Robin de Romans

Avignon, Papal Palace, Deer Room (Chambre du cerf): wall painting (detail), 14th century

Avignon, Papal Palace, Deer Room (Chambre du cerf): wall painting (detail, water basin), 14th century

Robin de Romans was a French painter who worked in the 14th century at the court of the Popes in Avignon , France.

The popes resided instead of Rome in Italy from 1309 to 1376 and a short time later again in Avignon in France. They had called artists from Italy to their new residence to design their palaces and churches. From around 1340, Italian painters such as Simone Martini or Matteo Giovannetti da Vitterbo worked in Avignon for a long time and also gathered local French artists around them. This is how the Avignon School was born , a fusion of Italian and French painting, to which Robin de Romans is also counted.

Robin de Romans' teacher was probably Giovannetti and numerous documents have survived that attest to Robin de Romans and Giovannetti's workshop. Giovanetto worked at the papal court from 1343 to 1366 and during this time, along with Martini, had a decisive influence on the development of art there.

Robin de Romans is said to have created the frescoes in the deer room of the Papal Palace with subjects of hunting, i.e. secular painting. This is the only room that has not been painted with pictures of religious content. Two scenes from deer and falcon hunting are shown. Another scene shows figures at a fish pond, which probably represents the water basin that can be detected in Avignon, in which fish caught alive elsewhere were kept fresh. Since the paintings from around 1343 appear to imitate the style of the design of elegant French tapestries , they are attributed to the French Robin de Romans. This probably worked under the guidance of an Italian workshop in which he worked. Robin de Romans mainly adopted the new choice of perspective and the plastic, three-dimensional way of depicting the figures that had developed in the Italian Renaissance .

literature

• Eugène Müntz: Un document inédit sur les fresques du palais d'Avignon . In: Bulletin monumental, XLVIII (1882), pp. 90-93.
• Eugène Müntz: Les peintres d'Avignon pendant le règne de Clément VI (1342-1352) . Tours 1885.
• Eugène Müntz: Fresques inédites du palais des papes à Avignon et de la chartreuse de Villeneuve . In: Gazette archéologique, X (1885), pp. 392–395.
• Enrico Castelnuovo: École d'Avignon . In: Art de France I (1961), pp. 283-287.
• Paul Deschamps, Marc Thibout: La peinture murale en France au début de l'époque gothique, de Philippe Auguste à la fin du règne de Charles V (1180-1380) . Paris 1963.
• Avignon School . In: The large art dictionary by PW Hartmann (online edition 2011).