Francis I of France
Francis I was King of France from 1515 until his death in 1547. He was the son of Charles, Count of Angoulême, Louise of Savoy, he succeeded his father-in-law Louis XII, who died without a son. Francis was the ninth king from the House of Valois, the second from the Valois-Orléans branch, the first from the Valois-Orléans-Angoulême branch. A prodigious patron of the arts, he initiated the French Renaissance by attracting many Italian artists to work on the Château de Chambord, including Leonardo da Vinci, who brought the Mona Lisa with him, which Francis had acquired. Francis' reign saw important cultural changes with the rise of absolute monarchy in France, the spread of humanism and Protestantism, the beginning of French exploration of the New World. 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 du Grand Nez, the Grand Colas, the Roi-Chevalier for his personal involvement in the wars against his great rival the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain Charles V. Following the policy of his predecessors, Francis continued the Italian Wars; the succession of Charles V to the Burgundian Netherlands, the throne of Spain, his subsequent election as Holy Roman Emperor, meant that France was geographically encircled by the Habsburg monarchy. 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 d'Orléans 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, a part of the Duchy of Aquitaine. Today the town lies in the department of Charente. Francis was the only son of Charles d'Orléans, Count of Angoulême, Louise of Savoy and a great-great-grandson of King Charles V of France.
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 father's cousin the Duke of Orléans King Louis XII. However, Charles VIII died childless in 1498 and was succeeded by Louis XII, who himself had no male heir; 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 but only through an assembly of nobles were the two engaged. Claude was heiress to the Duchy of Brittany through Anne of Brittany. Following Anne's death, the marriage took place on 18 May 1514. On 1 January 1515, Louis died, Francis inherited the throne, 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 and writing and he became proficient in Hebrew, Italian and Spanish. 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 science. His mother, who had a high admiration for Italian Renaissance art, passed this interest on to her son. Although Francis did not receive a humanist education, he was more influenced by humanism than any previous French king. By the time he ascended the throne in 1515, the Renaissance had arrived in France, Francis became an enthusiastic patron of the arts. At the time of his accession, the royal palaces of France were ornamented with only a scattering of great paintings, not a single sculpture, either ancient or modern.
During Francis' reign, the magnificent art collection of the French kings, which can still be seen at the Louvre Palace, was begun. Francis patronized many great artists of his time, including Leonardo da Vinci. While da Vinci painted little during his years in France, he brought with him many of his greatest works, including the Mona Lisa, these remained in France after his death. Other major artists to receive Francis' patronage included the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini and the painters Rosso Fiorentino, Giulio Romano, Primaticcio, all of whom were employed in decorating Francis' various palaces, he invited the noted architect Sebastiano Serlio, who enjoyed a fruitful late career in France. Francis commissioned a number of agents in Italy to procure notable works of art and ship them to France. Francis was renowned as a man of letters; when Francis comes up in a conversation among characters in Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtie
Henri Matisse
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman and sculptor, but is known as a painter. Matisse is regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture; the intense colorism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves. Many of his finest works were created in the decade or so after 1906, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasized flattened forms and decorative pattern. In 1917 he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form; when ill health in his final years prevented him from painting, he created an important body of work in the medium of cut paper collage.
His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art. Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, in the Nord department in Northern France, the oldest son of a prosperous grain merchant, he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, France. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification, he first started to paint in 1889, after his mother brought him art supplies during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis. He discovered "a kind of paradise" as he described it, decided to become an artist disappointing his father. In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau, he painted still lifes and landscapes in a traditional style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Matisse was influenced by the works of earlier masters such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau, as well as by modern artists, such as Édouard Manet, by Japanese art.
Chardin was one of the painters Matisse most admired. In 1896, Matisse, an unknown art student at the time, visited the Australian painter John Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of Vincent van Gogh—who had been a friend of Russell—and gave him a Van Gogh drawing. Matisse's style changed completely, he said "Russell was my teacher, Russell explained colour theory to me." The same year, Matisse exhibited five paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, two of which were purchased by the state. With the model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, born in 1894. In 1898 he married Amélie Noellie Parayre. Marguerite and Amélie served as models for Matisse. In 1898, on the advice of Camille Pissarro, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and went on a trip to Corsica. Upon his return to Paris in February 1899, he worked beside Albert Marquet and met André Derain, Jean Puy, Jules Flandrin.
Matisse immersed himself in the work of others and went into debt from buying work from painters he admired. The work he hung and displayed in his home included a plaster bust by Rodin, a painting by Gauguin, a drawing by van Gogh, Cézanne's Three Bathers. In Cézanne's sense of pictorial structure and colour, Matisse found his main inspiration. Many of Matisse's paintings from 1898 to 1901 make use of a Divisionist technique he adopted after reading Paul Signac's essay, "D'Eugène Delacroix au Néo-impressionisme", his paintings of 1902–03, a period of material hardship for the artist, are comparatively somber and reveal a preoccupation with form. Having made his first attempt at sculpture, a copy after Antoine-Louis Barye, in 1899, he devoted much of his energy to working in clay, completing The Slave in 1903. Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910; the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were André Derain.
Matisse's first solo exhibition was without much success. His fondness for bright and expressive colour became more pronounced after he spent the summer of 1904 painting in St. Tropez with the neo-Impressionists Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. In that year he painted the most important of his works in the neo-Impressionist style, Calme et Volupté. In 1905 he travelled southwards again to work with André Derain at Collioure, his paintings of this period are characterised by flat shapes and controlled lines, using pointillism in a less rigorous way than before. Matisse and a group of artists now known as "Fauves" exhibited together in a room at the Salon d'Automne in 1905; the paintings expressed emotion with wild dissonant colours, without regard for the subject's natural colours. Matisse showed Open Woman with the Hat at the Salon. Critic Louis Vauxcelles commented on a lone sculpture surround by an "orgie of pure tones" as "Donatello chez les fauves", referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them.
His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, passed
Alpes-Maritimes
Alpes-Maritimes is a department of France located in the extreme southeast corner of the country, near the border with Italy and on the Mediterranean coast. Part of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, it had a population of 1,080,771 in 2013, it has become in recent years one of the world's most attractive destinations, featuring cities such as Nice, Cannes and Grasse, numerous alpine ski resorts. Alpes-Maritimes entirely surrounds Monaco; the department's inhabitants are called Maralpines. The Alpes-Maritimes department is surrounded by the departments of Var in the southwest, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence in the northwest and the Mediterranean Sea to the south, it surrounds the Principality of Monaco on the west and east. Its topography is mixed; as its name suggests, most of the department is a constituent part of the overall topographic Alps – including the Maritime Alps – but it has the distinction of being a coastal district with its Mediterranean coast. The coastal area and densely populated, includes all the cities in an continuous conurbation from Cannes to Menton, while the larger but sparsely populated mountainous area is rural with the exception of the three large resorts of Valberg and Isola 2000.
The highest point of the department is the Cime du Gélas on the Franco-Italian border which dominates the Vallée des Merveilles further east. In fact the summit of Monte Argentera is higher at 3297 m above sea level but it is located in Italian territory. There is Mount Mounier which dominates the south of the vast Dôme de Barrot, formed of a mass of more than 900 m thick red mudstones indented by the gorges of Daluis and Cians. Except in winter, four passes allow passage to the north of the Mercantour/Argentera mountain range whose imposing 62 km long barrier covered in winter snow, visible from the coast. From the west the Route des Grandes Alpes enters the Cayolle Pass first on the way to the Alps and the sources of the Var in the commune of Entraunes; the route follows the Col de la Bonette – the highest pass in Europe at 2715 m – to connect to the valley of the Tinée the Ubaye. Further east, the Lombard pass above Isola 2000 allows access to the shrine of Saint-Anne de Vinadio in Italy.
At its eastern end, the Col de Tende links with Cuneo in Italy. The only region of the Alps close to Nice has an afforestation rate of 60.9% higher than the average of the department and well above the average of 39.4% for the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. The rivers in alphabetical order are: It is the climate that made the Côte d'Azur famous; the current department of Alpes-Maritimes, does not have only one climate, the complex terrain and high mountains divide the department between those who are well exposed and those which are less and with the mild Mediterranean climate there can be violent storms and prolonged droughts. The coastal area has a Mediterranean climate. Towards the interior in the north, a mountain climate. One of the attractions of the department is its level of sunshine: 300 days per year. Despite this the department is the most stormy of France with an average of 70 to 110 thunderstorm days per year. Alpes-Maritimes is divided into 2 arrondissements: the Grasse and the Nice,27 cantons and 163 communes.
In 2002 there were 14 intercommunalities. Including: 4 metropolitan intercommunalities of which: 3 are agglomeration communities Agglomeration community of Pôle Azur Provence Agglomeration community of the Riviera Française Agglomeration community of Sophia Antipolis and 1 is an urban community Urban community of Nice Côte d'Azur; the other 10 are Communauté de communes: Communauté de communes de la Vallée de l'Estéron Communauté de communes des Monts d'Azur Communauté de communes du Pays des Paillons Communauté de communes des Coteaux d'Azur Communauté de communes des Vallées d'Azur Communauté de communes de la Tinée Communauté de communes de Cians Var Communauté de communes des Stations du Mercantour Communauté de communes des Terres de Siagne Communauté de communes Vésubie MercantourThe following is a list of most populous cities of the department: Nice Antibes Cannes Grasse Cagnes-sur-Mer Le Cannet Saint-Laurent-du-Var Menton Vallauris Mandelieu-la-Napoule Vence Mougins Alpes Maritimae was created by Octavian as a Roman military district called maritimae Alps in 14BC, became a full Roman province in the middle of the 1st century AD with its capital first at Cemenelum and subsequently at Embrun.
At its greatest extent in AD 297, the province reached north to Briançon. A first French département of Alpes-Maritimes existed in the same area from 1793 to 1814, its boundaries differed from those of the modern department, however. In 1793 Alpes-Maritimes included Monaco and San Remo, but not Grasse, part of the départment of Var; the département was subdivided into the following arrondissements and cantons: Nice, cantons: Nice, Aspremont, La Brigue, Monaco, Roquebillière, Saint-Sauveur-sur-Tinée, Saorge, L'Escarène, Sospel and Villefranche-sur-Mer. Sanremo
Lambert of Vence
Lambert of Vence known as Lambert of Bauduen, was Bishop of Vence. Born Pelloquin Lambert, at Bauduen, France, in 1084, he lost his mother at birth and was raised at the age of twelve years by the Benedictine monks of Lérins. He was appointed Bishop of Vence in 1114, remained in the see until his death in 1154. During his episcopate he sent to Bauduen relics of St Véran for; the relics of Lambert are still enshrined in Vence
Marc Chagall
Marc Zakharovich Chagall was a Russian-French artist of Belarusian Jewish origin. An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in every artistic format, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic and fine art prints. Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century". According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists". For decades, he "had been respected as the world's pre-eminent Jewish artist". Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN and the Art Institute of Chicago, the Jerusalem Windows in Israel, he did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra. Before World War I, he travelled between Saint Petersburg and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture.
He spent the wartime years in Soviet Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922. He writes Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist, he experienced modernism's "golden age" in Paris, where "he synthesized the art forms of Cubism and Fauvism, the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism". Yet throughout these phases of his style "he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk." "When Matisse dies," Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour is". Marc Chagall was born Moishe Segal in a Lithuanian Jewish Hassidic family in Liozna, near the city of Vitebsk in 1887. At the time of his birth, Vitebsk's population was about 66,000, with half the population being Jewish. A picturesque city of churches and synagogues, it was called "Russian Toledo", after a cosmopolitan city of the former Spanish Empire.
As the city was built of wood, little of it survived years of occupation and destruction during World War II. Chagall was the eldest of nine children; the family name, Shagal, is a variant of the name Segal, which in a Jewish community was borne by a Levitic family. His father, Khatskl Shagal, was employed by a herring merchant, his mother, Feige-Ite, sold groceries from their home, his father worked hard, earning only 20 roubles each month. Chagall would include fish motifs "out of respect for his father", writes Chagall biographer, Jacob Baal-Teshuva. Chagall wrote of these early years: Day after day and summer, at six o'clock in the morning, my father got up and went off to the synagogue. There he said his usual prayer for other. On his return he drank some tea and went to work. Hellish work, the work of a galley-slave. Why try to hide it? How tell about it? No word will ease my father's lot... There was always plenty of cheese on our table. Buttered bread, like an eternal symbol, was never out of my childish hands.
One of the main sources of income of the Jewish population of the town was from the manufacture of clothing, sold throughout Russia. They made furniture and various agricultural tools. From the late 18th century to the First World War, the Russian government confined Jews to living within the Pale of Settlement, which included modern Ukraine, Poland and Latvia exactly corresponding to the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth taken over by Imperial Russia; this caused the creation of Jewish market-villages throughout today's Eastern Europe, with their own markets, schools and other community institutions. Chagall wrote as a boy. During a pogrom, Chagall wrote that: "The street lamps are out. I feel panicky in front of butchers' windows. There you can see calves that are still alive lying beside the butchers' hatchets and knives"; when asked by some pogromniks "Jew or not?", Chagall remembered thinking: "My pockets are empty, my fingers sensitive, my legs weak and they are out for blood.
My death would be futile. I so wanted to live". Chagall denied being a Jew, leading the pogromniks to shout "All right! Get along!"Most of what is known about Chagall's early life has come from his autobiography, My Life. In it, he described the major influence that the culture of Hasidic Judaism had on his life as an artist. Chagall related how he realised that the Jewish traditions in which he had grown up were fast disappearing and that he needed to document them. Vitebsk itself had been a centre of that culture dating from the 1730s with its teachings derived from the Kabbalah. Chagall scholar Susan Tumarkin Goodman describes the links and sources of his art to his early home: Chagall's art can be understood as the response to a situation that has long marked the history of Russian Jews. Though they were cultural innovators who made important contributions to the broader society, Jews were considered outsiders in a hostile society... Chagall himself was born of a family steeped in religious life.
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery; the Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early and Late Middle Ages. Population decline, counterurbanisation, collapse of centralized authority and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in Late Antiquity, continued in the Early Middle Ages; the large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, an Islamic empire, after conquest by Muhammad's successors. Although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete.
The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire, Rome's direct continuation, survived in the Eastern Mediterranean and remained a major power. The empire's law code, the Corpus Juris Civilis or "Code of Justinian", was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became admired in the Middle Ages. In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions. Monasteries were founded; the Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty established the Carolingian Empire during the 8th and early 9th century. It covered much of Western Europe but succumbed to the pressures of internal civil wars combined with external invasions: Vikings from the north, Magyars from the east, Saracens from the south. During the High Middle Ages, which began after 1000, the population of Europe increased as technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish and the Medieval Warm Period climate change allowed crop yields to increase. Manorialism, the organisation of peasants into villages that owed rent and labour services to the nobles, feudalism, the political structure whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords in return for the right to rent from lands and manors, were two of the ways society was organised in the High Middle Ages.
The Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralised nation-states, reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a unified Christendom more distant. Intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, by the founding of universities; the theology of Thomas Aquinas, the paintings of Giotto, the poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the travels of Marco Polo, the Gothic architecture of cathedrals such as Chartres are among the outstanding achievements toward the end of this period and into the Late Middle Ages. The Late Middle Ages was marked by difficulties and calamities including famine and war, which diminished the population of Europe. Controversy and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the interstate conflict, civil strife, peasant revolts that occurred in the kingdoms. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages and beginning the early modern period.
The Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history: classical civilisation, or Antiquity. The "Middle Ages" first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas or "middle season". In early usage, there were many variants, including medium aevum, or "middle age", first recorded in 1604, media saecula, or "middle ages", first recorded in 1625; the alternative term "medieval" derives from medium aevum. Medieval writers divided history into periods such as the "Six Ages" or the "Four Empires", considered their time to be the last before the end of the world; when referring to their own times, they spoke of them as being "modern". In the 1330s, the humanist and poet Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as antiqua and to the Christian period as nova. Leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodisation in his History of the Florentine People, with a middle period "between the fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of city life sometime in late eleventh and twelfth centuries".
Tripartite periodisation became standard after the 17th-century German historian Christoph Cellarius divided history into three periods: ancient and modern. The most given starting point for the Middle Ages is around 500, with the date of 476 first used by Bruni. Starting dates are sometimes used in the outer parts of Europe. For Europe as a whole, 1500 is considered to be the end of the Middle Ages, but there is no universally agreed upon end date. Depending on the context, events such as the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the Americas in 1492, or the Protestant Reformation in 1517 are sometimes used. English historians use the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to mark the end of the period. For Spain, dates used are the death of King Ferdinand II in 1516, the death of Queen Isabella I of Castile in 1504, or the conquest of Granada in 1492. Historians from Romance-speaking countries tend to divide the Middle Ages into two parts: an earlier "High" and late
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This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "article name needed". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton.
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