The Reanissance Period

Once again France was influenced by italian art, in the sixteenth century king Francis I employed the italian artist Francesco Primaticcio of Bologna, who was the director of the school of Fontainebleu, that's why the french painters adopted an italianate manner of work called the Renaissance period. Two of the most important artists of this period are: Jean Goujon and Germain Pilon, both of them were sculptors and contributed classical style to the representative work of France art. Portraits art were also famous and Jean Cousin and Jean and François Clouet were the best portrait painters in this period.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Baroque tendencies were evolving during the reign of Marie de Medici and Louis XIII. The enthusiasm for classical antiquity, combined with a cult of rationalism, encouraged the development of a monumental and formalized art, which shows influences from both the Roman painters and of the north of Europe, namely the Dutch and Flemish schools. Recognized painters of this period were those who painted landscapes, and others such as Philippe de Champaigne who painted comtemplative portraits of people in the Catholic Jansenist sect, Simon Vouet, Le Nain brothers, George de la Tour famous for his candle-lit paintings, and the most important were Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, who worked in Italy.

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