ABSTRACT
Charles VIII's Italian expedition of 1494/5 has traditionally been regarded as a great turning point in French cultural history. It was perhaps Jules Michelet, the nineteenth-century Romantic historian, who first vividly presented the classic picture of a boorish French nobility awestruck by the beauties of Renaissance Italy.! The theme was taken up later, for English readers, in the influential volume by W.H. Ward on Renaissance Architecture in France:
The stimulus of the Italian Renaissance has been seen by many historians as all the more necessary in late fifteenth-century France because of the decline and disintegration of its native medieval heritage: the later Middle Ages being viewed as a period of cultural exhaustion in the visual arts and intellectual activity. This interpretation was summed up in Arthur Tilley's Dawn of the French Renaissance, where he set out to show why 'France was now ready for the Renaissance')
Not all art historians, of course, have succumbed to this interpretation. In the later nineteenth century, Louis Courajod, curator of the sculpture collection of the Louvre in Paris, reacted against the thesis of profound Italian influences on French culture. Indeed he argued that Italy owed more to northern Europe than vice versa. For Courajod French Renaissance art arose first as a spontaneous national development, related to the development of a strong monarchy and new aristocracy and a new merchant and legal class. It was from an interaction of Flemish influences adopted in northern France about the middle of the fourteenth century that 'the general movement from which emerged the definitive style of the Renaissance, including the style of the Italian Renaissance' arose. The influence of clasical art as such was only of secondary importance, influential only after 'the Italian consciousness was enlightened by the emancipating counsels of naturalism'. Italian art indeed lagged behind that of the north until in fifteenth century Italy 'art at last entered the current of ideas which France and Flanders had brought to birth'. Without the Hundred Years' War, civil war and foreign occupation, Courajod believed that a spontaneous northern Renaissance already under way, including that of the Valois courts, could have effected the cultural conquest of Europe.4
