Simon Vouet

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Simon Vouet: Self-Portrait (approx. 1626–27), Musée des Beaux-Arts (Lyon)

Simon Vouet (born January 9, 1590, probably in Paris , † June 30, 1649 ibid) was a French painter and decorator of the Baroque .

Life

He received his first lessons from his father Laurent Vouet. Already in his youth, Simon traveled to England and from 1611–12 in the wake of the French ambassador Monsieur de Harlay to Constantinople , where he is said to have painted his portrait from memory after only one meeting with Sultan Ahmed I.

After a short stay in Venice he came to Rome towards the end of 1613 , where he initially joined the Caravaggist style , but also accepted suggestions from the Bolognese school. He was supported from 1618 at the latest by a pension of 450 livres from the French King Louis XIII . To Vouets main Roman patrons belonged to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who in 1623 as Urban VIII. Pope was.

The Fortune Teller , c. 1620, National Gallery of Canada , Ottawa

Vouet already had pupils in Rome and soon achieved a leading role among the French and French-speaking painters, among whom besides his brother Aubin Vouet et al. a. Claude Vignon , Charles Mellin , Nicolas Poussin and Nicolas Tournier included. Vouet also had good contact with the engraver Claude Mellan , who made many of Vouet's pictures known through his publications.

After a few years, Vouet enjoyed such a good reputation that he also received commissions from outside Rome, so in 1620 he painted a depiction of St. Bruno receiving the rules from the Child Jesus for the Certosa di San Martino in Naples . Whether Vouet went to Naples in person is not known or proven, but an affinity for Neapolitan painting, which can be seen in some of his paintings, could also go back through a contact with Massimo Stanzione , who was probably at the same time as Vouet in the Roman church of San Lorenzo worked in Lucina .

In 1621 Vouet traveled to Genoa , where he painted portraits for Don Paolo Orsini , Duke of Bracciano , and for Marc Antonio Doria . He sent the altarpiece of the crucifixion for the church of Sant'Ambrogio from Rome to Genoa.

In 1624 he was given the honor of being the first Frenchman to be appointed director (" principe ") of the Accademia di San Luca , as the successor to Antiveduto Grammatica . Vouet was also the first French painter to work in St. Peter's Basilica , for whom he painted a large mural Adoration of the Cross and the Symbols of the Passion in 1626 , which unfortunately has not survived.

Holy Family with St. Elisabeth, Johannes d. Baptist and Catherine , around 1627–30, Prado , Madrid

On April 21, 1626, he married the miniature and pastel painter Virginia Vezzi (or da Vezzi) in Rome , whom he had met the year before and who gave him his first daughter, Francesca, on March 9, 1627.

Since he was now the most famous French painter of the time, Louis XIII let him. recalled to Paris, where Vouet arrived after a stay in Venice on November 25, 1627, together with his family and two students.

Louis XIII appointed him " premier peintre du Roy " ("first painter of the king") and let himself be instructed in painting by Vouet because he wanted to make pastel portraits of his courtiers himself. Vouet was given an apartment in the Louvre and was henceforth responsible for the decoration of the royal castles: the Louvre, the New Castle of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the Palais du Luxembourg . In order to cope with this workload and the numerous commissions from the nobility, he founded a large workshop, from which numerous students and important artists emerged, including a. Eustache Le Sueur , Pierre Mignard , Charles Le Brun , Michel Corneille the Elder. Ä. , the garden architect André Le Nôtre , and Vouet's sons-in-law Michel Dorigny and François Tortebat .

Simon Vouet painted numerous paintings for churches and palaces in Paris. He created high altars in an Italian style for the churches of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs , Saint-Eustache (around 1635), and Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis (around 1640). At the time, these altars were among the most beautiful in Paris, but only the former is still original and preserved on site; the paintings of the other two are now scattered in various museums (including the Louvre, Paris).

Simon Vouet: Allegory of Wealth , approx. 1635–40, Louvre , Paris

In 1632 he decorated the gallery and the chapel of the (today's) Palais Royal and the chapel in its castle in Ruel for Cardinal Richelieu . Vouet created other large decorations in the Hôtel de Séguier, for Marshal d'Effiat in Chilly Castle, and in the castles of President Fourcy and the Finance Minister Bullion. Tragically, most of Vouet's decorations are no longer preserved in their original form, fragments are now in various museums, such as his famous Allegory of Wealth , and the Allegories of Virtue and Caritas in the Louvre (Paris), whose origin is often assumed to be in the castle is not proven by Saint-Germain-en-Laye. In addition to paintings, he also created designs for tapestries , including the finding of Moses in the Louvre.

Vouet's dominant position as the leading artist in the French capital was only questioned when the classicist Nicolas Poussin came to Paris at the end of 1640 at the request of the king of Rome and was named “ premier peintre ” in place of Vouet . Understandably, Vouet felt offended by this neglect and took the side of Poussin's opponents, a party of artists and supporters of Rubens . However, Poussin had probably never intended to stay in Paris permanently, neither interested nor talent for large decoration commissions or for quarrels, and returned to Rome at the end of September 1642. Then the field was free again.

Simon Vouet died on June 30, 1649 and was buried in the church of Saint-Jean-en-Grève in Paris (church and grave are not preserved).

Appreciation

Toilet of Venus , 1630s, Cincinnati Art Museum

Simon Vouet was one of the first French painters who went to Italy for a longer stay and received a thorough training there. His stylistic development is extremely broad and ranges from the tenebrism of the Caravaggists in his early Italian work to a late classical style. Already in Rome he combined his chiaroscuro with the elegant forms of painters such as Guido Reni , Domenichino , Lanfranco and Massimo Stanzione . In the 1620s, Vouet's palette gradually lightened and became more differentiated and finer in color.

In France he introduced decisive innovations in the style of an Italian baroque and played a central pioneering role for the classically influenced, elegant French taste in art, which paved the way for his student Charles Le Brun . Simon Vouet is considered to be the actual founder of French painting in the sense of the baroque classic. His art reached its peak in the years between 1625 and 1640. Stylistically, he almost completely abandoned the shady Tenebrism - with exceptions such as the Entombment of Christ (Musée André Malraux, Le Havre ) - and developed a decorative and richly agitated baroque elegance of bright and chromatically differentiated colors. Some authors see an increased influence from Veronese . In his late work, such as B. in the offering in the temple of the Louvre, Vouet became more and more classical, his color palette more reserved and cooler. The involvement of the workshop also seems to increase in the late period and sometimes to impair quality.

Picture gallery

Works

(Selection)

  • Allegory of the human soul, before 1624, canvas, 179 × 144 cm.
  • Angels carry the instruments of the Passion , 1626, canvas, 131 × 77 cm, Musée des beaux-arts de Besançon
  • Allegory of Victory, around 1630, canvas, 243 × 115 cm.
  • Cupid and Psyche , canvas, 112 × 165 cm.
  • Portrait of a »Bravo«, canvas, 74 × 58 cm.
  • Portrait of a man, canvas, 88 × 74 cm.
  • Offering in the temple, canvas, 393 × 250 cm.
  • The apostles at the grave of Mary, 1629, canvas, 300 × 260 cm.
  • The impotence of St. Mary Magdalene, canvas, 100 × 80 cm.
  • Cladding of St. Francis, 1622–24, canvas, 185 × 252 cm
  • Allegorical representation of Anna of Austria as Minerva, around 1643, ( Hermitage , Saint Petersburg)

literature

  • Vouet, Simon , article in: Lexikon der Kunst , Vol. 12, Karl Müller Verlag, Erlangen, 1994, pp. 197-198
  • Jacques Bousquet: Documents sur le séjour de Simon Vouet à Rome , in: Mélanges de l'école francaise de Rome, Année 1952, 64 , pp. 287–300, online at Persée.fr (French; accessed June 13, 2020)
  • Dr. Otto Grautoff: Nicolas Poussin , Parkstone, New York, 2015
  • Charles Perrault: Simon Vouet - premier peintre du Roy , in: Des hommes illustre qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle, ... , A. Dezallier, Paris 1696–1700, pp. 89–90, online on the Gallica website . bnf.fr , the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French; accessed on June 13, 2020)
  • Simon Vouet, les années italiennes (1613-1627) , article on the exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes (November 21, 2008 to February 23, 2009), December 16, 2008, online at dessin original (French; accessed on March 13 , 2008) June 2020)

Web links

Commons : Simon Vouet  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Vouet, Simon , in: Lexikon der Kunst , Vol. 12, Karl Müller Verlag, Erlangen, 1994, pp. 197–198, here: 197
  2. ↑ a b c d e Simon Vouet, les années italiennes (1613-1627) , article on the exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes (November 21, 2008 to February 23, 2009), December 16, 2008, online at dessin original ( French; accessed June 13, 2020)
  3. ↑ a b Jacques Bousquet: Documents sur le séjour de Simon Vouet à Rome , in: Mélanges de l'école francaise de Rome, Année 1952, 64 , pp. 287-300, here: p. 288, online at Persée.fr ( French; accessed June 13, 2020)
  4. ^ Jacques Bousquet: Documents sur le séjour de Simon Vouet à Rome , in: Mélanges de l'école francaise de Rome, Année 1952, 64 , pp. 287-300, here: pp. 288-89 (footnote 4), online Persée.fr (French; accessed June 13, 2020)
  5. ↑ Vouet, Simon , in: Lexikon der Kunst , Vol. 12, Karl Müller Verlag, Erlangen, 1994, pp. 197-198
  6. ^ Jacques Bousquet: Documents sur le séjour de Simon Vouet à Rome , ..., here: p. 290 (Aubin V., Vignon, Tournier) and 294 (Poussin), online at Persée.fr
  7. ↑ a b Jacques Bousquet: Documents sur le séjour de Simon Vouet à Rome , ..., here: pp. 290-91 (and footnote 4), online at Persée.fr
  8. ↑ Jacques Bousquet: Documents sur le séjour de Simon Vouet à Rome , ..., here: p. 291, online at Persée.fr
  9. ↑ a b c d e Vouet, Simon , in: Lexikon der Kunst , Vol. 12, Karl Müller Verlag, Erlangen, 1994, pp. 197–198, here: 198
  10. ↑ Jacques Bousquet: Documents sur le séjour de Simon Vouet à Rome , in: Mélanges de l'école francaise de Rome, Année 1952, 64 , pp. 287-300, here: pp. 294-95, online at Persée.fr ( French; accessed June 13, 2020)
  11. ↑ Jacques Bousquet: Documents sur le séjour de Simon Vouet à Rome , in: Mélanges de l'école francaise de Rome, Année 1952, 64 , pp. 287-300, here: p. 298, online at Persée.fr (French; Accessed June 13, 2020)
  12. ↑ Jacques Bousquet: Documents sur le séjour de Simon Vouet à Rome , in: Mélanges de l'école francaise de Rome, Année 1952, 64 , pp. 287-300, here: p. 299, online at Persée.fr (French; Accessed June 13, 2020)
  13. ↑ a b Jacques Bousquet: Documents sur le séjour de Simon Vouet à Rome , in: Mélanges de l'école francaise de Rome, Année 1952, 64 , pp. 287–300, here: pp. 299–300, online on Persée. fr (French; accessed June 13, 2020)
  14. ↑ a b c d Charles Perrault: Simon Vouet - premier peintre du Roy , in: Des hommes illustre qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle, ..., A. Dezallier, Paris 1696–1700, pp. 89–90, here : 89; online on the Gallica.bnf.fr website , the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French; accessed on June 13, 2020)
  15. ↑ a b c Charles Perrault: Simon Vouet - premier peintre du Roy , in: Des hommes illustre qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle, ..., A. Dezallier, Paris 1696–1700, pp. 89–90, here: 90; online on the Gallica.bnf.fr website , the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French; accessed on June 13, 2020)
  16. ↑ Simon Vouet on the British Museum website (accessed June 13, 2020)
  17. ↑ a b Jean-Gilles Berizzi: Simon Vouet: La Présentation au Temple , article on the Louvre website (French (or English); accessed June 13, 2020)
  18. ↑ Simon Vouet , short biography in: Encyclopaedia Britannica (English; accessed on June 13, 2020)
  19. ↑ Ann Sutherland Harris: Simon Vouet , in: Seventeenth-century Art and Architecture , Laurence King Publishing, London, 2005, pp. 260–263: here 260; online as a Google Book (English; accessed June 13, 2020)
  20. ↑ Angèle Dequier: Simon Vouet: La Richesse , article on the Louvre website (French (or English); accessed June 13, 2020)
  21. ↑ Daniel Arnaudet: Simon Vouet: Moïse sauvés des eaux , article on the Louvre website (French (or English); accessed June 13, 2020)
  22. ↑ Dr. Otto Grautoff: Nicolas Poussin, Parkstone, New York, 2015, pp. 94 and 100
  23. ↑ Dr. Otto Grautoff: Nicolas Poussin, Parkstone, New York, 2015, p. 106
  24. ↑ Dr. Otto Grautoff: Nicolas Poussin, Parkstone, New York, 2015, p. 115
  25. ↑ a b Jacques Bousquet: Documents sur le séjour de Simon Vouet à Rome , in: Mélanges de l'école francaise de Rome, Année 1952, 64 , pp. 287–300, here: p. 287, online at Persée.fr ( French; accessed June 13, 2020)
personal data
SURNAME Vouet, Simon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French Baroque painter
DATE OF BIRTH January 9, 1590
PLACE OF BIRTH uncertain: Paris
DATE OF DEATH June 30, 1649
Place of death Paris