Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French RenaissanceUniversity of Chicago Press, 2005 - 314 pages Most people would be hard pressed to name a famous artist from Renaissance France. Yet sixteenth-century French kings believed they were the heirs of imperial Rome and commissioned a magnificent array of visual arts to secure their hopes of political ascendancy with images of overflowing abundance. With a wide-ranging yet richly detailed interdisciplinary approach, Rebecca Zorach examines the visual culture of the French Renaissance, where depictions of sacrifice, luxury, fertility, violence, metamorphosis, and sexual excess are central. Zorach looks at the cultural, political, and individual roles that played out in these artistic themes and how, eventually, these aesthetics of exuberant abundance disintegrated amidst perceptions of decadent excess. Throughout the book, abundance and excess flow in liquids-blood, milk, ink, and gold-that highlight the materiality of objects and the human body, and explore the value (and values) accorded to them. The arts of the lavish royal court at Fontainebleau and in urban centers are here explored in a vibrant tableau that illuminates our own contemporary relationship to excess and desire. From marvelous works by Francois Clouet to oversexed ornamental prints to Benvenuto Cellini's golden saltcellar fashioned for Francis I, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold covers an astounding range of subjects with precision and panache, producing the most lucid, well-rounded portrait of the cultural politics of the French Renaissance to date. |
Contents
Incomprehensible Abundance? An Introduction | |
Blood | |
The Galerie Fançois Premier | |
Iconology | |
Fontainebleau Nova Pandora | |
Death and Rebirth | |
The Death of Adonis | |
The Aesthetics of Sacrifice | |
Copia and Curiosity | |
The Golden Fleece | |
Inanimate Reproduction | |
Problems of Number | |
Gold | |
Living Gold | |
Mutability | |
Royal Responses | |
Impossible Bodies | |
Milk | |
Nature France | |
Cybele and Artemis | |
Fertile Gauls Fat Breasts | |
Charles and Elizabeth | |
The Lust of the Earth | |
Natural Antiquity | |
Ink | |
Ornament and the School of Fontainebleau | |
The New World | |
Inflation and the Hubris of Kings | |
The Golden Age | |
Counterfeit Bodies | |
Animation and Deanimation | |
Notes | |
Common terms and phrases
abundance Adonis antique Antonio Fantuzzi appears architecture Artemis artists Attis Benvenuto Cellini Bibliothèque Nationale Blaise de Vigenère blood Bodin body breasts Cambridge Cellini CHAPTER Charles IX Château of Fontainebleau Christ classical culture currency Cybele Early Modern earth Edited Engraving entry erotic excess fashion female figure Fiorentino and assistants frame French Renaissance fresco Gabrielle d'Estrées Galerie François Premier Gaul goddess gold grotesque Henri Henri II human iconography imagery images Italian Jean Jean Bodin king l'art L'Estoile Léonard Thiry Livre material metaphor Musées Nationaux/Art Resource nation Nationale de France nature NOTES TO PAGES objects ornament painting Pandora Panofsky Paris Photo Pierre prints production René Boyvin represent Reproduced by permission Réunion Réunion des Musées Rosso Fiorentino royal sacrifice School of Fontainebleau sexual silver sixteenth century sixteenth-century France stucco style suggests symbolic things tion Toison d'or trans Translated University Press Vasari viewers visual wealth York Zerner