
Portrait of a Man in a Hat
1450s–60s
Black chalk, sanguine and pastel on tinted grey paper; black watercolour, whiting
The Hermitage, which possesses one of the finest collections of French graphic art outside of France itself, is showing in detail and from various sides the transition artists there made from the Gothic to the art of the Modern Era, a transition which established the principles that shaped the country’s art right through to the first half of the 20th century – the French Manner.
“The Hermitage’s superb innovation – the rotating Gallery of Graphic Art – continues to delight gourmets and students. The remarkable assemblage of French graphic art not only presents one of the best collections in the world, but also tells, through the language of art, the history of the formation of the especially elegant style of French culture. At the same time, the exhibition has once again provided an occasion to reflect on the highly topical question of the role of the individual creator in art. On the one hand, drawings are something undoubtedly made by the hand of an artist without the involvement of pupils. On the other, printed graphic art and books are the supposedly mass reproduction of copies that in themselves create an artistic world living a life of its own, separate from the original. The eye takes delight, while the mind comes up with problems in the ‘French Manner’,” Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, observed.
More than 150 works from the stocks of the Hermitage acquaint visitors with the main phenomena in the artistic life of France over a century and a half. The exhibition opens with pencil portraits – an official genre that was one of the first to feel the influence of Renaissance Italy and the Netherlands. The next two sections are devoted to the School of Fontainebleau and the School of Paris, showing the development and interpretation of the Mannerist ideas that were brought to France by Italian artists. A further section is devoted to book illustration, while the exhibition is concluded by the drawings and prints of Jacques Charles de Bellange – an original and contradictory artist who embodied the final manifestation of Mannerism and became a forerunner of the Rococo and Art Nouveau.
The curators of the “French Manner” exhibition are researchers in the Department of Western European Fine Art Alexander Nikolayevich Konev, Karina Vladimirovna Krasilnikova, Irina Yevgenyevna Kulimeneva and Vasily Mikhailovich Uspensky.
A scholarly illustrated catalogue in Russian has been published to accompany the exhibition (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2025).
The exhibition in Halls 324–328 can be visited by all holders of tickets to the Main Museum Complex until 13 July 2025.
Sections of the Exhibition
The Pencil Portrait
In the mid-15th century, after its victory in the Hundred Years’ War, France became a powerful centralized state under the rule of kings from the Valois dynasty. It was then too that the formation of a national school of art began, within which the portrait occupies a special place. The exhibition opens with a Portrait of a Man in a Hat, one of only three surviving drawings in the world by Jean Fouquet, the first artist of the French Renaissance and pioneer of the easel portrait in France.
Through the example of the Hermitage’s collection of pencil portraits from the 15th and 16th centuries it is possible to trace the main stages in the evolution of portraiture in France. Together with the extremely rare work by Jean Fouquet, this section also presents drawings by other celebrated artists who worked at the royal court: Jean Perréal, Jean and François Clouet, Jean de Court, Pierre Dumonstier I, Jean Foullon and the Master IDC.
The School of Fontainebleau
In 1528 the tireless, resolute King Francis I, who had been obsessed with Italy from the moment he came to the throne, decided to reconstruct the royal chateau at Fontainebleau in accordance with the latest fashion and sent out invitations to the finest Italian masters. Gradually a major artistic centre came into being at the King’s residence, the founding father of which would be the extravagant Mannerist Rosso Fiorentino, who had been constantly at a loose end in his homeland.
The avant-garde art of the Mannerists from Fontainebleau was a powerful cultural shock for Late Gothic France. Bypassing the Renaissance with its searchings for an elevated ideal, the country encountered a sophisticated artistic game that often rated the originality of a concept higher than correctness in proportions or clarity in the images. Over time, the blending of Tuscan, Emilian and Roman influences with Late Gothic elements gave rise to a contradictory, whimsical and attractive kind of art in which extreme refinement combined with awkward angularity, and elegant courtliness with showy extravagance.
This section of the exhibition is made up of works by central figures in the art of Fontainebleau, one of Europe’s foremost creative centres, which Giorgio Vasari called “a second Rome”: Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio, Niccolò dell’Abbate, Léonard Thiry and their followers.
The School of Paris
Following Francis I’s death in 1547, the new king, Henry II, moved the capital to Paris, where he continued the reconstruction of the Louvre. After the engraving workshop at Fontainebleau ceased operating, Paris emerged as France’s chief artistic centre. Those who worked there included Jean Mignon, Jean Cousin the Elder and Younger, Pierre Milan, René Boyvin, Baptiste Pellerin, Étienne Delaune and Léon Davent.
With a splendid grasp of the imagery and style of Fontainebleau, the Parisian artists were able to adapt them to the demands of French art and in doing so popularized and rooted in the national tradition the legacy of Mannerism with its craving for the unusual, eccentric and witty.
Book Illustration
The history of the printed illustrated book in France goes back to 1478, when an edition of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis or Mirror of Human Salvation was produced in Lyons. From that moment through to the late 16th century, the French printed book would gradually acquire its present-day appearance.
This section shows the main processes that took place in French book illustration during the period in question: the transition from the woodcut to burin engraving, from the verbosity inherited from Late Gothic manuscript books to Renaissance austerity, clarity and rationality, as well as the formation and consolidation in the nation’s book-printing of an approach to the illustration of a text that was new to France and based on the emblematic triad of “image – heading – explanatory text”, where the content was only fully revealed through a dialogue between text and image.
Visitors can compare the illustrations in books of hours from the first half of the 15th century and the beginning of the next, see the virtuoso miniature woodcuts by two leading masters of book illustration in Lyons at that time – Bernard Salomon and Pierre Eskrich, as well as the burin engravings of the Parisians Léonard Gaultier and Thomas de Leu, who set the fashion in French book illustration in the late 1500s.
Jacques Charles de Bellange
The exhibition finishes with a section devoted to a mysterious and extravagant artist from Nancy – Jacques Charles de Bellange. He not only remained a Mannerist in the era when Mannerism had already waned almost to nothing, but was also perhaps the last exponent of a tendency within Mannerism that esteemed precise elegance above all and cherished the gracefulness of the line and the refinement of the silhouette.
The prints by Bellange featured in the exhibition were probably created with the aim of spreading awareness of his distinctive manner, which brought him success in Rome and Paris. The artist’s drawings, on the other hand, belonged to his personal “backroom”: with rapid, inspired sweeps of the pen combined with soft shading he created lightweight images that seem to melt in the air – an embodiment of fleeting beauty.
The Hermitage’s collection of Bellange’s works, a significant one by world standards, makes it possible to see how contradictory influences torn out of context combined in his output, and how within that amalgam everything that existed in French art in the 16th century attained its highest expression: a striving after elegance and love of the theatre, a fascination with ornamentality and painstaking execution. Bellange became a figure who embodied the last vestiges of the flamboyant Gothic and the first portent of the Rococo and Art Nouveau.