One of the distinctive art forms of the French Renaissance, enamel painting flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the city of Limoges, in southwest-central France. The production of enamel—essentially powdered glass on a metal substrate—required highly specialized skills, with artists of the Limoges workshops marshaling a variety of materials and techniques to achieve the desired colors, opacities, and other effects. The objects displayed in these cases represent the handful of dominant workshops that operated over generations to satisfy the demand for Limoges enamels across Europe. This includes the workshop of Suzanne de Court, who is the only known female head of a workshop active in Limoges.
Like all of these objects, the saltcellars indicate the wealth and status of their owners. Technical analysis of the Orpheus saltcellars, signed by Suzanne de Court, suggests that they were rarely, if ever, used to hold salt, then a very costly luxury. They were perhaps used primarily for display.
The subjects depicted on the objects displayed here represent the interests of their patrons: chiefly religious and mythological subjects as well as portraits, which were typically made at a small scale. The ambitious plaque of the Triumph of the Eucharist and the Catholic Faith, by Léonard Limousin, combines religious subject matter with a rare group portrait of the powerful Guise family.
The Triumph of the Eucharist and the Catholic Faith
This ambitious plaque is a propagandistic, if private, retelling of the shifting religious ideals and political struggles of the powerful Guise family. In the center is Jean de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, in a red robe and biretta, walking beside his older brother, Claude, first Duke of Guise. Behind the brothers—both of whom died in 1550, more than ten years before the plaque was commissioned—a chariot carrying Claude’s wife, Antoinette de Bourbon, tramples a group of Protestant heretics as she displays a chalice and host. This scene represents the triumph of the doctrine of transubstantiation—the belief in the transformation of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the actual body and blood of Christ— a central issue of the Counter-Reformation and French Wars of Religion. Antoinette’s eldest son, François, second Duke of Guise, pushes the triumphal procession forward while the youngest, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, walks toward them with a text in his hands, offering a compromise to the Catholic Church’s controversial position on the Eucharist. Charles’s personal emblem and motto— an ivy-covered obelisk bearing the Latin phrase TE STANTE VIREBO (With you standing, I shall flourish)—are painted at the right.
Source: Vignon, Charlotte. The Frick Collection Decorative Arts Handbook. New York: The Frick Collection/Scala, 2015.
J. Pierpont Morgan, London and New York. Duveen. Frick, 1916.
Source: Enamels, Rugs and Silver in The Frick Collection. Volume VIII. New York: The Frick Collection, 1977.
