Leonardo da Vinci
He has been variously called the father of palaeontology and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. Sometimes credited with the inventions of the parachute and tank, many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the Universal Genius or Renaissance Man, an individual of unquenchable curiosity and feverishly inventive imagination. Much of his working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He worked in Rome and Venice, and he spent his last years in France at the home awarded to him by Francis I of France, Leonardo was, and is, renowned primarily as a painter. Among his works, the Mona Lisa is the most famous and most parodied portrait, Leonardos drawing of the Vitruvian Man is regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro coin, and T-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings have survived, Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised flying machines, a type of armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated power, an adding machine.
Some of his inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder. A number of Leonardos most practical inventions are nowadays displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, geology and hydrodynamics, Leonardo is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 at the hour of the night in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci. He was the son of the wealthy Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina. Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense – da Vinci simply meaning of Vinci, his birth name was Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci, meaning Leonardo. The inclusion of the title ser indicated that Leonardos father was a gentleman, little is known about Leonardos early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano in the home of his mother and his father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera Amadori, who loved Leonardo but died young in 1465 without children.
When Leonardo was sixteen, his father married again to twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini, pieros legitimate heirs were born from his third wife Margherita di Guglielmo and his fourth and final wife, Lucrezia Cortigiani. Leonardo received an education in Latin and mathematics. In life, Leonardo recorded only two childhood incidents, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face
Marguerite de Navarre
Marguerite de Navarre, known as Marguerite of Angoulême and Margaret of Navarre, was the princess of France, Queen of Navarre, and Duchess of Alençon and Berry. She was married to Henry II of Navarre and her brother became King of France, as Francis I, and the two siblings were responsible for the celebrated intellectual and cultural court and salons of their day in France. Marguerite is the ancestress of the Bourbon kings of France, being the mother of Jeanne dAlbret, whose son, Henry of Navarre, succeeded as Henry IV of France, the first Bourbon king. As an author and a patron of humanists and reformers, she was a figure of the French Renaissance. Samuel Putnam called her The First Modern Woman, Marguerite was born in Angoulême on 11 April 1492, the eldest child of Louise of Savoy and Charles, Count of Angoulême. On 16 February 1488, her father, married eleven-year-old Louise, the daughter of Philip II of Savoy and Margaret of Bourbon, Louise was considered one of the most brilliant feminine minds in France and she named their first-born, after her own mother.
Two years after Marguerites birth, the family moved from Angoulême to Cognac, where the Italian influence reigned supreme, Marguerites brother, Francis, to be King Francis I of France, was born there on 12 September 1494. She had several half-siblings, from illegitimate relationships of her father, another half-sister, was born to Jeanne le Conte, one of her fathers mistresses. Her father died when she was four, her one-year-old brother became heir presumptive to the throne of France. Thanks to her mother, who was nineteen when widowed, Marguerite was carefully tutored from her earliest childhood. The young princess was to be called Maecenas to the ones of her brothers kingdom. Never, she wrote, shall a man attain to the love of God who has not loved to perfection some creature in this world. When Marguerite was ten, Louise tried to marry her to the Prince of Wales, who would become Henry VIII of England, perhaps the one real love in her life was Gaston de Foix, Duc de Nemours, nephew of King Louis XII.
Gaston went to Italy and died a hero at Ravenna, at the age of seventeen Marguerite was married to Charles IV of Alençon, aged twenty, by the decree of King Louis XII. With this decree, Marguerite was forced to marry a generally kind, had become the bride of a laggard and a dolt. She had been bartered to save the royal pride of Louis, there were no offspring from this marriage. After the death of Queen Claude, she took in her two nieces Madeleine and Marguerite, for whom she would continue to care during her second marriage, after the death of her first husband in 1525, Marguerite married Henry II of Navarre. Ferdinand II of Aragon had invaded the Kingdom of Navarre in 1512, and Henry ruled only Lower Navarre, the independent principality of Béarn, a Venetian ambassador of that time praised Marguerite as knowing all the secrets of diplomatic art, hence to be treated with deference and circumspection
Charles VIII of France
Charles VIII, called the Affable, French, lAffable, was a monarch of the House of Valois who ruled as King of France from 1483 to his death in 1498. He succeeded his father Louis XI at the age of 13 and his elder sister Anne of France acted as regent jointly with her husband Peter II, Duke of Bourbon until 1491 when the young king turned 21 years of age. During Annes regency, the great lords rebelled against royal centralisation efforts in a known as the Mad War. Preoccupied by the succession in the Kingdom of Hungary, Maximilian failed to press his claim. Upon his marriage, Charles became administrator of Brittany and established a union that enabled France to avoid total encirclement by Habsburg territories. The coalition formed against the French invasion of 1494-98 finally drove out Charles army, Charles died in 1498 after accidentally striking his head on the lintel of a door. Since he had no heir, he was succeeded by his cousin Louis XII of France from the Orléans cadet branch of the House of Valois.
Charles was born at the Château dAmboise in France, the surviving son of King Louis XI by his second wife Charlotte of Savoy. Charles succeeded to the throne on 30 August 1483 at the age of 13 and he was regarded by his contemporaries as possessing a pleasant disposition, but as foolish and unsuited for the business of the state. She would rule as regent, together with her husband Peter of Bourbon, Charles was betrothed on 22 July 1483 to the 3-year-old Margaret of Austria, daughter of the Archduke Maximilian of Austria and Mary, Duchess of Burgundy. The marriage was arranged by Louis XI, and the Estates of the Low Countries as part of the 1482 Peace of Arras between France and the Duchy of Burgundy. Margaret brought the Counties of Artois and Burgundy to France as her dowry, in 1488, Francis II, Duke of Brittany, died in a riding accident, leaving his 11-year-old daughter Anne as his heiress. The Regent Anne of France and her husband Peter refused to countenance such a marriage, since it would place Maximilian and his family, the Habsburgs, on two French borders.
The French army invaded Brittany, taking advantage of the preoccupation of Frederick III and his son with the succession to Mathias Corvinus. Anne of Brittany was forced to renounce Maximilian and agree to be married to Charles VIII instead, in December 1491, in an elaborate ceremony at the Château de Langeais and Anne of Brittany were married. The 14-year-old Duchess Anne, not happy with the arranged marriage, Charless marriage brought him independence from his relatives and thereafter he managed affairs according to his own inclinations. Queen Anne lived at the Clos Lucé in Amboise, there still remained the matter of Charles first betrothed, the young Margaret of Austria. Although the cancellation of her betrothal meant that she by rights should have returned to her family, Charles did not initially do so
Anne of Brittany
Anne of Brittany was Duchess of Brittany from 1488 until her death, and queen consort of France from 1491 to 1498 and from 1499 to her death. She is the woman to have been queen consort of France twice. During the Italian Wars, Anne became queen consort of Naples, from 1501 to 1504, Anne was raised in Nantes during a series of conflicts in which the king of France sought to assert his suzerainty over Brittany. Her father, Francis II, Duke of Brittany, was the last male of the House of Montfort, upon his death in 1488, Anne became duchess regnant of Brittany, countess of Nantes and Richmond, and viscountess of Limoges. She was only 12 at that time, but she was already a coveted heiress because of Brittanys strategic position. The next year, she married Maximilian I of Austria by proxy and he started a military campaign which eventually forced the duchess to renounce her marriage. Anne eventually married Charles VIII in 1491, none of their children survived early childhood, and when the king died in 1498, the throne went to his cousin, Louis XII.
Following an agreement made to secure the annexation of Brittany, Anne had to marry the new king, Louis XII was deeply in love with his wife and Anne had many opportunities to reassert the independence of her duchy. They had two daughters together and, although neither could succeed to the French throne due to the Salic Law, the eldest was proclaimed the heiress of Brittany. Anne managed to have her eldest daughter engaged to the future Charles V of Austria, grandchild of Maximilian I and this marriage led to the formal union between France and Brittany. Anne is highly regarded in Brittany as a ruler who defended the duchy against France. In the Romantic period, she became a figure of Breton patriotism and she was honoured with many memorials and her artistic legacy is important in the Loire Valley, where she spent most of her life. She was notably responsible, with her husbands, for projects in the châteaux of Blois. Four years later, her parents had a daughter, Isabelle. Her mother died when she was little, while her father died when Anne was eleven years old and it is likely that she learned to read and write in French, and perhaps a little Latin.
Contrary to what is claimed, it was unlikely that she learned Greek or Hebrew. She was raised by a governess, Françoise de Dinan, Lady of Chateaubriant, in addition, she had several tutors, including her butler and court poet, Jean Meschinot, who is thought to have taught her dancing and music. The Treaty of Guérande in 1365, stated that in the absence of an heir from the House of Montfort
Ambroise Dubois
Ambroise Dubois was a Flemish-born French painter. Dubois was born in Antwerp and became a painter of the second School of Fontainebleau and his influences were Niccolò dellAbbate and Francesco Primaticcio. Dubois painted primarily portraits and mythological scenes, dubreuil was painter to Marie de Médicis in 1606, decorating the Queens Cabinet with episodes from Tancred and Clorinda
JSTOR
JSTOR is a digital library founded in 1995. Originally containing digitized back issues of journals, it now includes books and primary sources. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals, more than 8,000 institutions in more than 160 countries have access to JSTOR, most access is by subscription, but some older public domain content is freely available to anyone. William G. Bowen, president of Princeton University from 1972 to 1988, JSTOR originally was conceived as a solution to one of the problems faced by libraries, especially research and university libraries, due to the increasing number of academic journals in existence. Most libraries found it prohibitively expensive in terms of cost and space to maintain a collection of journals. By digitizing many journal titles, JSTOR allowed libraries to outsource the storage of journals with the confidence that they would remain available long-term, online access and full-text search ability improved access dramatically. Bowen initially considered using CD-ROMs for distribution, JSTOR was initiated in 1995 at seven different library sites, and originally encompassed ten economics and history journals. JSTOR access improved based on feedback from its sites.
Special software was put in place to make pictures and graphs clear, with the success of this limited project and Kevin Guthrie, then-president of JSTOR, wanted to expand the number of participating journals. They met with representatives of the Royal Society of London and an agreement was made to digitize the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society dating from its beginning in 1665, the work of adding these volumes to JSTOR was completed by December 2000. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded JSTOR initially, until January 2009 JSTOR operated as an independent, self-sustaining nonprofit organization with offices in New York City and in Ann Arbor, Michigan. JSTOR content is provided by more than 900 publishers, the database contains more than 1,900 journal titles, in more than 50 disciplines. Each object is identified by an integer value, starting at 1. In addition to the site, the JSTOR labs group operates an open service that allows access to the contents of the archives for the purposes of corpus analysis at its Data for Research service.
This site offers a facility with graphical indication of the article coverage. Users may create focused sets of articles and request a dataset containing word and n-gram frequencies and they are notified when the dataset is ready and may download it in either XML or CSV formats. The service does not offer full-text, although academics may request that from JSTOR, JSTOR Plant Science is available in addition to the main site. The materials on JSTOR Plant Science are contributed through the Global Plants Initiative and are only to JSTOR
Francis I of France
Francis I was the first King of France from the Angoulême branch of the House of Valois, reigning from 1515 until his death. He was the son of Charles, Count of Angoulême, and he succeeded his cousin and father-in-law Louis XII, who died without a male heir. Francis reign saw important cultural changes with the rise of absolute monarchy in France, the spread of humanism and Protestantism, Jacques Cartier and others claimed lands in the Americas for France and paved the way for the expansion of the first French colonial empire. For his role in the development and promotion of a standardized French language, he became known as le Père et Restaurateur des Lettres. He was known as François au Grand Nez, the Grand Colas, following the policy of his predecessors, Francis continued the Italian Wars. In his struggle against Imperial hegemony, he sought the support of Henry VIII of England at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. When this was unsuccessful, he formed a Franco-Ottoman alliance with the Muslim sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, a controversial move for a Christian king at the time.
Francis was born on 12 September 1494 at the Château de Cognac in the town of Cognac, which at that time lay in the province of Saintonge, today the town lies in the department of Charente. Francis was the son of Charles, Count of Angoulême, and Louise of Savoy. His family was not expected to inherit the throne, as his third cousin King Charles VIII was still young at the time of his birth, as was his fathers cousin the Duke of Orléans, King Louis XII. However, Charles VIII died childless in 1498 and was succeeded by Louis XII, the Salic Law prevailed in France, thus females were ineligible to inherit the throne. Therefore, the four-year-old Francis became the heir presumptive to the throne of France in 1498 and was vested with the title of Duke of Valois. In 1505, Louis XII, having fallen ill, ordered that his daughter Claude and Francis be married immediately, Claude was heiress to the Duchy of Brittany through her mother, Anne of Brittany. Following Annes death, the took place on 18 May 1514.
Louis died shortly afterwards and Francis inherited the throne and he was crowned King of France in the Cathedral of Reims on 25 January 1515, with Claude as his queen consort. As Francis was receiving his education, ideas emerging from the Italian Renaissance were influential in France, some of his tutors, such as François Desmoulins de Rochefort and Christophe de Longueil, were attracted by these new ways of thinking and attempted to influence Francis. His academic education had been in arithmetic, grammar, reading, Francis came to learn chivalry and music and he loved archery, horseback riding, jousting, real tennis and wrestling. He ended up reading philosophy and theology and he was fascinated with art, literature and his mother, who had a high admiration for Italian Renaissance art, passed this interest on to her son
St. John the Baptist (Leonardo)
St. John the Baptist is a High Renaissance oil painting on walnut wood by Leonardo da Vinci. Probably completed from 1513 to 1516, it is believed to be his final painting and is now exhibited at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the piece depicts St. John the Baptist in isolation. Through use of chiaroscuro, the figure appears to emerge from the shadowy background, St. John is dressed in pelts, has long curly hair, and is smiling in an enigmatic manner reminiscent of Leonardos famous Mona Lisa. He holds a cross in his left hand while his right hand points up toward heaven like St Anne in Leonardos Burlington House Cartoon. Kenneth Clark claimed that for Leonardo, St. John represented the eternal question mark, the enigma of creation, barolsky adds that, Describing Saint John emerging from darkness in almost shockingly immediate relation to the beholder, Leonardo magnifies the very ambiguity between spirit and flesh. The grace of Leonardos figure, which has an erotic charge. The dating of St. John the Baptist is disputed and it was seen by Antonio de Beatis in Leonardos workshop at Clos Lucé, his diary entry giving a terminus ante quem of 17 October 1517.
Traditionally the painting has been considered the artists last and dated to 1513-16, some experts, have compared the hand of St. John to a similar work by a pupil in the Codex Atlanticus, dating the commencement of the picture to around 1509. St. John the Baptist was apparently part of King Francis collection at Fontainebleu in 1542, in 1625 King Charles I received the painting from Louis XIII in return for a Titian Holy Family and Holbeins Portrait of Erasmus. In 1649 Charles collection was sold, whereupon the painting entered into the hands of banker Eberhard Jabach, after a spell in the possession of Cardinal Mazarin, in 1661 the piece once again returned to the King of France – Louis XIV. Following the revolution the painting entered the collection at the Louvre where it remains to this day, prior to this work, St. John had traditionally been portrayed as a gaunt ascetic. Leonardos innovative depiction proved influential upon Raphaels workshop, several portraits of St, numerous copies and variations of St.
John the Baptist made by Leonardeschi exist. The viewer is based on IIPImage
French Renaissance
The French Renaissance was the cultural and artistic movement in France between the 15th and early 17th centuries. The period is associated with the pan-European Renaissance, a word first used by the French historian Jules Michelet to define the artistic, the French Renaissance traditionally extends from the French invasion of Italy in 1494 during the reign of Charles VIII until the death of Henry IV in 1610. The reigns of Francis I of France and his son Henry II are generally considered the apex of the French Renaissance, the word Renaissance is a French word, whose literal translation into English is Rebirth. The word Renaissance was first used and defined by French historian Jules Michelet, in his 1855 work, as a French citizen and historian, Michelet claimed the Renaissance as a French movement. His work is at the origin of the use of the French word Renaissance in other languages, for a chronological list of French Renaissance artists, see List of French Renaissance artists. In 1516, Francis I of France invited Leonardo da Vinci to the Château dAmboise and provided him with the Château du Clos Lucé, called Château de Cloux, as a place to stay and work.
Leonardo, a painter and inventor, arrived with three of his paintings, namely the Mona Lisa, Sainte Anne, and Saint Jean Baptiste. There are a number of French artists of talent in this period including the painter Jean Fouquet of Tours. Marie de Medici, Henry IVs queen, invited the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens to France, another Flemish artist working for the court was Frans Pourbus the younger. Outside France, working for the dukes of Lorraine, one finds a very different late mannerist style in the artists Jacques Bellange, Claude Deruet and Jacques Callot. Having little contact with the French artists of the period, they developed a heightened and often erotic mannerism, the old Louvre castle in Paris was rebuilt under the direction of Pierre Lescot and would become the core of a brand new Renaissance château. To the west of the Louvre, Catherine de Medici had built for her the Tuileries palace with extensive gardens and they became an extension of the chateaux that they surrounded, and were designed to illustrate the Renaissance ideals of measure and proportion.
Burgundy, the mostly French-speaking area unified with the Kingdom of France in 1477, was the center of Europe in the early. The Burgundian style gave birth to the Franco-Flemish style of polyphony which dominated European music in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. However, by the end of the 15th century, a French national character was becoming distinct in music of the French royal and aristocratic courts, guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois are two notable examples from the Burgundian school during the early Renaissance period. The most renowned composer in Europe, Josquin des Prez, worked for a time in the court of Louis XII, Francis I, who became king that year, made the creation of an opulent musical establishment a priority. By far the most significant contribution of France to music in the Renaissance period was the chanson, the chanson in the early 16th century was characterised by a dactylic opening and contrapuntal style which was adopted by the Italian canzona, the predecessor of the sonata.
Typically chansons were for three or four voices, without accompaniment, but the most popular examples were inevitably made into instrumental versions as well
France
France, officially the French Republic, is a country with territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European, or metropolitan, area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, Overseas France include French Guiana on the South American continent and several island territories in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. France spans 643,801 square kilometres and had a population of almost 67 million people as of January 2017. It is a unitary republic with the capital in Paris. Other major urban centres include Marseille, Lille, Toulouse, during the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by the Gauls, a Celtic people. The area was annexed in 51 BC by Rome, which held Gaul until 486, France emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages, with its victory in the Hundred Years War strengthening state-building and political centralisation. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a colonial empire was established.
The 16th century was dominated by civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. France became Europes dominant cultural and military power under Louis XIV, in the 19th century Napoleon took power and established the First French Empire, whose subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and dissolved in the course of the Algerian War, the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, was formed in 1958 and remains to this day. Algeria and nearly all the colonies became independent in the 1960s with minimal controversy and typically retained close economic. France has long been a centre of art, science. It hosts Europes fourth-largest number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites and receives around 83 million foreign tourists annually, France is a developed country with the worlds sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and ninth-largest by purchasing power parity.
In terms of household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, France remains a great power in the world, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a member state of the European Union and the Eurozone. It is a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, originally applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name France comes from the Latin Francia, or country of the Franks
Media related to Manoir du Clos Lucé at Wikimedia Commons
