europe france in school

From "curious" to canonical: Jehan roy de France and the origins of the French school

In his 1928 discussion of the origins of the art of painting in France, Louis Gillet proclaimed, "It is very noteworthy that French painting begins with a portrait." (1) The image that Gillet referred to as the progenitor of French painting hangs today in the Musee du Louvre, Paris (Fig. 1). (2) It depicts a man's face and shoulders in profile set against a gold ground. (3) An inscription above the head informs the viewer that the figure represents "Jehan Roy de France"; this provides us with perhaps the most apt title for the image. There have been only two French kings named John, and because the first died in 1316 just four days after his birth, it seems clear that the image was intended to represent John II. Also known as John the Good, he was born in 1319 and reigned from 1350 until his death in 1364. John is best known today for having spent much of his reign in captivity in London, following his defeat by the English at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356.

At present the panel hangs at the entrance to the recently reinstalled northern painting galleries on the second floor of the Richelieu wing of the Louvre. Visitors entering the wing from the vast admissions area beneath the Pyramid are directed to a set of escalators that convey them to the upper level of the wing. As they rise through a majestic space designed by I. M. Pei, the panel comes into view (Figs. 2, 3). Framed by twin signs announcing the beginning of the painting collection, it hangs alone inside a large protective case. In the galleries behind this display, "Peinture" continues with a select number of works from the French court of the late fourteenth century and then branches off into other regional and national "schools"--southern France, Flanders, Germany, and so on. This dramatic display situates the panel at the starting point of early modern painting in northern Europe, distinctly apart from the Louvre's medieval collection (located on the floors below in the decorative arts and sculpture galleries). Accordingly, the installation echoes (and indeed broadens) Gillet's bold claim that "French painting begins with a portrait."

The wall text beside the panel reinforces the subtle cues provided by its installation, pointing viewers toward the reigning account of the piece's art historical significance. In addition to assigning the panel a date of "before 1350," the text informs the viewer that the work constitutes "the first surviving example since Antiquity of an independent painted portrait." (4) The label thus signals a decisive taxonomic move: it assigns the panel to the category of images known as "portraits." The text furthermore suggests that an interest in "portraits" was shared by antiquity and modernity but neglected in the intervening years, that is, the Middle Ages. It thereby invests "portraits" with profound cultural significance, implying that they collectively stand as one element of the broader rebirth of classical culture taken as characteristic of the Renaissance.

Identifying the panel as a portrait also leads present-day visitors to the Louvre to assume that it offers an unmediated view of its subject's facial features--that through it they see "what John really looked like." As a corollary, viewers are encouraged to believe that "seeing John" in this way allows us to begin to know something about him as a person, granting them access to an individual identity presumed to exist independently of its representation in the panel. (5) Even sophisticated scholarly discussions of portraiture tend to take it as axiomatic that external appearances are a necessary component of human beings' sense of self. For instance, in a stimulating book-length essay on the portrait genre, Richard Brilliant listed "a recognized or recognizable appearance" as one of the "essential constituents of a person's identity." (6)

Jehan Roy de France and the History of Portraiture

Physiognomic likeness has become enmeshed within art historical approaches to periodization, as it has come to be understood as the visual symptom of a postmedieval mentality. (7) This concept has proven to be particularly tenacious in scholarship on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century art. (8) Scholars have traditionally divided late medieval images of individuals into two categories: "portraits," which use physiognomic likeness to refer to specific individuals, and "types," which use conventional, nonmimetic representational systems to refer to group, rather than individual, identities. (9) This binary categorization has persuaded us to view the introduction of physiognomic likeness as a sign marking the triumph of the self-conscious individual of the Renaissance over the anonymity and corporate identities of the Middle Ages. At the same time, the most subtle recent transhistorical and transcultural accounts of portraiture have tended to avoid specifying the moment in which physiognomic likeness was introduced into Western art, leaving the place of images like the Louvre panel within this history unchallenged. (10)

In order to describe the Louvre panel as "the first" or, at least, "the earliest surviving" modern portrait, however, it is not sufficient merely to claim that it is a physiognomic likeness. Scholars have perceived physiognomic likenesses in a variety of other types of images beginning in the early fourteenth century, when "donor figures" in devotional works began to display distinctive, apparently individualized facial features. In order to present the panel in the Louvre as decisively modern, scholars have emphasized its status as, in the words of its wall text, "an independent painted portrait" (emphasis mine). Studies of portraiture frequently claim that portraits should ideally be entirely divorced from obvious religious references, enabling the representation of an individual's identity to emerge as the primary goal of the image. (11) This insistence that an image be "independent" to be considered a proper portrait crops up repeatedly in discussions of the Louvre panel. (12)

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The traditional account of the Louvre panel is thus predicated on several assumptions: that it is a physiognomic likeness of its subject; that physiognomic likeness is necessary for the representation of individual identity; that as a physiognomic likeness devoid of overt religious references, the panel constitutes an example of portraiture in the modern sense; and that as a portrait, it marks a decisive break with medieval artistic traditions. If all of these assumptions are accepted as accurate, the Louvre panel can certainly be said to stand as a work of tremendous importance for the history of art--and, indeed, for the history of Western culture.

But there are significant problems with each of these assumptions. Most basically, it is extremely difficult to ascertain what one might call an image's "physiognomic intent" in the absence of the image's subject. (13) An image's naturalistic, individualized traits cannot be taken as proof of physiognomic intent. (14) An artist can produce a highly individualized representation without attempting to replicate the actual appearance of a particular individual; the well-known "founder figures" in the west choir of Naumburg Cathedral are cases in point. (15) Beyond these is an even more profound problem with the assumptions applied to Jehan roy de France: it is dangerous to assume that present-day conceptions of physiognomic likeness were shared by artists and audiences from different periods and cultures. The number of ways in which an image can resemble its subject are potentially infinite, and the degree of resemblance that a viewer expects to find between image and subject is also infinitely variable. As a result, the criteria by which one gauges concepts such as "likeness," "resemblance," and "realism" are always historically and culturally contingent. (16) The common-sense definition of the portrait--that it is simply an image that "looks like" its subject--is thus hopelessly imprecise. The most perceptive recent scholarship on the practice of portraiture has stressed ways in which portraiture must be understood as a complex social practice rather than as a simple form of representation calling for verisimilitude and mimesis. (17) It is therefore understandable that scholars of medieval art have at times looked skeptically on the presumed connection between physiognomic likeness and the representation of individual identity, and recent scholarship has explored ways in which images can convey vast amounts of information specific to an individual's identity without recourse to physical resemblance. (18)

A further difficulty arises when one wishes to identify the first member--the prime image--in a sequence known otherwise through its later manifestations. In order to classify an object as a part of a series of similar objects, an observer must possess an understanding of the criteria that justify the grouping together of those objects and must be aware of other previously existing objects belonging to that series. As a result, any description of an image as the earliest member of a group is necessarily anachronistic. We can construct our definition of the group of images described as "portraits" in ways that enable Jehan roy de France to stand as the first in this series (for instance, by assuming that it provides a physiognomic likeness of John the Good, by requiring that images can only be construed as portraits if they represent their subjects through physiognomic likeness, and by excluding votive images from our definition of portraiture). This definition, however, is dependent on a broad awareness of the images that were created both prior and subsequent to the Louvre panel; the artist who painted the panel itself could never have conceived of such a definition. That artist would necessarily have understood the image in different terms--terms that were effaced by the subsequent reinterpretation of the image as the "first modern portrait." (19)

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The recent exaltation of Jehan roy de France as the head of the "French school" encapsulates an additional significant anachronism, as historians have shown that national identity is a postmedieval notion; the painter of the panel could not have thought of him- or herself as "French" first and foremost. (20) The belief that works of art manifest a nation's culture has its ultimate roots in the foundational scholarship of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), and it was reinforced in the early nineteenth century by subsequent generations of cultural historians as well as early art historians. (21) A pair of basic assumptions unites the work of such scholars: that human productions (whether laws or works of art) reflect distinctive "cultures," and that "culture" can be correlated with national identities. (22) This notion of national artistic schools also informed the organization of the first art museums, which began to take shape in the years around 1800. For instance, Andrew McClellan and Carol Duncan note that this arrangement governed the installation at the Louvre from its earliest years as a public museum in the late eighteenth century. (23) By presenting the panel as a prime object in several categories--portraiture, modernity, and the French school of painting--the modern installation of Jehan roy de France thus situates the panel squarely at the intersection of several of the founding premises of art history.

The thoughts of the original maker and audience of the Louvre panel will remain elusive. Clearly, however, they were necessarily different from those ascribed to the piece by postmedieval scholarship. In order to shed light on the ways that that scholarship has effaced possible original intentions by interpreting the panel according to prevailing conceptions of the postmedieval practice of portraiture, this article traces the panel's historiography, plotting the course it took on the path to its current triumphal installation in the Louvre. Broadly speaking, three historical moments were crucial to the formation of the present-day account of the piece. The first of these moments occurred in the early seventeenth century, when the panel emerged from obscurity by being interpreted according to representational paradigms then current in France. The second period of importance to our understanding of Jehan roy de France spanned much of the nineteenth century. The panel received little in the way of direct attention at this time; indeed, Romantic-era understandings of art history and portraiture were not conducive to an appreciation of the panel. Over the course of the nineteenth century, though, art historical thinking shifted in ways that would eventually lead to a radical rethinking of the panel's importance, as notions of artistic schools and the nature of the Renaissance were articulated in increasingly nationalist terms. The third crucial period hinges on the 1904 exhibition Primitifs francais in Paris. The curators who organized the show acclaimed the panel as a work of fundamental artistic (and national) importance. This interpretation of the piece is implicit in its recent reinstallation in the Louvre.

A greater awareness of the fault lines within the historiography surrounding Jehan roy de France is desirable because that scholarship reveals a microcosm of the current state of the history of late medieval art, which continues to be haunted by notions of periodicity that we have inherited from earlier generations. A case in point is the exhibition marking the centennial of the Primitifs francais exhibition, which was on display as this article was being revised. In the catalog for the show, the curators openly acknowledge the nationalism inherent in many of the dubious attributions that were advanced in the 1904 exhibition, and they make note of its curators' efforts to argue that the Renaissance was a French invention. (24) But the most important facet of the original exhibition remains unexamined: its underlying assumption that there is such a thing as the "French school," or any other national school, for that matter. That assumption continues to map out the physical space of museums as well as the conceptual terrain of our discipline. Once we recognize the tenuous nature of many of the reigning assumptions concerning Jehan roy de France, we could construct an alternative, and perhaps more satisfying, account of this image and others of its era. In such an account, we would be wary of earlier scholars' tendency to transform these assumptions into tools for dating the panel; in fact, we would be open to the possibility that it does not date to the lifetime of its subject. Instead, we would explore more fully the broad web of associations cast by the panel in its act of representing King John.

From Obscurity to "Curiosity": Jehan Roy de France as Physiognomic Likeness

If any documents relating to the creation of the Louvre panel ever existed, they have long since disappeared. Two royal inventories survive from John's reign. One lists the items with John at the time of his death in London in 1364. (25) The other, which dates to 1363, describes the possessions of the dauphin, the future Charles V. (26) Neither inventory makes note of anything like the panel today in the Louvre. A possible reference to the panel does crop up in archival sources dating to 1380--sixteen years after John's death. In that year, as the reign of John's son Charles was nearing an end, royal officials compiled an exhaustive inventory of the king's collection. An entry describes an object comprising "folding panels of wood, in four pieces," and further states that "on one there is painted the present King, the Emperor his uncle, King John his father, and Edward King of England." (27) This object was therefore apparently a quadriptych displaying images of four individuals: John the Good, his son and successor Charles V (r. 1364-80), King Edward III of England (r. 1327-77), and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (r. 1355-78). Because the entry makes no mention of any other subject appearing on the quadriptych, it is possible that each of the four heads of state occupied his own panel. After Charles V's death in 1380, the quadriptych appears in the inventories (1391 and 1399-1400) of the collection of his son, Charles VI, and then in the last inventory (1416) of the possessions of Charles V's younger brother (and John's namesake), Jean de Berry. (28) The quadriptych subsequently disappears from written records. No physical or archival evidence survives that would help prove or disprove the possible connection between the lost quadriptych and the panel presently at the Louvre. (29)

The Louvre panel emerged from the shadows in 1634, when the antiquarian Jacques de Bie published an engraved copy of it as part of a series of "vrais portraits" of the kings of France (Fig. 4). (30) Beyond its importance as the first reproduction of the panel, the significance of de Bie's print lies in its inauguration of a crucial element of the modern reception of Jehan roy de France: de Bie established the painting's credentials as a physiognomic likeness of the king. In an introductory epistle addressed to the general reader, de Bie claimed that the images in his publication were based on originals found in the "rarest and most curious collections in the kingdom." He told the reader that he had been struck by the fact that many of the images that passed in his day for representations of earlier kings of France were quite unlike images he discovered during his examination of antiquities in various private collections throughout France. De Bie offered two explanations for the deficiencies of the commonly accepted images of kings. First, he suggested that the "impertinence" and "caprice" of contemporary artists frequently led them to depict the earlier kings from their imaginations. Second, he noted that when artists do not have firsthand access to trustworthy original images of kings, they must rely instead on copies of those originals. As successive generations of artists copy the work of their predecessors rather than originals, the images they produce deviate further and further from the appearance of the originals. To remedy this problem, de Bie turned to images that he deemed to be the most trustworthy: tombs, seals, and certain "very true portraits and medals." (31)

By asserting that only images dating to the lifetime of their sitters and found in officially sanctioned media were worthy of the status of "true portrait," de Bie's work conformed to his period's growing belief in the necessity of archaeological methods for any historical inquiry. (32) De Bie's text also aligned the Louvre panel with his own period's conception of portraiture. That portrait paradigm measured an image's accuracy by gauging its success in representing the precise topography of its subject's face. De Bie's archaeological methods seemed to vouchsafe his engravings as meticulous copies of just such original images done "from life." (33) What scholars and artists such as de Bie did not realize, of course, was that other periods and cultures could have conceptions of "truth" in representation that differed from their own. In fact, the demand that an image present the physiognomic likeness of its subject in order to be considered "true" was relatively new in the seventeenth century. Throughout much of the sixteenth century, artists and publishers had held that it was possible to portray an individual accurately without having access to his or her appearance, and it was not until the last half of that century that physiognomic likeness achieved dominance as the primary means of representing an individual. (34) Significantly, this was the very period in which French and English forms of the word portrait came to denote images of individuals; earlier sources refer to such images with terms like effigie, counterfeit, and ymage. (35)

De Bie's search for a "true portrait" of John the Good evidently led him to the collection of a certain Monsieur de Fleury, a royal official with homes in Burgundy and Paris. (36) The image that he saw there, and later copied for his publication, was either the panel that is today in the Louvre or a lost replica of it. De Bie may have been attracted to the panel because of its similarities to portraits created in his own time. Its profile format and the apparent individualization of the contour of John's face would have particularly reminded de Bie of medals representing contemporary rulers. (37) In any case, de Bie's decision to reproduce the panel makes it clear that he considered it to be an acceptable physiognomic likeness of John.

This interpretation of the panel was strengthened by the republication of de Bie's images in 1643 in an ambitious historical compendium by Francois de Mezeray. (38) In Mezeray's book, portraits of kings served as frontispieces for accounts of the principal events of those kings' reigns; de Bie's engraving of Jehan roy de France appeared at the beginning of Mezeray's account of John the Good. Each king's history was then followed by engravings after medals depicting what Mezeray referred to as "abridged" accounts of the "principal actions" or "most remarkable events" occurring under the rule of the individual kings. (39) The portraits and medals thus fulfilled what Hayden White and Stephen Bann have characterized as a "metonymic" function, serving as "parts" capable of standing in for the "whole" comprising a king's reign. (40) In such a system, every aspect of the king's rule--a field of facts and information potentially so vast as to defy representation--is distilled down to a limited set of representations. While both White and Bann have seen metonymic historiography as a characteristic of the Enlightenment, its essential tendencies were established in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when carefully designed images were deployed to represent every facet of a king's identity within condensed, encomiastic historical treatises. (41) Indeed, it is not surprising that the development of this historiographic paradigm coincides with the rise of monarchical absolutism. (42)

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In its claimed ability to convey profound historical truths instantly, metonymic history held out the promise of functioning as a tremendously powerful tool for historians such as Mezeray. But with this potency came a danger: "false" images could lead a viewer into grave misunderstandings. Anticipating his reader's anxiety over this possibility, Mezeray's title page assured his audience that his book contained "les portraits au naturel" of the kings, "drawn from their charters, effigies, and other ancient originals, or from their veritable copies preserved in the most curious cabinets of Europe." The inscriptions on the prints certified their basis in real images owned by impressive individuals, vouchsafing each image's status as an authentic physiognomic likeness.

De Bie had been vague in discussing why authentic or "true" portraits were desirable, simply speaking of his collection as a "temple ... of honor and virtue" dedicated to the glory of the present king, Louis XIII. (43) Mezeray, in contrast, was far more precise, offering a carefully worded justification for the role of engraved portraits in metonymic history. His extended discourse on the function of his images makes clear his expectation that his audience might well lack familiarity with this method of recording and communicating history--indicating that his readers would have seen his approach as novel and in need of justification and explanation. Mezeray described portraits ("la portraiture") and words ("la narration") as complementary, mutually reinforcing historical modes. He justified this claim by writing that portraiture "retraces faces and [thus] makes known the exterior and the majesty of the person," while text can "recount actions and depict morals." Furthermore, Mezeray proposed that a ruler's portrait could convey a sense of the ruler's essential personal qualities, laying clear the connection between interior essence and visible deeds: "the physiognomy of [a ruler's] face makes it possible to know what his nature had caused." (44)

Mezeray's explanation for why "true" images can play an important role in a historical publication foreshadows the claims made for the "science" of physiognomy in later centuries. Already by Mezeray's era, art theorists were becoming acutely aware of the mutability of facial features and of the profound challenges that confounded attempts to devise a reliable mode for accurately recording them. Seventeenth-century authors suggested a variety of seemingly objective methods of regulating portraiture to ensure reliable physiognomic representations--for instance, advocating that painters follow the "rules" of perspective or that they gauge the conformity of portrait to model through the use of measuring devices like squares. (45) By the later eighteenth century, Johann Caspar Lavater insisted on profile silhouettes as the most stable means of representing physiognomies. (46) Mezeray, relatively untroubled by such questions, simply sought to ensure that his portraits were based on models that depicted their subjects "from life."

Mezeray's interest in the evidentiary value of "ancient" works like Jehan roy de France parallels in certain ways the motivations underlying the work of the antiquarian Roger de Gaignieres, who was responsible for the next recorded reference to the panel. In the late seventeenth

century, Gaignieres set about forming a collection of images that he judged to be of interest for their ability to convey historical information, especially concerning the forms of costume worn by earlier generations of aristocrats and rulers. (47) He claimed that he purchased Jehan roy de France in 1700 as part of a lot of paintings he acquired at the Chateau d'Oiron, the home of the once-powerful Gouffier family. (48) The Gouffiers, tremendously influential at the sixteenth-century royal court, had lost much of their wealth and influence by the mid-seven-teeth century. It is unclear when the Gouffiers obtained the image of John, but they are unlikely to have done so before the later fifteenth century, when their rise to prominence began. (49) In any case, Gaignieres wrote that he purchased the panel from Oiron, along with twenty other portraits, to add to his own large collection of images of members of the royal family. Gaignieres commissioned a watercolor rendering of the piece as well. Almost certainly at Gaignieres's urging, the artists he employed frequently altered their sources to make them better serve his purpose--representing ancient forms of costume--and their rendering of the Louvre panel was no exception. (50) They transformed the original by adding lapels to the figure's collar, thereby bringing it into conformity with the dress worn by John in another image of the king recorded by Gaigniere's artist. (51)

In 1711, Gaignieres announced that he would bequeath Jehan roy de France, along with much of the rest of his collection, to the king, Louis XIV. The actual transaction was to take place at Gaignieres's death in 1715; by that time, Louis XIV had also died, and Philippe II d'Orleans was serving as regent for the young Louis XV. Three subsequent references to the panel preserve traces of its reception after the crown took possession of it; in each, the panel's status as accurate physiognomic likeness was accepted without question. In 1717, a brief notice buried deep in an issue of the monthly Le Nouveau Mercure announced the king's acquisitions, singling out the panel for particular mention because of its great age. (52) A little more than a decade later, Jehan roy de France became the source of an image in Bernard de Montfaucon's Monumens de la monarchie francoise (1729-33). (53) Both the author of the anonymous "Notice" and Montfaucon explicitly assumed that the image was painted while the king was alive. (54) Finally, in 1743, the Parisian print dealer Michel Odieuvre commissioned an engraving of it as part of his large and apparently popular series of portraits of kings, queens, and other famous individuals. (55) A notice of the print's publication appeared in the Mercure de France; it simply stated that prints of John and his son Charles were now available. (56) The invocation of the phrase "made in his lifetime" in Le Nouveau Mercure and by Montfaucon demonstrates that both authors assumed that the panel was a straightforward physiognomic likeness of the king. By the time Odieuvre published his own copy of the piece, that assumption, evidently taken for granted, could be left unspoken.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the belief in Jehan roy de France as a physiognomic likeness was firmly in place, and the panel had been effectively appropriated as part of that period's portrait practices. This left the image in a somewhat precarious situation. The panel itself could scarcely compete with the work of the most subtle portraitists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, it is telling that de Bie enhanced the expressive modeling of the original's facial musculature and added a reflective glint to John's eye. Such changes would have brought the rather impassive image closer to the sense of liveliness desired by audiences of the period. (57) Another factor that likely dampened interest in Jehan roy de France was the fact that its subject was hardly among the most illustrious royal ancestors. (58) It is therefore not surprising that the mild excitement surrounding the panel's acquisition by the king in 1711 appears to have been short-lived, and the piece aroused little further interest for more than a century. A series of major conceptual shifts had to occur for the panel to rise to its present exalted position at the head of the French school.

"Curiosities" and "Relics": The Problematic Place of Jehan Roy de France in Romantic-Era Art History

Art history began to emerge as a distinct discipline in the early nineteenth century, entering public consciousness through two principal devices. First, the nineteenth century witnessed the publication of numerous books surveying the history of art, either as a whole or broken up into discrete periods. Second, the modern museum also came into being in the nineteenth century, becoming a crucial space for the articulation of scholarly understandings of the history of art. Jehan roy de France did not appear in any of the new survey texts until 1890, nor was it enshrined in one of the period's new art museums. Instead, it mostly remained in the Royal (and alternately National or Imperial) Library in Paris, installed next to a window in one of the print study rooms. (59)

Several factors explain this lack of interest in the panel. The most basic involves the relatively modest status that audiences assigned to portraiture in the early years of the century. The genre was relegated to a low position in the hierarchy of genres proposed (and enforced) by the Academic Royale, due to the perception that, as a genre dedicated to pure mimetic representation, it offered little room for invention on the part of the artist. (60) Moreover, not only was the panel a member of a prosaic category of images, it was also apparently judged a poor-quality example of that genre. In 1782, for example, Nicolas-Thomas Le Prince addressed the panel's cropped format and stiff qualities, explaining them as the result of the period's lack of familiarity with the practice of painting on a large scale. (61)

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, audiences continued to view Jehan roy de France as a "curiosity" rather than as a work of art. This categorization was implicit in the context of the panel's display at the library: it was hung alongside other "curious" objects, such as an engraving printed on tree bark. The image's status as a curiosity largely stemmed from its age. In a 1782 description of "the most curious things to see" in the Royal Library, Le Prince focused on the piece's great age as the primary source of its interest. (62) Le Prince's comments were echoed nearly forty years later by another visitor to the library, the British antiquarian and self-professed "bibliomaniac" Thomas Frognall Dibdin. He described the panel as "a great curiosity" and "an exceedingly curious and ancient relic of graphic art." (63)

While some viewers apparently found the panel to be worthy of at least passing attention, others actively dismissed its importance. In his account of his visit to the print room, Dibdin claimed the assistant curator Jean Duchesne himself had been very excited by his British guest's attention to the painting, exclaiming, "[F]inally, there is something that merits your attention!" (64) But French scholarship betrays no signs of such enthusiasm. In his own catalogs of the print collection, Duchesne himself is noticeably restrained in his handling of the piece. Following in the tradition launched by de Bie and Mezeray of seeing the panel simply as a concise metonymic sign referring to a particular king, Duchesne's catalog entry explains that it was appropriate to display the panel at the library, given that John was understood as the institution's founder. (65) He concluded his brief remarks by taking a tentative stab at identifying the piece's medium and its artist. (66) Other French authors were even less enamored of the panel. The French translator of Dibdin's book inserted his own petulant footnote to the passage in which Dibdin had asserted that Duchesne shared his excitement about the image. The translator criticized Dibdin's interest in the piece, which he felt came at the expense of other, more "magnificent" works in the print department. (67) On one level, the translator had a point: Dibdin's focus on the panel betrays his antiquarian interests and could be read as a disservice to the treasures in the royal print collection. At the same time, the translator's pique reveals his own aesthetic biases. He saw the panel as a simple "curiosity," of value because of its age and because it represented the king who founded the library. He did not think it an artistic achievement equal to the greatest prints in the collection, making it a relatively unworthy recipient of Dibdin's attention.

The period's emerging consensus concerning chronological periodization likewise proved detrimental to the panel's status. As several scholars have noted, the basic conceptions of historical periods that structure art history as a discipline--most notably, the distinction between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance--were defined in detail in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (68) One of the earliest institutions to chart the passage from medieval to early modern artistic culture was Alexandre Lenoir's Musee des Monumens Francais, which operated from 1795 to 1816. In the introduction to his catalog of the collection, Lenoir echoes Giorgio Vasari by describing how Tuscans rescued art from "the bad taste and barbarism" that had resulted from the victories of the "Goths" in the early Middle Ages. Building on this premise, he claimed that Francis I (r. 1515-47) brought artistic glory to France through his active importation of Italian artists. Andrew McClellan has pointed out that Lenoir designed the installations at his museum in such a way as to present the sixteenth century as a pinnacle of French civilization--a peak emphatically contrasted with the crudeness and ignorance of the works of the Middle Ages. (69)

A nearly identical conception of artistic decline and progress informs Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Georges Seroux d'Agincourt's pioneering art historical survey, published between 1810 and 1823 with a revealing title: Histoire de l'art par les monumens, depuis sa decadence au IVe siecle jusqu'a sa renouvellement au XVIe. (70) This narrative of medieval decline and sixteenth-century renewal also appeared in history texts from the early nineteenth century, although historians did not begin to use the term "Renaissance" to denote that renewal until the middle of the century. For instance, in his 1828 Histoire de la civilisation en Europe et en France, the French political historian Francois Guizot (1787-1874) divided his historical epochs into a feudal era and modernity. For Guizot, the latter did not fully come into being before the sixteenth century. (71) Judged according to early-nineteenth-century chronological frameworks, therefore, Jehan roy de France would have been a medieval, rather than a Renaissance, or modern, object.

The panel did not conform to that period's expectations concerning medieval art, however. The years following the French Revolution witnessed the glimmerings of a new interest in medieval objects, some of which came to be viewed with nationalist pride. (72) Lenoir's museum is an example of this selective respect accorded to medieval works: it gave pride of place to sculpture and stained glass. The sculpted figure from John the Good's tomb at St-Denis was installed at his museum, but Jehan roy de France remained at the library, and Lenoir's catalog entry for the statue gives no indication that he was aware of the painting's existence. (73) In fact, Lenoir confidently asserted that there was no "French school" of painting before 1540, when "Francis I, having received the last breaths of Leonardo," placed Jean Cousin in charge of royal commissions. (74) Likewise, when Alexandre du Sommerard opened his collection of art at the Hotel de Cluny (today the Musee National du Moyen Age) in 1834, he proudly proclaimed that what were often dismissed as "decorative arts" were in fact artworks of the highest order in the Middle Ages, but he continued to see painting primarily as a medium practiced by artists of a later period. (75)

Like other writers of his day, du Sommerard believed that the true apogee of French art had been reached in the sixteenth century under Francis I. (76) His museum at the Hotel de Cluny included a room dedicated to the memory of that sovereign, the "Chambre Francois I," which was filled with an array of sixteenth-century objects. The installation was intended, as Bann has demonstrated, to immerse the visitor in the aura of the past, a characteristic of Romantic-era museum installation. (77) A portrait of Francis I himself was displayed in the room, and the terms du Sommerard used to discuss the image are telling. He commented that the portrait was exhibited to "recall the memory of this prince." His description of the image itself is cursory, failing even to mention its medium, with greater attention paid to its display and its sumptuous frame: "one sees it hung in a glass case, its frame encrusted with fine stones garnished with enameled golden crowns." Du Sommerard continued by observing that the reverse of the image bore the initials of Louise de Savoye, Francis's mother. He read this monogram as a guarantor of the illustrious provenance of the object and vested it with emotional significance, suggesting that it was "a proof of filial devotion and maternal love." (78) He thus elided the portrait's status as art object, leaving aesthetic matters--its material, its style, the quality of its execution--unmentioned. Instead, the object became part of the room's ability to produce an effect of total immersion in the visual and emotional life of the sixteenth century. (79)

Bann has shown that Romantic-era audiences craved images and objects that could help them reconstruct a vivid sense of the "lived life" of the past. He has pointed out that in the debate over the French state's prospective purchase of du Sommerard's collection at the Cluny, the objects were referred to as "relics" capable of effacing the distance between modern viewers and ancient heroes. Bann specified that in order to function fully as a "relic" in the Romantic system, an object had to be redolent of the life of the past. (80) When it was judged in such terms, Jehan roy de France was effectively doomed to obscurity, given its minimalism and its status as a rare survivor from the fourteenth century. With its static portrayal of the king's head, and with its omission of details (for instance, of costume or setting) that could have been perceived as a point of access to the customs and behaviors of the past, Jehan roy de France failed to rise to the level of an ideal "relic" of the fourteenth century. Likewise, the fact that objects from John's court were exceedingly rare meant that it would have been nearly impossible to assemble a holistic environment for the object's display; a "Chambre Francois I" was achievable, but a "Chambre Jean II" was not.

It is no coincidence that portraits like those in Mezeray's volumes fell out of favor in the illustrated historical texts of the nineteenth century. Bann has traced an early-nineteenth-century shift in the illustration of such books, as the portrait-laden histories of earlier centuries gave way to tomes filled with highly detailed narrative images. He concluded that just as du Sommerard's collection at the Cluny was displayed in densely packed "period rooms" in an attempt to provide a vivid sense of medieval life, illustrations in historical texts offered dramatic, imaginative reconstructions of scenes from the past in order to bring that past alive for modern viewers. (81) With its bland focus on the king's face, Jehan roy de France would have been deeply dissatisfying to audiences steeped in the dramatized historicism of the Romantic era.

There were two significant exceptions to this general rule of neglect of Jehan roy de France during the middle years of the nineteenth century. Each can be understood as attempts to interpret the panel according to Romantic paradigms. First, while careful reproductions of the panel disappear from illustrated historical texts of the period, it seems to have served as the basis (either directly or via a printed intermediary) for images in a revised version of Guizot's Histoire de France, published posthumously in 1874-79. (82) While the book uses mostly evocative narrative images as its illustrations, it also includes a handful of full-length portraits. All of the book's illustrations were made after drawings by Alphonse de Neuville, who appears to have sought out historical sources for his portraits; his image of John's son Charles V, for instance, was explicitly derived from the king's tomb figure. (83) De Neuville's image of John himself (Fig. 5) carries no indication of its source, but the subject's heavy brow, prominent nose, shoulder-length hair, and short beard are all strongly reminiscent of the features displayed in Jehan roy de France. (84) Conforming to Romantic predilections for anecdotal detail, de Neuville embellished his source through the addition of a full-length body clad in an elaborate suit of armor and an array of weapons. A few pages later, he transformed the figure yet again by inserting it into a full narrative image, depicting John valiantly defending his youngest son from the advancing English hordes at the Battle of Poitiers (Fig. 6). (85) Without such radical reworking, the panel was evidently incapable of conveying the rich sense of historical detail that nineteenth-century audiences sought.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Second, for one relatively brief period, the panel left its home in the library to take up its home in a museum; tellingly, it was a history museum, not one dedicated to the display of fine art. In 1852, the year he obtained his imperial title, Emperor Napoleon III ordered the creation of a new institution, to be called the Musee des Souverains. (86) Jehan roy de France was among the objects chosen for display there, although it had returned to the library by 1863, nine years before the Musee des Souverains closed. (87) The collection was installed at the Louvre in the rooms along Claude Perrault's eastern facade, in spaces that had been a throne room and audience chambers under Napoleon I. One could access these galleries from the Louvre museum proper--specifically, via the Egyptian rooms--but the Musee des Souverains was clearly demarcated as a separate space of its own. In fact, Jehan roy de France was the only painting in the museum; the other objects included documents, weapons, furniture, saddles, clothing, and books. (88) Following the vision for the museum spelled out in the emperor's edict, the curators considered provenance as the sole criterion in assembling the collection. (89) This identifies the museum's methods and goals as unambiguously Romantic. Its objects seemed to promise a quasimystical form of contact with the vanished rulers, serving as relics of past glories. (90) Indeed, much like a medieval "contact" relic, their evocative potency rested on the possibility that they had come into physical contact with a French ruler (epitomized most clearly in the saddles included in the collection).

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

But Jehan roy de France was a problematic contact relic for a simple reason: it was not accompanied by an unambiguous provenance connecting it to the ruler it depicted. Henry Barbet de Jouy's catalog of the museum's collection recorded that "this authentic portrait of a king of France" was "the most ancient we possess," but he could not provide it with a clear royal pedigree. Instead, he traced the panel's history back only to Gaignieres, observing that after his death the regent Philippe II d'Orleans had ordered that the piece be placed in the Royal Library "for reason of its historical and national interest." In short, one could connect the panel to an "illustrious collector" and to a powerful regent, but not to a king, let alone to the specific king represented by the panel. (91) It was therefore difficult to make a compelling case for the treatment of Jehan roy de France as an awe-inspiring historical relic, a fact that probably explains its brief stay at the Musee des Souverains. This left the image in a kind of taxonomic limbo, as it was equally unworthy of consideration as a masterful work of art.

Modernism, Portraiture, and the Redefinition of the Renaissance in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, important intellectual shifts laid the groundwork for a fundamental reinterpretation of Jehan roy de France. First, portraiture as a genre began to rise from its previously humble status. Critics and scholars began to describe ways that portraits could accommodate impressive artistic expression without sacrificing a sense of the sitter's individuality, leading to a significant increase in the status accorded to the genre. (92) In his critique of the Salon of 1857, for instance, Jules Castagnary provocatively wrote, "The portrait is the expression of human individuality," a premise that led him to conclude that portraiture is "the veritable touchstone of genius and the most elevated aim a painter can give himself." (93) In such claims, portraiture becomes perfectly aligned with emerging modernist notions of individualism, capable, in a sense, of representing both sitter and artist. A second, equally important shift in aesthetic attitudes involved a new appreciation for "naive," "humble," or "simple" styles. Critics like Castagnary extolled those qualities as part of their promotion of the Realist movement in French art, while their contemporary Theophile Thore used them to elevate the status of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. (94)

Perhaps not surprisingly, Jehan roy de France began to attract tentative critical attention at precisely the time that Realist painters like Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet were making their mark. Between 1858 and 1877, four publications made reference to the panel; of these, two were brief articles focused solely on the piece. The earliest was by Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt, who gave a short lecture in England in 1858 after having seen the work at the Musee des Souverains. Tennyson d'Eyncourt's interest in it was primarily historical, arising from John's role in the Hundred Years War with England. He also remarked on the panel's great age, describing it as "one of the earliest examples of portrait-painting which has been preserved to us" and defining a "portrait" as "a painting intended merely to represent a person, as distinguished from the usual pictures of the period in which the portraitures were accessories." (95) Tennyson d'Eyncourt attributed the panel to Girard d'Orleans, a painter known to have worked for John the Good. (96) That attribution was echoed in Abbe Valentin Dufour's 1877 compilation of documents concerning the artistic activities of Girard d'Orleans and his family members; although none of the surviving documents seems to refer to the panel in question, Dufour assumed that Girard had painted the piece because he accompanied the king during his captivity in England, the period in which he believed the image had been painted. (97) Dufour reproduced the image as the frontispiece to his slim volume, explaining his choice by noting that the painting was "interesting for its antiquity" and that it "has a special interest for us" because it had been attributed to one of the painters who were the focus of his book. He made no grand aesthetic claims for the Louvre panel; he even suggested that the panel might be a copy rather than an original. (98)

Two other references to the panel made the earliest proposals that the work was noteworthy for something other than its antiquity. As part of an 1862 invective against fourteenth century art, the cultural historian Ernest Renan allowed one exception to what he saw as the abysmal state of French art of that period: portraits, which seek to "express life and individuality." Here, Renan called particular attention to the image of John. (99) One year after Renan's essay appeared, Paul Lacroix and Camille Marsuzi de Aguirre published a short article dedicated to the panel, mostly consisting of a lengthy quotation from Le Prince's 1782 description of it. Lacroix and Marsuzi de Aguirre, however, prefaced that excerpt with a novel proposal. They wrote that the panel deserved a more illustrious display than it currently received at the library, tentatively suggesting that it might even merit inclusion in the collection of the Louvre. (100) In short, by the early 1860s, some viewers were beginning to see Jehan roy de France as an important work of art. Despite this new interest in the piece, it remained at the library for another forty years.

Moreover, scholarly conceptions of historical periods evolved in the second half of the century in ways that would prompt a fundamental reappraisal of the panel's significance. Historians began to endow the Renaissance with a new and distinctive set of cultural characteristics. Much as the period's revised account of portraiture stressed its connection to "individual" subjects and makers, so, too, this new definition of the Renaissance emphasized the role of the individual human agent. In his 1855 book on the Renaissance, the seventh volume of his Histoire de France, Jules Michelet described the Renaissance as marking the antithesis of the Middle Ages, which he presented as an age of stifling oppression--a "bizarre" and "monstrous" period, "an artificial world, weighted down by mediocrity, a world of lead, which forcibly submerged all nobility of life and thought, all grandeur and all ingegno." In Michelet's account, the Renaissance represented by contrast a new age of freedom. (101) These ideas were echoed in the work of the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose study The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was published in 1860. (102) As is well known, Burckhardt saw the Renaissance as the moment of the rise of the individual, effecting a decisive shift from earlier studies that had characterized the period as having revived aspects of classical antiquity. (103) Burckhardt did not explicitly connect portraiture to this presumed exaltation of the individual; indeed, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy speaks only sparingly of art, and elsewhere Burckhardt had in fact downplayed the possibility that images could be viewed as symptomatic of broader historical forces. (104) Yet, with art critics already holding that portraiture was the primary artistic avenue for the expression of individual identity, doing so would require only a relatively small step.

An additional late-nineteenth-century trend helped pave the way for a rethinking of Jehan roy de France: art historical scholarship became progressively more nationalistic in tone, and authors increasingly sought out ways to glorify their own national artistic "schools." For decades, scholars had accepted the conventional wisdom that French art had been reinvigorated as a result of contact with Italian artists in the years around 1500. In his 1855 tome, for instance, Michelet located the source of the French Renaissance in Italy. He wrote that the French labored on in their pathetic medieval ways until the late fifteenth century, when armies under Charles VIII invaded Italy and the glories of the Italian Renaissance were revealed to them. (105) Henri Martin's narrative of the French Renaissance, published between 1855 and 1866, offered a nearly identical account. (106) These ideas had important ramifications for the study of art. In his vast 1885 study of the Renaissance, the prominent art historian Eugene Muntz accepted without reservations the idea that the Renaissance was transplanted to France from Italy. Muntz explicitly cited Burckhardt's work (published in a French translation that same year), (107) drawing particularly on the Swiss scholar's notion of the primacy of the individual in the Renaissance. (108)

The scholarly tendency to ascribe the glories of the Renaissance to Italian national traditions quickly began to grate on French sensibilities. It is therefore not surprising that the evolving scholarship on the Renaissance provoked an almost immediate reaction in France: scholars began to look for periods in which their national traditions could claim unrivaled prestige. One solution to this dilemma was to devise ways to speak of France's medieval traditions in positive terms. Reacting to the anticlerical sentiments of the Revolutionary era, early-nineteenth-century conservative authors saw in the Middle Ages a society of pure and universal Christian devotion. (109) By the later years of the century, the Middle Ages had been coopted by nationalists of all stripes, and the thirteenth century was acclaimed as the era of the greatest cultural achievements. (110) With the institution in 1882 of the Musee de Sculpture Comparee (later renamed the Musee des Monuments Francais), the display of medieval art played to such sentiments by adopting a decidedly nationalistic tone. The museum encouraged visitors to compare plaster casts of French architectural sculpture with work from other nations and to find there confirmation of the superiority of French art. (111) The first major survey text dedicated to the art of the later Middle Ages took a similar tone. Louis Gonse's 1890 L'art gothique was framed in explicitly nostalgic terms: "Is it not salutary and comforting to live again in those days when France was so strong, so exuberant in its vitality, when all of Europe came hoping to study her arts?" the author asked rhetorically. Gonse expressed regret that he was forced by convention to use the term Gothic--a "defective" term that "came from Italy"--to denote this period, and hoped that someday people would refer to the art of the period as "French Art, nothing more." (112)

Even with the rehabilitation of medieval art, works categorized by today's scholarship as "late medieval" were frequently denigrated. First published in the late 1850s, Victor Duruy's widely used high school survey of French history characterized the thirteenth century as marking the "highest summit" of medieval art, but then referred to the fourteenth century as a cataclysmic "descent down the other side" of the hill, as a result of which art become "lost" in a cultural "hollow." (113) Renan echoed those sentiments when he wrote in 1862 that "the art of the fourteenth century is essentially only that of the preceding century, perfected in its details ... but debased as to its general inspiration and originality." (114) And the Renaissance itself remained a source of embarrassment to French scholars, as they were still forced to admit that their glorious national style had been supplanted by traditions imported from Italy.

To solve this problem, the critic Thore worked to dislodge the Renaissance from its eminent status in the popular imagination. As early as the 1840s, Thore had decried the pernicious influence of Italian art on other national schools, treating the Renaissance almost as if it were an invasive weed that had choked out authentically native traditions. In his writings of the late 1850s, Thore's more internationalist politics led him to soften his critique of Italian traditions. (115) Nevertheless, he continued to seek ways of crafting an artistic ideal that could serve as an alternative to the Renaissance, which he presented as the final summation of a dying tradition. Publishing in exile under the pseudonym William Burger, he extolled the naturalism of seventeenth-century Dutch art as a better example to hold before the eyes of contemporary painters. (116) As we have already seen, Renan echoed Thore's ideas in 1862, when he advanced the naturalism of Jehan roy de France as the one bright spot in an otherwise dark period.

By the 1890s, French nationalist scholars had picked up on many of Thore's themes. In 1895, for instance, Arsene Alexandre wrote a history of the French school of painting in which he amplified Thore's disdain for the Renaissance, depicting it not as a period of rebirth but rather of "decadence" marked by the slavish copying of ancient art. (117) Whereas Thore had, as late as 1860, refused to accept the existence of a genuinely French school before the eighteenth century, (118) Alexandre insisted that a vibrant French school had existed at least as early as the fifteenth century. (119) He suggested that the names and works of the pre-Renaissance French painters (or "the French primitives," in the period's emerging formulation) had been forgotten as a result of the tragic adoption of tastes imported from Italy. Alexandre lamented what he termed a foolish French "disdain" for "our own riches," a failing that consigned countless great French works to oblivion, leaving behind only "ruins, conjectures, and a few rare, intact works, saved as if by a miracle." (120) Those rare survivals evidently sufficed to make Alexandre feel confident in challenging the Italians on their own Renaissance turf, as it were: the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Singing the praises of the Retable of Saint Denis, a work now dated to 1416 but which Alexandre assigned simply to the period about 1400, he wrote that the image was proof that "painting was as advanced in our land as it was in Italy in the fourteenth century." (121) The subsequent step from proclaiming French painting of that period the equal of early Italian Renaissance art to claiming the French school to be in fact superior occurred in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, when scholarly attitudes came together in ways that had a decisive impact on our understanding of Jehan roy de France.

Entering the Canon: Jehan Roy de France at the 1904 Exhibition Primitifs Francais

By the late 1880s, a handful of scholars sought to defend their nation's honor by challenging the belief that the Renaissance was the product of "foreign" minds. Leading the charge among this group was Louis Courajod, the curator of sculpture at the Louvre. (122) Beginning in 1887, Courajod offered a series of lectures in which he passionately enumerated what he felt were French contributions to the Renaissance. Indeed, he sought to prove an audacious claim: that the Renaissance had arisen in France, independently of ultramontane influence. (123) According to Courajod, the French (and, to a lesser degree, the Flemish) invented "realism" in art, which he described as a key component of Renaissance style. Here he was thus drawing on the ideas expressed decades earlier by Thore, who had seen naturalism as a distinctly northern characteristic, and by Burckhardt, who had deemed the study of nature a crucial component of Italian Renaissance culture. (124) Portraiture was central to Courajod's arguments; he cited portraits as the clearest symptoms of the revolutionary "realism" of the fourteenth century. He located the origins of this interest in portraiture--and hence the origins of the Renaissance--in sculptural projects commissioned by King Charles V in the 1360s, which Courajod described as having been designed "to perpetuate the memory of his physiognomy." (125) Courajod furthermore declared that the Italians had actually been late to accept "realism," stating that it was not until the early years of the fifteenth century that Italy "had finally entered into the stream of ideas that Flanders and France had given birth to." (126)

In this way, portraits emerged as critical pieces of evidence in efforts to rehabilitate the reputation of French art of the fourteenth century. Courajod saw this project as having profound national importance. He attacked those who would dismiss the quality of late medieval French art, writing that they "did not know ... the ill they are doing to our country in preventing us from displaying the remarkable works produced by northern France." In a forceful rebuke to scholars who accepted the theory that the Renaissance had been imported from abroad, Courajod asserted that "we counted in France artists who were not only superior to their contemporaries beyond the Alps, but who were capable of serving as models for Italian art in the near future." (127) He thus framed his answer to the question of the origins of the French Renaissance in explicitly nationalistic terms.

Courajod's revisionist interpretation of the Renaissance had an electrifying effect on other French scholars active during the last decade of the nineteenth century. In a talk of his own presented shortly after Courajod began his lectures, Muntz qualified his earlier statements that Italy had invented the Renaissance. Muntz may have been worried that his zealous colleagues were coming to label his previous views as unpatriotic; he began his lecture by proclaiming it the duty of French art instructors to remind their students of the glories of their heritage. He now stated that all the Italians had really done was borrow from the ideas of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and that while the French artists of the sixteenth century had in turn borrowed from the Italians, they had very quickly shown themselves capable of drawing directly from the original antique sources. This obviated the need for any assistance from the Italians, who, Muntz wrote, in the meantime had descended into banality anyway. (128)

Other scholars embraced aspects of Courajod's arguments but were hesitant to accept all of his conclusions. Courajod's exaltation of portraiture as the naturalist genre par excellence was echoed in 1890 by Gonse, who cited Courajod as one of the most important recent scholars responsible for reinvigorating the study of French art. (129) This, of course, was in his survey of Gothic, rather than Renaissance, art, where he dealt with Jehan roy de France in his section on French Gothic painting. The author pronounced the panel "the first work to be truly worthy" of being termed a portrait, urging his readers to "consider it a monument of inestimable worth for the history of modern art." (130) However, because paintings played a secondary role in Gonse's book, his discussion on the panel appeared deep within his text. The first ten chapters, amounting to more than 350 pages, were dedicated to architecture. Gonse examined Jehan roy de France in his eleventh chapter, which concerned painting, stained glass, incised tombs, tapestry, and manuscript illumination. Nor was panel painting the first medium addressed in his section on painting; he began with a treatment of mural painting. The first illustration to Gonse's discussion of panel paintings was the miniature self-portrait by Jean Fouquet, whose star had been on the rise in France since the middle of the century. (131) The text of the section starts off by examining three other paintings, all in the collection of the Louvre: the Parement de Narbonne, Retable of Saint Denis (today attributed to Henri Bellechose), and the large Pieta tondo (now ascribed to Jean Malouel). (132) In short, Gonse characterized Jehan roy de France as an important monument of Gothic art in France, but he did not assign it a starring role in his narrative, nor did he use it as proof of Courajod's most provocative claim: that the Renaissance had its origins in France rather than in Italy.

While Gonse believed that the panel's installation at the Bibliotheque Nationale was sufficiently honorable, (133) other scholars began to repeat Lacroix and Marsuzi de Aguirre's 1863 call to move it to the Louvre. Writing in the same year as Gonse, Bernard Prost published the first extensive scholarly article dedicated solely to the panel. After a lengthy disquisition on the piece's possible authorship, Prost proposed that it be moved from its home at the library to the Louvre, where he felt it should be exhibited "at the head of the earliest works of the French school." (134) Five years later, Paul Mantz seconded Prost's suggestion, adding that the painting was "without contest a work of art." (135)

Courajod's ideas had their most profound influence on the scholars responsible for Primitifs francais, a massive exhibition held in 1904 in the galleries of the Louvre and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. (136) The show opened in April of that year and closed, appropriately, on July 14--Bastille Day--having drawn immense crowds throughout its run. (137) Taken as a whole, the exhibition and its accompanying publications advanced a revised account of the history of French painting--an account with a stridently nationalist tone. The principal organizer of the exhibition was Henri Bouchot, a print curator at the Bibliotheque Nationale and a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War of some thirty years earlier. (138) Bouchot undoubtedly decided to organize the exhibition as a consequence of other major exhibitions of "primitive" art around the year 1900--most notably the show Primitifs flamands held in Bruges in 1902. (139) In journal articles published concurrently with the exhibition, Bouchot laid out his account of the history of art in France. He credited Courajod with having called attention to the role of France as the birthplace of Renaissance naturalism. He also sought to reassert French priority over Flanders in the chronological sequence in which the Renaissance occurred, to counteract the emphasis on Flanders arising from the Primitifs flamands exhibition of two years earlier. (140)

Bouchot and his colleagues chose the image of John as the first object in the exhibition catalog. (141) In an article on the panel published at the time of the exhibition, Bouchot wrote that "nothing is more praiseworthy, more brutally realistic, more deliberately French than this effigy," and he pointedly remarked that it was painted "at a time when neither the Flemings nor the Italians dared attempt the portrait after nature." (142) Bouchot's entry in the exhibition catalog reiterated these points and confidently asserted that "this work, which has a considerable historical interest, more or less unique in Europe, is the most striking proof of the activity and talent in naturalism of Parisian artists of the fourteenth century." (143) In the introduction to the exhibition catalog, Bouchot's colleague Georges Lafenestre related in grand terms his own conception of French artistic character. Lafenestre felt that this national character was most perfectly revealed by the fourteenth-century interest in portraiture. He wrote that the "taste for life and truth" seen in portraiture was "a noble taste which we [the French] shall always maintain." (144)

The curators of the Primitifs francais exhibition sought to defuse previous criticisms of fourteenth-century art by appropriating the terms of earlier critiques and interpreting them in a positive light. To do so, they embraced--indeed, amplified--the conclusion of earlier scholars that the panel presented a physiognomic likeness of King John. In what Lafenestre described as the "large nose," "thick lips," the "heavy and serious rusticity of the dejected appearance," and the "negligence of clothing and hair" witnessed in the panel, the exhibition organizers saw proof that the artist sought to record the unvarnished reality of his subject's features. (145)

The French attributions that Bouchot and his colleagues applied to several works previously (and subsequently) understood as Flemish in origin provoked controversies that resounded throughout the pages of the leading art journals of the day. (146) Nevertheless, the basic historical account of French painting constructed by the Primitifs francais exhibition was warmly received, and its founding premises went unchallenged. Despite their questions about a handful of attributions, the reviews of influential writers like Emile Durand-Greville and Georges Hulin de Loo were largely positive. (147) Hulin de Loo singled out the image of John for special attention, calling it "one of the most beautiful claims to glory for ancient French painting" and remarking that he found it "astonishing that it has not long occupied a place of honor in the Louvre." (148)

Such sentiments found a receptive audience in the curatorial offices of the Louvre itself. Adjunct curator Paul Durrieu enthusiastically endorsed Mantz's evaluation of the panel as "without contest a work of art," confirming its promotion from its previous status as a "curiosity." Durrieu, moreover, cited portraiture as the first of several genres that he felt one should study in order to understand French art. (149) Likewise, a review of the exhibit by Louvre curator Paul Vitry offered nothing but praise for the show. Vitry expounded on the narrative of French painting that the exhibition laid out, agreeing with the theory that a discrete stylistic school of French art can first be discerned in the 1350s. He saw the image of John as the perfect embodiment of the character of the nascent French school and took up the now-familiar refrain that the painting deserved to be placed permanently in the Louvre. (150)

Following the closing of the Primitifs francais exhibition, Jehan roy de France returned to the Bibliotheque Nationale. (151) But by the early 1920s the peripatetic image had again traveled down the Rue Richelieu to the Louvre. (152) This time the change of address was to be permanent: the arrangement became official in 1925, when the panel was placed on permanent loan to the national museum. (153) In effect, this move signaled an acceptance by the highest levels of the French museum world of the claims advanced by the 1904 exhibition. That this occurred in the 1920s is no coincidence. In the years following World War I, French artists, critics, and curators had begun attaching great patriotic significance to works that exhibited "French" style. As scholars such as Romy Golan, Kenneth Silver, and Benjamin Buchloh have shown, French artists and audiences of all political stripes joined together in reasserting the importance of naturalism, mimesis, and classicism as essential to French national style. Such qualities enabled them to define French style as diametrically opposed to the forms of modernism that had flourished in the prewar years--styles characterized as "foreign," "German," and, at times, "Jewish" in origin. (154) Jehan roy de France would thus have seemed perfectly suited to stand as an early example of a distinctly French artistic tradition.

Visitors to the Louvre, throughout its history as a public institution, lamented the lack of coherence in its presentation of works of art. Nineteenth-century critics like Thore had bitterly complained about the Louvre's failure to offer a clear historical narrative of the French school, (155) and as late as the early twentieth century writers still spoke of the installation as chaotic. (156) Even official guidebooks to the collection from this latter period acknowledge that the principles that informed the arrangement of pictures in the galleries were not always self-evident. Nevertheless, the guidebooks make it clear that the installation followed a conceptual framework. On its most basic level, this framework was based on nationality, with works divided into "schools" equated with their country of origin. Early-twentieth-century guidebooks explicitly explained the sequence of rooms as constituting an art historical narrative. Vitry's 1922 guide to the Louvre, for example, refers to the succession of galleries as "streams," with national schools flowing into and nourishing succeeding artistic movements. (157) McClellan and Duncan both rightly note that this type of didactic arrangement was designed from its inception to correspond to a specifically nationalist agenda. (158) Vitry's account essentially features the works of the French school as the pinnacle of cultural achievement.

At the Louvre, the panel was installed with other French "primitives" in the Salle Jean Fouquet. That room was the first in a series of small galleries that displayed French paintings of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries (Fig. 7: room X). Their spaces allowed visitors to pass between the celebrated Italian Renaissance paintings displayed in the Grande Galerie and the works by French artists of the seventeenth century in the Salles Mollien and Denon. Louis Hourticq's 1923 guidebook encourages visitors to experience the history of French painting in chronological order, beginning with the works in the Salle Jean Fouquet. The fact that the gallery in question was named after Fouquet and not Girard d'Orleans (to whom Hourticq attributed the painting of John, in agreement with Bouchot and others of the time) makes it clear that the museum did not wish to promote the panel as the single most important foundational work of the French school. Hourticq himself did not select the image as one of the highlights of the room, reserving his "starred" notices instead for paintings attributed to Nicolas Froment, the Master of Moulins, and Jean Fouquet himself. He described the image of John in harsh terms, noting simply that "a certain brutality and stupidity are evident despite the softness of its execution"; evidently, he saw its artist as having succeeded in conveying the ignominious qualities of his subject in spite of his modest talents. (159)

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

Nonetheless, the panel's installation at the Louvre marked a widespread acceptance of the claims articulated in the context of the Primitifs francais exhibition. (160) The academic embrace of those claims is particularly pronounced in the work of Louis Gillet. In 1928, Gillet explicitly proposed the panel as the first French painting (in the phrase quoted above). As in the case of his predecessors Vitry and Bouchot, Gillet embraced what he saw as the painting's "charmless" character, praising its anonymous artist for having succeeded in "conveying the powerful impression of this ox's countenance, this heap of flesh and cartilage, without a glimmer of intelligence, the pitiful king of Poitiers." (161)

Similar sentiments abound in writings by Charles Sterling, whose studies earned their author a reputation as a gifted scholar of late medieval art. Born in Poland but largely trained in France under Henri Focillon, Sterling became a French citizen in 1934. (162) In a 1938 survey of early French painting, he quoted Gillet's phrase, "French painting begins with a portrait." While he admitted that other, earlier paintings may well have been lost, Sterling posited that "the eminently French taste for precise pictorial descriptions of the individual asserted itself beginning in the middle of the [fourteenth] century." (163) In a work published in occupied Paris in 1941, Sterling (writing from exile in New York under the pseudonym Charles Jacques) again described portraits as a distinctively French genre. He noted with satisfaction that "one could not have chosen a better, more eloquent witness" to the character of French painting "to save from the destructions of the ages" than the Louvre panel. (164) Gillet, too, returned to the panel in a 1941 publication. There, he restated his belief that the panel marked the origin of French painting and amplified his earlier praises of what he saw as the artist's unabashedly clear-sighted reproduction of the hapless king's blunt features. (165) Having recently witnessed the German conquest of France, Gillet found it especially poignant that the image of a disgraced French king was the start of a glorious tradition. (166)

The appeal of Jehan roy de France for twentieth-century scholars can be understood as part of a broader modernist mode of viewing Renaissance portraiture. Writing in the first quarter of the century, for instance, the popular writer Robert de la Sizeranne confessed to an obsession with fifteenth- and sixteenth-century portraits. (167) Beginning in 1913, la Sizeranne published a series of texts under the collective title Les masques et les visages de la Renaissance. In each volume, the author used his encounter with a portrait in a museum setting as a starting point for an extended historical rumination on the achievements of many of the Renaissance's most influential individuals--Cesare Borgia, Federigo da Montefeltro, and the like. When la Sizeranne died in 1932, his obituary in La Revue des Deux Mondes was written by none other than Louis Gillet, his close friend. In that elegiac notice, Gillet adopted his colleague's fascination with portraits, writing,

  In the museums where [La Sizeranne] spent so much of his life, there
  are often faces that haunt you, gazes that follow you and that one
  does not forget; next to the famous masterpieces, which are the first
  to attract the curious, these faces catch you and seem to ask
  something of you: a prayer is there behind the canvas, a soul
  suffering from a secret. These are mute confidences that implore you,
  lips sealed by the tomb that float in the frame in the midst of these
  faded features and that murmur "divine me!" (168)

This almost seamless blend of portrait, ekphrasis, and biography--all dedicated to the virtual resuscitation of the powerful humanists of the Renaissance--found perhaps its most pointed formulation during the 1920s and 1930s in odes to the despot Sigismondo Malatesta (1417-1468) by the likes of Ezra Pound and Adrian Stokes. The latter's rhapsodic praise of Malatesta and his contemporaries was derived in large part from his viewing of Antonio Pisanello's medallion portraits of them. (169) For both Stokes and Pound, the cinquecento ruler offered a point of comparison to criticize the weak, bourgeois culture of the present, and Pound went so far as to see Benito Mussolini as the potential heir to Malatesta's "greatness." (170)

It would be grossly unfair to impute similar motives to authors such as Gillet or Sterling. Indeed, Sterling's decision to pass the war years in New York stands in marked contrast to Pound's enthusiastic work in Italy at the same time for Mussolini's regime. But all of these authors are united by a distinctly modernist epistemology of both individualism and portraiture, in which portraits are understood as offering a form of direct access to the individual identities of the heroes of the past. As Lawrence Rainey has noted, Stokes's fascination with quattrocento portrait medallions must be understood within the context of a burgeoning interest in (and market for) such objects during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During that period, scholars and collectors came to view the medallions as perfect crystallizations of the identities and personalities of their subjects. (171) Compared to the earlier, Romantic reception of objects like Jehan roy de France, this later mode of viewing portraits constitutes a reversal in what we might express as the flow of aura from object to person. For Romantic-era audiences, as we have seen, a portrait's potency was derived from its association with a specific historical figure; thus a portrait depicting Francis I with a provenance connecting it to his mother could help imbue a room in du Sommerard's museum with a powerful sense of sixteenth-century life. In this new, modern epoch, on the other hand, portraits seemed to promise a particular ability to make the authentic identities of the heroes of the past forcefully present. They were perceived as being capable of doing so on their own, without the support of additional objects like those scattered throughout the rooms of the Hotel de Cluny. This mode of viewing portraits, of course, in fact involved projecting modernist notions of individualism onto those historical figures. The identities purportedly recovered via the portraits, therefore, tended to be quite familiar to modern audiences, with Pound's Malatesta-Mussolini being perhaps the most egregious example of this sort of historical doppelganger.

In any case, later authors have wisely avoided reiterating the most overtly chauvinistic claims found in early-twentieth-century discussions of Jehan roy de France. Nonetheless, their work has retained certain key elements of the account articulated by the organizers of the Primitifs francais exhibition. As a result, the nationalism of the 1904 exhibition continues to exert an almost magnetic influence on scholarship concerning the panel, subtly orienting the assumptions scholars bring to the piece and essentially preordaining their conclusions. Perhaps the most astonishing echo of prewar scholarship--at least to contemporary readers sensitized to issues of intellectual property and plagiarism--is contained in Grete Ring's broad study of fifteenth-century French painting, published in 1949. Ring referred to the panel as "the earliest example of an independent easel painting in France and the first single portrait in history" and then proceeded to give, without citation, a verbatim repetition of Gillet's 1928 formulation, writing, "We wish to point to the precedence of France in this domain and to the fact that French painting began with a portrait." (172)

Ring's treatment of the panel is emblematic of the postwar scholarly consensus that Bouchot was fundamentally correct in presenting the Louvre panel as the fount of French painting. These views subsequently informed the plans to reinstall the French painting collection at the Louvre that culminated in the "Grand Louvre" project of the 1980s and 1990s. As part of the first phase of renovations in 1989, the curators temporarily reinstalled the collection of French paintings in the second floor of the northern and western sides of the Cour Carree. There, the panel joined a small number of works displayed in what curators intended to be the first room entered by visitors to the French painting galleries. (173) Four years later, the curators moved the early French works yet again, this time to their present-day location in the Richelieu wing.

With this latest move, the enshrinement of Jehan roy de France was complete. Pierre Rosenberg, the conservateur general du Patrimoine who took charge of the reinstallation, has made it clear that the new sequence of displays is absolutely meant to convey a particular art historical narrative--one with an unabashedly nationalist spin. In an interview that appeared in the journal Connaissance des Arts when the wing opened in 1993, Rosenberg explained what he thought the Louvre's audience wanted: "The visitor who comes to the Louvre naturally expects to see the Mona Lisa and other famous works, but above all he wishes to understand the development of the French School, from the fourteenth century up until 1850, in a coherent, complete and perfect manner." He commented that it had taken some time for scholars to recognize that France possessed a long and illustrious national artistic tradition. Therefore, the reinstallation allowed the Louvre to redress a long-standing injustice by properly elevating the display of the French school, now that it "had acquired its certificate of nobility." (174)

The editors of Connaissance des Arts understood Rosenberg's art historical narrative perfectly. While several illustrations accompanying the article show other works grouped together as they appear in the new installation, the panel representing John is the only work illustrated on its own, excerpted from the context of its surrounding gallery installation. The caption to the photograph describes the panel as "the oldest French panel painting known" and notes that "[i]t marks the beginning of the tour of French painting." (175) With the new installation, Louis Gillet's evidently compelling 1928 assertion that "French painting begins with a portrait" received its most concrete declaration of support.

Physiognomic Likeness: An Assumption and Its Consequences

The enshrinement of the panel in its current installation at the Louvre marks the completion of a momentous shift in its critical fortunes. The image is today viewed as a work of art of great significance rather than as the mildly interesting "curiosity" described in the earliest writings on the piece. But present-day scholarship shares one major element with the earliest accounts of the panel: the assumption that it represents its subject through physiognomic likeness. This assumption was implicit in the first published reproduction of the panel, in Jacques de Bie's collection of "true portraits." It is based solely on the perceived specificity of the features depicted on the panel. No written account of John's physical attributes was recorded in the fourteenth century, and the panel does not closely resemble any other surviving fourteenth-century image of the king. (176) From de Bie's time onward, scholars have looked at the panel, observed that it appears to be highly individualized, and recognized that its format is similar to that of later portraits. In fact, if the Louvre panel was once part of the St-Paul quadriptych, de Bie would not have been the first viewer to assume it was a physiognomic likeness. Like later scholars, the clerk and appraisers who compiled Jean de Berry's 1416 inventory were clearly struck by the quadriptych's naturalistic qualities. The entry claims that it depicted the faces of its subjects "au vif," a term they also applied to Roman cameos in the duke's collection. (177) The appraisers, however, examined the piece more than half a century after John's death, and none of the earlier inventory entries mentioning the piece--those of 1380, 1391, and 1399-1400--applied the term "au vif" to it. Rather than reflecting a secure knowledge of their circumstances of production, the phrase encapsulates the reaction of the duke's appraisers to the naturalistic appearances of the figures' faces; they simply assumed that the quadriptych represented John and the other rulers through physiognomic likeness. A similar leap of faith has guided all of the modern scholarship on Jehan roy de France, having a profound impact on opinions concerning its dating and even the identity of the person that it represents.

The assumption that the work is a physiognomic likeness has driven scholarly efforts to identify the panel's subject. It may seem absurd to raise questions concerning the identity of the individual depicted on the panel, given the fact that it features an inscription telling us that it represents King John. Many scholars, though, believe the inscription to be a later addition, and some have raised the possibility that it may be either mistaken or intentionally misleading. Recent scholarship accepts the idea that the inscription was added during the fourteenth century, but after the original execution of the work. In the 1981 catalog of the Fastes du Gothique exhibition in Paris, Dominique Thiebaut wrote that the inscription is of "a date slightly posterior to the reign of John the Good," and Charles Sterling concurred in his weighty 1987 study of painting in late medieval Paris. (178) Experts cite two factors as evidence for this conclusion. First, some (but by no means all) art historians feel that the slightly irregular form of the inscription is incongruent with the quality of the image itself. (179) Second, and more significantly, several scholars have remarked that the inscription appears similar to scripts of the later 1300s. (180) The most specific analyses of the letterforms place them in the fourth quarter of the fourteenth century. (181) Of course, the inscription's paleographic qualities only postdate the image if one assumes that the image was painted during the lifetime of John the Good. The later one places the date of the image, the more its creation and the likely date of the inscription come into alignment.

Raymond Cazelles and Gerhard Schmidt proposed that the inscription was a later addition to support their theory that the panel represents not John but rather his son and successor, Charles V. Their arguments, as well as the contrary opinions of other authors, relied entirely on the premise that the Louvre panel and other images from the period contain physiognomic likenesses of specific individuals. Writing in 1971, Schmidt compared the features of the figure in the panel to those appearing in images of Charles. He decided that the figure in the Louvre panel closely resembled the features visible in images of Charles rather than those of John, leading him to conclude that the inscription was erroneous. (182) During the same year, Cazelles independently proclaimed the figure on the panel to be Charles. (183) Herve Pinoteau and Jean-Baptiste de Vaivre quickly rebutted this identification. Like the proponents of an identification of the panel with Charles, Pinoteau and de Vaivre based their arguments on the assumption that images of this period contain physiognomic likenesses; they simply argued that the figure on the panel resembled other images of John more closely than they did images of his son. (184) Recent scholars have followed Pinoteau and de Vaivre, accepting the traditional identification of the figure in the panel as John. (185)

Similarly, the assumption that the panel is a physiognomic likeness has guided arguments concerning the date of its execution. As we have seen, no documentary evidence survives that could help us pin down the precise date of Jehan roy de France's execution. Moreover, dendrochronological analysis of the panel has not yet yielded a range of likely dates for the piece. (186) The fact that the painting is on an oak panel that had been covered with a layer of cloth to assist in the adherence of the paint offers a meager technical clue to its origin and date, as paintings commissioned by members of the French royal family were prepared this way at least as early as 1378. (187) The low survival rate of such works, however, makes it impossible to propose the late 1370s as a certain terminus post quem on the basis of the painting's physical support alone.

In the absence of solid archival or scientific evidence, scholars attempting to date the panel have worked from a now-familiar assumption: that the Louvre panel is a physiognomic likeness. As early as 1717, the anonymous author of the notice in Le Nouveau Mercure confidently wrote that the panel was "made during his [John's] lifetime," and this claim was consistently repeated throughout the sparse scholarship devoted to the piece in the following century and a half. (188) Of course, the dates corresponding to John's life span cover the years from 1319 to 1364. Other scholars have sought a more precise date by relying on their specific perceptions of the figure's age. Given the subjective nature of such perceptions, it is not surprising that this method has produced little consensus. In their publications associated with the Primitifs francais exhibition, Bouchot, Lafenestre, and Durrieu shared the view that John is approximately forty years old in the picture, leading them to date the piece to about 1358-59. (189) Louis Reau, Ring, and Erwin Panofsky likewise accepted that the piece was executed fairly late in the king's short life, assigning it a date of about 1360. (190) Other authors have seen the king's features as those of a younger man. Cazelles considered the figure in the image as about eighteen to twenty years old, so young as to be "proud of his recent virility." (191) This would indicate a date as early as 1338 (which Cazelles, believing that the image represented Charles rather than John, ultimately rejected). Falling between these two extremes, Prost, Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, and de Vaivre thought that the figure in the painting looked to be about thirty, leading them to prefer a date of shortly before 1350. (192) Still other scholars, including Gillet and Sterling, have vacillated between an early and a late date. (193) Sterling initially advocated a date of about 1360. (194) Later, however, he advanced a (remarkably precise) age for the figure in the image of between twenty-two and twenty-six years old and consequently switched his allegiance to the pre-1350 camp. (195)

All of these arguments are based on the assumption that the panel depicts its subject's facial features as they appeared at the moment of the image's execution. Such reasoning, however, constitutes a clear example of what Georges Didi-Huberman has aptly termed the "synchronic sophism." (196) This faulty reasoning allows scholars to conclude that a physiognomic likeness directly references the features of its subject as they looked at the precise moment the likeness was executed, rather than replicating the features visible in earlier representations. It is conceivable, of course, that the Louvre panel actually depicts its subject as he appeared at the time during which it was created. Yet it is equally possible that the image shows John's features as they appeared months or even years prior to the painting of the panel. (197) In that case, the image may have attempted to represent accurately the features of a physically absent, or even deceased, individual. And then there is a third possibility: that the image does not depict John's features at all, and that its ability to refer to a specific individual depends entirely on the inscription bearing his name. While this mode of representation does not conform to modern paradigms of portraiture, it was not at all unusual in the fourteenth century--witness the series of statues of French kings once installed in the Grand'Salle of the royal palace on the Ile-de-la-Cite. (198) Nor was this representational mode unheard of in the early fifteenth century, as is evidenced by a panel painting that today resides in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Records indicate that this subtly rendered but evidently posthumous image bore an inscription on its reverse identifying the subject as Wenceslas of Luxembourg. Wenceslas died in 1383, but stylistic and technical analyses demonstrate that the image was painted between 1400 and 1415. (199)

These facts suggest ways in which we might rethink our account of Jehan roy de France and other images of its period. Such a rethinking would not necessarily reject outright the possibility that such images represent their subjects through physiognomic likeness. Art historians have long argued that the fourteenth century witnessed a new interest among artists and patrons in physiognomic images, and there is considerable evidence that artists of that period began to produce images that sought to refer to certain aspects of the visual appearance of their subjects. (200) However, the belief that the introduction of physiognomic likeness was symptomatic of the arrival of the Renaissance has led scholars to focus almost exclusively on the potentially physiognomic portions of those images. In doing so, they have tended to overlook ways in which those same images also rely on traditional medieval representational modes--methods of representation that do not rely on the selective replication of certain visible features. If we wish to construct a revised taxonomy of these images--one that does not presume that certain representational modes are more advanced than others--we must be attuned to all of the ways in which they work to represent their subjects.

We would thus do well to look for ways other than physiognomy in which the Louvre panel represents the king. Here I would like to propose an approach similar to that advocated by Didi-Huberman in his deeply engaging work on portraits in fifteenth-century Italy. We should broaden our investigations beyond the traditional narrow attempts to identify the figure within the image and to ascertain the date of its execution. This does not mean that we should reject the findings of those efforts outright; they are helpful to an extent, but they ultimately cannot achieve the level of certitude that historians of a more positivist age claimed for them. The problem lies in the fact that such efforts, which Didi-Huberman likens to the sort of criminal inquiries featured in detective novels, prevent us from devoting attention to what he refers to as the "particularity" of images: in a sense, the manner in which the image achieves its act of representation. (201) In the case of the Louvre panel, much of our work would be of an essentially iconographic nature, considering the significance of the absence of emblems of rank in the image, of the image's profile format, of the rhetorical strategies of the inscription. But it would also necessarily remain sensitive to the coloristic and even tactile qualities of the panel, considering what Paul Binski has aptly termed a "poetics of materials" (in his case, in sepulchral representations of individuals). (202)

Jehan Roy de France as "Image"

The possibility that the Louvre panel is posthumous does not rule out the possibility that its creator attempted to represent John through physiognomic likeness, or that its painter at least hoped to create the impression that the image was such a likeness. It is entirely possible that the Louvre panel was originally intended to be seen as a physiognomic likeness, but that it was based solely on its creator's memory of John's features and not from an earlier sketch from life. Elsewhere I have demonstrated that the representation of visible appearances from memory, rather than from direct observation, was a crucial component of artistic practice in late medieval France. (203) The English author Thomas Hoccleve offers one particularly intriguing example of how this sort of mnemonically based representation could include activities that modern scholars would describe as portrait making. In The Regiment of Princes (ca. 1411-12). Hoccleve sang the praises of Geoffrey Chaucer, who had been dead for just over a decade. Hoccleve wrote, "Although he [Chaucer] has died, my memory image of him has such fresh liveliness, that, in order to remind others of him, I have made his likeness here to this end in truth, that those who do not have him in mind may again find him in this painting." (204) The earliest surviving manuscript of this text features an image of a middle-aged man alongside this passage. (205) A pen case worn by the figure helps to identify the image as an author: a set of prayer beads in his left hand demonstrates his piety. (206) Hoccleve, who modeled his own literary work on that of Chaucer, thus claimed that he produced this image directly from a deeply impressed and highly accurate memory image, a sign of his close familiarity with, and intense loyalty to, his illustrious predecessor. (207)

We will never know for certain whether or not the image in the Louvre functions through physiognomic likeness. In fact, the assumption of generations of scholars that it does so is in many ways the result of the image's own visual strategies; in this sense, it actively constructs its own reception. The image eschews the regalia, the heraldry, and the details of costume found in other representations of late medieval kings, intensely focusing instead on facial contour, leading us to believe that it enables us, in the words of Hoccleve, to "find" John again in the painting. It is therefore no surprise that viewers from at least the time of Jacques de Bie assumed that the image had been created in ways familiar to postmedieval portrait practice. This is further evidence of the panel's success in constructing a narrative--or perhaps a myth--of its own creation. (208)

An awareness of the biases we have inherited from earlier scholarship should prompt us to question the current categorization of the panel as an early example of the class of artworks known as "portraits." A new taxonomy of the Louvre panel would classify it as a particular type of late medieval "image" (that is, an ymage or imago, to use the terms applied by fourteenth-century sources to a wide variety of representations) rather than as the "earliest modern portrait." (209) Abandoning the anachronistic epithets applied to Jehan roy de France in the last century would allow us to view the piece as a product of the visual culture of the late Middle Ages--a visual culture largely comprising works in media that have been marginalized or ignored by modern scholarship. (210) By redirecting our attention to the other, nonphysiognomic visual references posed by Jehan roy de France, we may discover ways in which it locates identity in concepts and institutions beyond the body of an individual person. In turn, such a reimagining of the piece could help us understand how it would fit in with what Michel Pastoureau has characterized as a "crisis" in understandings of courtly identity in the later Middle Ages. (211) We might then at the very least be freed to devise a better range of hypotheses for why this particular panel was made and how its original audience used it. That audience certainly would not have perceived it as a revolutionary (if awkward) attempt to invent a new artistic genre, nor would they have considered it to be the start of a glorious national tradition. Indeed, they would have thought of the image in terms familiar to them, rather than as the initiator of previously unimagined categories of artworks.

Stephen Perkinson, an assistant professor of art history at Bowdoin College, has published articles on topics ranging from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries in journals including Gesta and the Sixteenth Century Journal. He is completing a manuscript reexamining the purported origins of modern portraiture in late medieval France [Art Department, 9300 College Station, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Me. 04011, sperkins@bowdoin.edu].

Notes

An early version of this paper was presented at the College Art Association Conference in New York in 1997 as part of a session chaired by Brigitte Buettner and William Diebold. I am also indebted to Pamela Fletcher, Sandra Hindman, Clark Hulse, Nina Rowe, and Larry Silver, whose insightful responses to early drafts were extremely helpful. Laura Morowitz was likewise exceptionally generous in sharing her thoughts and knowledge concerning art history in France of about 1900 in general, and the scholarship surrounding the Primitifs francais exhibition in particular. I also profited greatly from the thoughtful comments of Marc Gotlieb, Perry Chapman, and the Art Bullelin's anonymous readers. John Gallucci graciously afforded me considerable assistance in translating several thorny passages of seventeenth-century French; remaining errors are entirely my own. Finally, I am grateful for the financial support provided for research on various components of this project by a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship and a French Government Bourse Chateaubriand.

1. Louis Gillet, La peinture francaise: Moyen Age et Renaissance, in Bibliotheque d'histoire de l'art, ed. Auguste Marguillier (Paris: G. Van Oest, 1928), 25.

2. For a bibliography of scholarship on the panel, see Charles Sterling, La peinture medievale a Paris, 1300-1500, vol. 1 (Paris: Fondation Wildenstein, 1987), 146-49.

3. The panel has been restored on several occasions, most recently in 1954. The body has been heavily repainted, and losses to the gold background and to the face have been patched. See Jacqueline Marette, Connaissance des primitifs par l'etude du bois: Du XIIe au XVIe siecle (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1961), 189, no. 201; Sterling, La peinture medievale, 147; and Raymond Cazelles, "Peinture et actualite politique sous les premiers Valois: Jean le Bon ou Charles, Dauphin," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 92 (1978): 59.

4. "Premier exemple conserve depuis l'Antiquite d'un portrait peint independent."

5. As an example of this colloquial understanding of portraiture, see the definition provided by the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "portrait": "... (now almost always) A representation or delineation of a person, especially of the face, made from life, by drawing, painting, photography, engraving, etc.; a likeness." For a classic formulation of the scholarly form of this definition, see Sir John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (New York: Bollingen Foundation/Pantheon Books, 1966).

6. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 9.

7. For example, Joanna Woodall, ed., Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), I and passim.

8. For example, Pope-Hennessy's Portrait in the Renaissance, 3: "in the Renaissance it [portraiture] reflects the reawakening interest in human motives and the human character, the resurgent recognition of those factors which make human beings individual, that lay at the center of Renaissance life." More recently, this equation between "portraits" and the Renaissance determined the chronological scope of Lorne Campbell's Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). See also Norbert Schneider, The Art of the Portrait: Masterpieces of European Portrait-Painting, 1420-1670, trans. Iain Galbraith (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1994), 6 and passim.

9. For a clear outline of the traditional scholarly distinctions between "types" and "portraits," along with some awareness of the problematic nature of this taxonomy, see Franz J. Ronig, "Die Bildnisse Kunos von Falkenstein: Typ oder Portrat?" in Die Parler und der Schone Stil, 1350-1400, ed. Anton Legner, exh. cat., Schnutgen-Museums, Kunsthalle, Cologne, 1978, 211-15.

10. For example, Brilliant, Portraiture, and Woodall, Portraiture, 1. In the introduction to a generally outstanding collection of essays on Italian Renaissance portraiture, Luke Syson points vaguely but suggestively to a number of factors that may have led to a confluence of an interest in physiognomy and in practices of representing individuals; Syson, introduction to The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, ed. Syson and Nicholas Mann (London: British Museum Press, 1998), 9-14.

11. For example, Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origin and Character, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 170; Andrew Martindale, Heroes, Ancestors, Relatives, and the Birth of the Portrait (Maarssen: Gary Schwartz/SDU, 1988), 32-33; and Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, ix.

12. For example, Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt, "Notice of a Portrait of John, King of France (read 18th March, 1858)," Archaeologia, or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity 38 (1860): 201; Paul Durrieu, La peinture a l'exposition des primitifs francais (Paris: Librairie de l'Art Ancien et Moderne, 1904), 30; Charles Sterling, La peinture francaise: Les primitifs (Paris: Librairie Floury, 1938), 25; and Claire Richter Sherman, The Portraits of Charles V of France (1338-1380) (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 73-74.

13. For two ambitious but problematic attempts to devise a set of rules for gauging the physiognomic intent of medieval images, see Georgia Sommers Wright, "The Reinvention of the Portrait Likeness in the Fourteenth Century," Gesta 39, no. 2 (2000): 117-34; and Sherman, Portraits of Charles V, 3-5. For a critique of such criteria, see Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Portrait, the Individual, and the Singular: Remarks on the Legacy of Aby Warburg," in Syson and Mann, Image of the Individual, 165-85.

14. This is also noted by Wright, "Reinvention of the Portrait Likeness," 117.

15. For the Naumburg statues, see Paul Williamson, Gothic Sculpture 1140-1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 180-84, 283 nn. 21-24.

16. For lucid explanations of the historical nature of all conceptions of "likeness," including physiognomic resemblance, see Nelson Goodman, "Seven Strictures on Similarity," in Projects and Problems (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), 437-46; and idem, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 6-10. Scholars who study non-Western cultures, such as Ladislav Kesner ("Likeness of No One: [Re]presenting the First Emperor's Army," Art Bulletin 77 [1995]: 115-32), and historians of early American portraiture, like T. H. Breen ("The Meaning of 'Likeness': American Portrait Painting in an Eighteenth-Century Consumer Society," Word and Image 6 [1990]: 325-50), have taken heed of Goodman's ideas, and their work illustrates the benefits of using temporally and culturally specific criteria in evaluating the manner in which images resemble individuals.

17. For example, Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), esp. 1-9.

18. See for instance Percy Ernst Schramm, Die Deutsehen Kaiser und Konige in Bildern ihrer Zeit, 2nd ed. (Munich: Prestel,