Luca Penni. Un disciple de Raphaël à Fontainebleau

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Luca Penni. A disciple of Raphael in Fontainebleau, Louvre Museum - Sully wing, from October 8, 2012 to January 14, 2013. Fontainebleau was in the 16th century an enchanted, sophisticated and daring place. At the request of a king attracted to the Italian taste, the damp and sylvan castle was seen as the abode of a nymph. It became, in the style of the peninsula, the seat of elegant forms, voluptuous ideas and all the enigmas of fiction. It was also the site of an intense, heroic and erudite mythology, epic and obscure. All the suppleness of eros found a place to exercise itself there. The athletic and contorted heroes, the sinuous female figures imposed a presence, a game, an aesthetic. Their only censorship was beauty, their only limit, a coded poetry. François I employed three masters of the maniera moderna to create this art of Fontainebleau: Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio and less known but no less excellent, Luca Penni. All showed a pronounced taste for unruly and entangled narratives, for an ideal that was surpassed and for the marginal but fruitful developments of ornamentation. More than any other, Luca Penni wonderfully explored the register of profane nudity, multiplied the fascinating images of fierce and bloody stories and gave them the appearance of graceful choreographies. Trained in Raphael's Rome, he was an impeccable draftsman, in turn creator, codifier and popularizer. He made the art of Fontainebleau known through the print and gave it the strength of a style that could be transposed into all fields and accessible to all.