Exhibit of the week: Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Art in Early Renaissance France

Art Institute of Chicago

Through May 30

The curators must have missed the memo, said Chris Miller in Newcity. As other museums ride out the recession with clever repackagings of their permanent holdings, the Art Institute of Chicago is bucking the trend with a “blockbuster.” Reaching out to dozens of institutions to pull together many rarely seen paintings, tapestries, statues, and other objects, they’ve achieved a triumph: “A better survey of this time and place is likely not possible.” Tackling an underrated period of French history—the early 16th century—“Kings, Queens, and Courtiers” traces the fraught transition from the God-fearing Middle Ages to the secular Renaissance. Old habits died hard, especially for the court of Charles VIII, which “still savored that sweet medieval dream of a divine order, with the Madonna’s family at the top, the extended royal family one notch down, and beautiful angels floating freely in between.”

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For royals, buying art was a form of PR, said Lauren Weinberg in Time Out Chicago. Hiring the “it” sculptor or commissioning a portrait of the family hobnobbing with saints signaled rising power. In 1504, when Charles’s successor, Louis XII, became ill, his wife, Anne of Brittany, “hastened to have herself crowned, and hired the fabulously nicknamed Master of the Chronique Scandaleuse to paint her coronation.” Art also served more utilitarian purposes, said Margaret Hawkins in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Huge room-sized tapestries, woven in wool and silk, provided warmth in drafty stone-walled rooms. That they were also beautiful was integral to their design but not their sole purpose.” Likewise, stained-glass windows, first and foremost, had to be “sturdy.” After that, they were meant to “educate a pious but mostly illiterate public” with biblical stories told in purely “visual language.”

Not every showstopper here is monumental, said Lauren Viera in the Chicago Tribune. “Alongside massive tapestries and impossibly brilliant oil paintings,” smaller works—such as Jean Perreal’s illustrated poems in Little Book of Love—offer glimpses of daily life, romantic crushes, and other ephemera. The show’s centerpiece is quite literally a work concerned with the human heart. An “oddly shaped” but precious-looking object, it is embossed with an inscription spelling out its original purpose: “In this small vessel / Of pure fine gold / Rests the greatest heart / That any lady had in the world.” That’s right: This oversize gold locket, “hinges and clasp and all,” once contained the heart of Anne of Brittany, who died at 36 of natural causes. The very thought of such veneration is “thrilling” to entertain.