Soffit with Arabesques, Birds, Masks and a Star at the Centre
Unknown · 1500-1515
A long, narrow marble slab, over a metre and a half wide, is carved with a delicate pattern of arabesques: scrolling stems, birds, grotesque masks and a star at the centre. It is a soffit, the underside of a lintel or architrave, meant to be seen from below as you passed through a doorway or under a gallery. The ornament is Italian in every detail, the kind of candelabra-and-scroll decoration that Lombard carvers made fashionable, and it shows the first arrival of Renaissance taste in France around the year 1500.
The slab comes from the chateau of Gaillon in Normandy, rebuilt from 1502 to 1510 by Cardinal Georges d'Amboise, archbishop of Rouen, minister of Louis the Twelfth and viceroy of Milan. He employed both French and Italian artists and imported many works from Italy, and the building became the showcase of the early French Renaissance. Gaillon was largely dismantled after the Revolution, and its carved fragments were scattered; which pieces were made in Normandy and which in Italy is still debated. This soffit is now among the Gaillon remains preserved in the Louvre.
Did You Know? The pattern was designed to be read from underneath, by someone walking through a doorway and looking up.
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