Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/593

 In Fkance. 563 of being engraved, this masterpiece of Jean Cousin lay for a long time forgotten in the Sacristy of Minimes at Vincennes. It has now found a place in the Louvre. Martin Freminet (1567 — 1619), the son of a painter, was born at Paris. After a long sojourn in Italy, he brought with him the taste which prevailed there at the close of the great age, a little before the foundation of the Carracci school. Leaving the calm and simple beauty which Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Correggio had taught, he adopted, like the mistaken imitators of Michelangelo, an ostentatious display of the science of anatomy, and a mania for foreshortening. At the same time his great pictures in the Louvre — both the Venus waiting for Mars, and JEneas abandoning Dido — are remarkable because he painted his figures the size of life. After a long series of sacred subjects, he produced mythologic scenes. Henri IV. appointed Freminet painter to the court, and com- missioned him to decorate the ceiling of the chapel at Fontainebleau. Simon Vouet (1590 — 1649), also the son of a painter, had been from his earliest youth remarkable for his precocious talents ; and after fourteen years' residence at Rome car- ried the lessons of the Carracci school back with him to Paris. In his great composition, the Presentation in the Temple — in the Entombment, the Madonna, the Roman Charity (a young woman feeding an old man), we trace clearly the influence of the Bolognese school, although Vouet possesses neither the profound expression of Domenichino, the elegance of Guido, nor the powerful chiaroscuro of Guercino. We must do him the justice to add that it was his lessons which taught Eustache le Sueur, Charles le Brun, and Pierre Mignard ; and that 2