs. Art historian Henri Zerner has called the design "a grand ritualistic drama which would have filled the rotunda's celestial space" and "the last and most brilliant of the royal tombs of the Renaissance". Work on the building was abandoned in 1585, as the monarchy faced bankruptcy and a series of rebellions. Over two hundred years later, in 1793, a mob tossed Catherine and Henry's bones into a pit with the rest of the French kings and queens.

Catherine de' Medici spent extravagant sums on the building and embellishment of monuments and palaces, and as the country slipped deeper into anarchy, her plans grew ever more ambitious. Yet the Valois monarchy was crippled by debt and its moral authority in steep decline. The popular view condemned Catherine's building schemes as obscenely wasteful. This was especially true in Paris, where the parlement was often asked to contribute to her costs.

Ronsard captured the mood in a poem:

The queen must cease building,
Her lime must stop swallowing our wealth…
Painters, masons, engravers, stone-carvers
Drain the treasury with their deceits.
Of what use is her Tuileries to us?
Of none, Moreau; it is but vanity.
It will be deserted within a hundred years.

Ronsard was in many ways proved correct. Little remains of Catherine de' Medici's investment today: one Doric column, a few fragments in the corner of the Tuileries gardens, an empty tomb at Saint Denis.

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