The court of France was far more splendid than, and
equally enlightened with, that of Florence. The monarch felt his title
to Maecenasship as justified as that of the Medici. He created,
accordingly, French painting out of hand--I mean, at all events, the
French painting that stands at the beginning of the line of the present
tradition. He summoned Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Rossi, Primaticcio,
and founded the famous Fontainebleau school. Of necessity it was
Italianate. It had no Giotto, Masaccio, Raphael behind it. Italian was
the best art going; French appreciation was educated and keen; its
choice between evolution and adoption was inevitable. It was very much
in the position in which American appreciation finds itself to-day. Like
our own painters, the French artists of the Renaissance found themselves
familiar with masterpieces wholly beyond their power to create, and
produced by a foreign people who had enjoyed the incomparable advantage
of arriving at their artistic apogee through natural stages of growth,
beginning with impulse and culminating in expertness.
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