The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King (11 page)

The greatest masterpiece to hang in Fontainebleau was indisputably the
Mona Lisa
, which François I bought from Leonardo da Vinci’s heir and installed in his library.

Another of the artists lured to Fontainebleau by the king was Benvenuto Cellini, a “character” who drove everyone mad with his jokes and japes. He disliked the pretensions of the king’s mistress, the duchesse d’Etampes, and went out of his way to annoy her—and succeeded. The duchess tried to have the king send him away, but François laughed and kept him at court. Cellini called the château “Fontana Belio.” His sketches and wax models always delighted the king, and in his diaries he tells us quite frankly how he would feel the need to make love to his models in order to best portray their long-limbed beauty. Cellini clearly went too far and was tried by jury for using his mistress “after the Italian manner.”

Cellini is probably responsible for the greatest
objets d’art
in the royal collection. During his two long visits to the French court, he created
the famous golden saltcellar, depicting a long-legged, reclining nude figure of a nymph with an open shell for holding the salt.
⁹
Several nineteenth-century writers claim the model was Diane de Poitiers, but in fact the model was Cellini’s mistress. The artist planned twelve life-size silver figures of gods and goddesses intended to be used as candelabra, but only one, the Jupiter, was finished. Among his other works for François I was a bronze lunette in demirelief depicting the
Nymph of Fontainebleau
,
¹⁰
another long-legged nude beauty mistakenly identified as Diane de Poitiers, this time with her arm protectively around a stag—the Valois kings had always used the stag as their family emblem.

François I established an impressive library at Fontainebleau, with over fifteen hundred books, including forty-one in Greek, four in Hebrew, and two in Arabic. The king sent several learned men to Italy on book-buying expeditions, and his diplomats in Venice and Rome were instructed to buy (or have copied) all the Greek manuscripts they could find. As François never stayed in one place for any length of time, he had a chest of books which followed him wherever he went. From 1537, the French printers and booksellers were obliged to deliver to the king one copy of all books printed in any language. Imported books had to be screened by the Sorbonne
¹¹
before being sold to the public, and one copy had to remain at Blois. In 1544, the library was moved to Fontainebleau, and two years later it was opened to visitors. In twenty years the library was bursting with 3,560 titles. It was moved to Paris, where it formed the basis of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

A charming anonymous miniature from about 1530 shows the king and his three sons listening to Antoine Macault reading from his translation of Diodorus of Sicily. Also present are courtiers and François’ pet monkey. Of the three children, only Henri appears to be listening. When Henri became king, the ordinance concerning books printed was stretched to two copies for the king; the second was for Diane’s library at Anet.

Fontainebleau is a monument to François I, the patron of Humanism,
scholars, and artists. Of all his many châteaux, it was the closest he came to having a home: he referred to the house as “
chez moi
” and continued improving it for the rest of his life. Brantôme wrote: “What a building is Fontainebleau, where out of a wilderness has been made the finest house in Christendom … so rich, so fair a building and so big and spacious that one might house a small world in it, and so many lovely gardens and groves and beautiful fountains, and everything pleasing and delightful.”

The greatest pastime of the court was the hunt. Although a noted scholar, the king was primarily a man of action, and when not at war, jousting in tournaments or chasing the stag, bear, wild boar, or wolf was the favorite occupation of courtiers. François I was heroically brave and his lack of concern for his own welfare resulted in many a nasty accident. Idleness was scorned by society. But the only other alternative
to scholarship and sport for the nobility was attending festivities, performing in masques, dancing, and for some, even
sinning
.

It has always been said by contemporary as well as later writers that the inspiration for the lifestyle at Fontainebleau came from Baldassare Castiglione’s book
The Courtier
. The king had read it in the original Italian and commissioned a French translation for the court. It reached cult status among the
cognoscenti
and was adopted by many other European courts as well. François loved to talk—conversation was one of his greatest joys, and there was no greater book for teaching the art of conversation than
The Courtier
. Castiglione wrote that “all inspiration must come from women.… Without women nothing is possible, either in military courage, or art, or poetry, or music, or philosophy, or even religion. God is truly seen only through them.” This thinking was at the core of the doctrine for François I’s court at Fontainebleau.

Other contemporary writers on art history such as Giorgio Vasari give more credit for the multicultural impact of Fontainebleau to the king’s contemporary, François Rabelais, the chief poet of the day. Rabelais studied to become a prior, but he left the monastery in disgust when the old learning became transformed into envy of the new, and great classical books were being banned and even burned. He studied medicine and went to Lyons to practice, where he soon joined the literary circle around the great printer Andreas Gryphius. Rabelais wrote
Pantagruel
as a sequel to the original
Gargantua
, and then composed a
Gargantua
of his own.

Rabelais’ books were read to François I during meals. It seems the king laughed until he cried over both books, and called Rabelais “the merriest devil in his realm.” Naturally, Rabelais’ books were banned by the Sorbonne as seditious, but that did not prevent the king from giving them his royal imprimatur. Lytton Strachey wrote of
Gargantua
that the “whole vast spirit of the Renaissance is gathered within its pages.” It has been said that the riotous mirth and wisdom of Rabelais made him “as many friends as enemies,” and that his works remain “the most astonishing treasure of wit, wisdom, common sense and satire that the world has ever seen.”

Rabelais also wrote erotic verse, very much to the taste of François I and his licentious court. Some of the stories told about the king’s womanizing
seem hard to believe. Contemporary sources claim that François had an incestuous relationship with his sister, Marguerite, and enjoyed a mistress from the age of ten. If he was capable of such precocity, one must remember that his mother, Louise de Savoie, married at the age of eleven and no one thought that too young. François’ love of women was legendary; even Queen Claude’s stepmother, Mary Tudor, had complained of his forced attentions. Nonetheless, the French court was the envy of all others in Europe and was viewed as the most scintillating on earth.

_____________________

1
. In winter, the ermine has a white pelt, its tail ending in a black tip; its fur was the most prized in Europe.

2
. Official mistress.

3
. This château is now a museum about twenty miles northwest of Paris.

4
. In a journal entry by Antonio de’ Beatis, dated October 10, 1517, he states that Leonardo was overcome by a certain paralysis of his right hand and “one can no longer expect fine things of him.… Messer Leonardo can no longer paint with the sweetness of style that he used to have, and he can only make drawings and teach others.” As the Cardinal Luigi of Aragon’s secretary, it is likely that Beatis was an accurate observer. The famous painting by Ingres of Leonardo’s death in the arms of François is apocryphal.

5
. Three-pronged forks, known at the Italian courts, only came into use at the French court with the reign of Henri III, grandson of François I.

6
. François never went farther south than Pavia or farther east than Bologna.

7
. Il Rosso suffered at the hands of the imperial forces during the Sack of Rome, and a later fall from a roof affected his head and probably his brain. After a quarrel with a friend, he fatally poisoned himself.

8
. Until that time, mirrors in France were made of polished metal.

9
. Cellini’s saltcellar, almost unanimously considered the most beautiful small work of all Renaissance art, was stolen in 2003 from the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna.

10
. Now in the Louvre. A replica has replaced the original at Anet.

11
. The Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris, commonly referred to as the Sorbonne.

CHAPTER FOUR

Treachery and Treason

A
fter his triumph at Marignano, François I soon learned that winning northern Italy was one thing, but holding on to it was quite another. The French king needed Pope Leo X’s cooperation on the peninsula as there was a real danger of the Habsburg forces joining with Henry VIII and attacking France. The king also had his eye on the title of Holy Roman Emperor, and for that Pope Leo X’s endorsement of the imperial crown was essential. There were other territorial gains that an alliance with the pope would help facilitate. As the feudal suzerain of the Kingdom of Naples, the crown was in his gift, and as the senior Medici, the duchy of Florence was also his to bestow.

On December 8, 1515, pope and king met in Bologna and signed a concordat of friendship. François I ensured the Vatican’s authority over the Catholic Church in France, and Leo X promised to support François’ claims to the Kingdom of Naples. The usual manner of cementing such an arrangement was a wedding. In 1518, the king of France offered the hand of his cousin Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne
to the pope’s nephew, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino and head of the Florentine republic.
¹

For the Medici to marry into the royal house of France was a gigantic elevation, and the family was suitably awed. The origin of the Medicis is unclear. According to legend, they began their rise with a certain Alverado, a knight of Charlemagne. Other sources claim the family’s origins rest with two unidentified Florentine apothecaries in the thirteenth century. As the family increased in wealth, it began to infiltrate the political and financial circles of the city. By the fourteenth century, the Medici concentrated on banking and the acquisition of steadily more important appointments within the republic. The aristocratic dynasties and the grand old families of weavers—Florence produced the most elaborate and finely woven fabrics in all Europe—despised the “nouveaux riches” merchant bankers and excluded them from society. Thereafter, the Medici made themselves the champions of the working class, and by the first quarter of the fifteenth century, a Medici had risen to become the head of the republic.

Once at the helm of power, they never let go again, but continued to control politics and finance in Florence for three hundred years. By the fifteenth century, the wealth and power of the Medici was such that they were in a position to make enormous loans to Louis XI of France. It was due to the French king’s inability to repay that he permitted the
fleur-de-lys
to be placed on the city’s coat of arms and on the central ball of the Medicis’ own armorial shield.

The wedding arranged by François I and the Medici Pope Leo X would bring their families even closer together. The willing victim of this arrangement was seventeen-year-old Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne, comtesse de Boulogne, daughter of a Princess of the Blood, a substantial heiress, and an acknowledged beauty. Since the king had negotiated the marriage contract between the ravishing Madeleine and the Duke of Urbino, he also presided over the magnificent, almost-royal festivities at Amboise, just days after the baptism of his heir the dauphin, on February 28, 1517. It was here that François met Leonardo
da Vinci (who was among the pope’s suite of representatives) and invited the artist to come to France.

For both occasions—the wedding and the christening—the courtyard of the château was covered and transformed into a huge banqueting hall. The castle walls were hung with rich tapestries, and the awning’s ceiling was decorated with garlands of box and flowers. Diane de Poitiers was a cousin of the bride through her mother, as well as the confidante of the queen, and she played a significant part in the joint ceremonies.
²
The first of these was the christening of the dauphin François.

Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, standing proxy for the pope, who was godfather, held the dauphin at the font during the ceremony, and presented the king of France with a number of gifts, including two paintings by Raphael. The king, for his part, gave the bridegroom a company of men-at-arms and the chain and Order of Saint-Michel, as well as a handsome allowance for his French bride. This double celebration pleased all parties—the king was able to fortify his links with Rome and Florence; the duke felt himself nearer the realization of his ambition to hold sway over more of the Italian peninsula than just his native Urbino; and the bride’s family was delighted to come within the illustrious sphere of the pope. The joint christening and wedding celebrations lasted for several days of feasting and dancing, but no festivity was complete without a tournament. The king and the bridegroom distinguished themselves at the joust and no one was unduly disturbed when several of the combatants were killed during the mock battle that followed.

Tournaments were held to enhance the prowess of the warriors by staging competitions. “Jousts,” as they were called, included single combat or teams taking part against one another. Once the trumpets had sounded the start, the audience was bound to total silence. Neither coughing nor hand signals or gestures were permitted. Jousting was carried out in “lists”
³
in an enclosed area, with riders charging at one another on either side of a barrier, their lances poised to knock their
opponent off his horse. Both riders and horses wore armor, but injury was still commonplace.

After touring his wife’s considerable estates in the Auvergne, the Duke of Urbino brought his duchess home to Tuscany, where they spent an idyllic three months before he fell ill. Unlike his famous forbear, this Lorenzo de’ Medici had only succeeded in mastering dissipation and drunkenness during his short life. If the pope and the king knew about it, neither had mentioned the “bad blood” of the Medici, which carried tuberculosis, and worse. Lorenzo was a victim of the so-called
mal français or mal de Naples
, which had been brought from the New World allegedly by the Spanish: syphilis.

All the well-laid plans of the Medici pope and the French king came to nothing. Lorenzo took to his bed with consumption. On
April 13, 1519, one year after her wedding, Madeleine gave birth to a daughter, but Lorenzo was already too weak to go to his wife’s room to see her. The frail child was immediately baptized Catarina
⁴
Maria Romula. Two weeks after the birth, Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne died of puerperal fever and complications from her husband’s double wedding gifts of syphilis and tuberculosis. One week later, Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, ruler of Florence, and master wastrel, joined her in the tomb. He was twenty-eight years old. Although François I and Pope Leo X may have thought their dynastic alliance ended with these two deaths, no one could have foretold the intertwining of the destinies of François’ second son, the one-month-old Henri d’Orléans, with Catherine de’ Medici—and with Diane de Poitiers.

P
EACE at home did not prevent the king’s mother from plotting another campaign. Why should not François become Holy Roman Emperor? With the death of the past incumbent, Maximilian, an election was due soon. Despite its grandeur, the title was largely honorific; it conferred nominal sovereignty over a “mosaic” of principalities, duchies, free cities, margravates, baronies, the many small kingdoms that now comprise modern Germany, and the sizable duchy of Savoy.

By ancient tradition, the emperor was chosen by seven German Electors, although some of them could be bribed. Louise, determined to add the crown of Charlemagne
⁵
to her son’s glory, noted that there were really only three contenders: François I; Henry VIII (although he
was certainly not rich enough to compete); and the Habsburg Charles, king of Spain.

Five years younger than François I, Charles, son of the Austrian Archduke Philip “the Handsome,” was in almost every way his father’s opposite. How shrewdly the Venetian diplomat Marino Giustiniani, who had served at the courts of both François and Charles, observed: “They will hate each other until one of them dies.” Where François was dashing and ebullient, Charles was cold and phlegmatic. With his long Habsburg chin and the permanently open mouth of the adenoid sufferer, Charles was far from good-looking. He wore the colors of shadows and hated the ostentation that the French king loved. The excitement of the chase, which occupied so much of the life of the Valois court and of François in particular, was anathema to the calm and curt Charles of Spain. In fact, although his extended jaw made him look stupid, he was blessed with a rare intelligence. Charles was tenacious, possessing total self-control and patience. With the wealth generated by the New World, he could also afford to outbid François for the crown of Charlemagne.

In addition to being king of Spain, and by dint of other inheritances, Charles had the right to be named ruler of “Sicily, Jerusalem, the Balearic and Canary Islands, the Indies, and the Mainland on the Far Side of the Atlantic.” He was “Archduke of Austria; Duke of Burgundy, Brabant, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Luxembourg, Limburg, Athens and Patras; Count of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol; Count Palatine of Burgundy, Hainault, Pfiart, Roussillon; Landgrave of Alsace; Count of Swabia; Lord of Asia and Afric.” He was ruler of the Netherlands, the German Franche-Comté, and the Kingdom of Naples. One historian described this nineteen-year-old paragon as a “coalition in his own person,” since no Christian monarch, not even Charlemagne whose crown he now coveted, had ever possessed so much territory and so many titles. It was the dearest wish of the emperor Maximilian that his grandson Charles would succeed him in this title as well as all his others.

Inevitably, with the larger financial clout, the Habsburg Charles of Spain won the election on June 28, 1519, and became the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, although it would be eleven years before
Pope Clement VII placed the heavy gold crown of Charlemagne on his head. From this moment, Charles V would endanger the kingdom of France and peace in Europe; and he remained an implacable enemy of François I for the rest of his life.

With France now encircled on three sides by the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, Louise de Savoie looked across the English Channel for support. By nature a troublemaker, Henry VIII recognized an opportunity for making mischief between Europe’s two great powers. In 1520, after some delicate negotiations, François and Henry agreed to meet in a small, sheltered valley near Calais to discuss a possible alliance. As the neighboring castles were in ruins, the French and the English camps erected pavilions of such splendor that the many paintings of the scene would make appropriate illustrations for a fairy tale.

There are enough contemporary reports to make one believe
that Henry VIII really did ship a three-story wooden palace to Calais. It arrived in sections and was assembled with windows of leaded, diamond-shaped panes. Canvas painted to look like stone covered the outside. This legendary castle had four great crenellated towers at its corners, and two large fountain statues of Bacchus and Cupid gushed claret for anyone passing to drink.