William Poundstone’s Los Angeles County Museum on Fire

With its recent purchase of a bronze Double Head attributed to Primaticcio, the Getty Museum has the two most significant School of Fontainebleau sculptures in America (the other being the Cellini Satyr). The acquisition is the latest expression of America’s fascination with the Chateau Fontainebleau, the French Renaissance pleasure dome of François I and his heirs. To be sure, most Americans know “Fontainebleau” only as a hotel in Miami Beach, resort of the Rat Pack and not royals. That establishment (above), the apex of Morris Lapidus’ eclectic modernism, looks nothing like the French palace. Miamians pronounce it “fountain-blue.” Yet the name records a moment when the School of Fontainebleau was in the air—synonymous with hedonism and even existentialism.

In 1954—the same year that Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau opened—Dr. and Mrs. Herbert Kalmus gave the Los Angeles County Museum its Rosso Fiorentino Allegory of Salvation (right). It was the first Rosso in an American museum and, not incidentally, the museum’s first Renaissance painting of any consequence. A decade after painting it, Rosso left Italy, recruited by French king François I to decorate Fontainebleau. Rosso was joined a few years later by another Italian, Francesco Primaticcio. Rosso died young (suicide said Vasari, that unreliable narrator), leaving Primaticcio to carry on for the next 30 years. Primaticcio’s job description ranged from architect to arts administrator to event planner. He must have supervised hundreds of talented artists and artisans in decorating and furnishing Fontainebleau. Many of their names are unknown. The most famous name of all was Benvenuto Cellini, who worked for François for five rocky years. Cellini managed to produce the famous gold Salt Cellar and the bronze Nymph of Fontainebleau in the Louvre—to which the Getty Satyr is related.

Back to the 20th century. The Fontainebleau school was an expression of mannerism, long dismissed as derivative and irrational and bad. Modernist critics decided that mannerism was so far out it was in. To that Fontainebleau added erotic heat. Check out the Louvre painting of a woman pinching her sister’s nipple.

“The long-despised Mannerists have at last been rescued from the dustbin and brushed off, to become Europe’s latest vogue,” wrote Time magazine in 1955. The article referred to the exhibition, “The Triumph of European Mannerism,” then touring Europe.

The title of a 1965 book by Arnold Hauser laid out the thesis—Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art. Mannerism was reinvented as Giacometti minus 400 years. It was all about the existential alienation of 16th-century man.

Whatever. American museums jumped on the bandwagon. In 1958 Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts bought its great Rosso Fiorentino, The Dead Christ with Angels, for a then-staggering $85,000 (above). In 1964 the Toledo Museum of Art bought a Primaticcio painting, Ulysses and Penelope (right). It relates directly to a fresco painting at Fontainebleau and is one of the few paintings believed to be by Primaticcio’s hand.

That was one problem with the School of Fontainebleau. It was hard to tell who did what. Primaticcio’s greatest achievement was said to have been the Gallery of Ulysses at Fontainebleau, but it was painted by assistants and has largely been destroyed.

Up until now, the most impressive Fontainebleau acquisition of recent years was a marble relief, called The Reign of Jupiter (below), that the Metropolitan Museum bought in 1997. Embodying the Primaticcio aesthetic, it’s assigned to an unknown artist, c. 1550-1570.

How did the Getty get two big-name Fontainebleau bronzes? The Cellini Satyr (below) came with the Erich Lederer collection of Renaissance bronzes purchased in 1985. It’s a relic cast, probably made after Cellini skipped town. He’d been accused of stealing (again).

The Double Head is a rediscovery. When in the collection of Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent, it was simply an interesting French bronze by somebody, from some time around 1600. Research by Christie’s suggested it was earlier. The catalog description read,

“It is interesting to note that at Fontainebleau there was listed in the 1707 Royal inventory of bronzes ‘au dessus de la porte du jardin de l’Etang: Une Teste de femme a double visage, de quatorze a quinze pouce’ (‘over the door of the Pond Garden: a female double-faced head, between 14 and 15 inches; inv. 0/1/976 A, p. 979). Although smaller than the present example, it does show that such heads were in use in France in the 17th century.”

That was a goof, it now appears. The bronze is in fact 15 inches high, on a modern porphyry stand that  raises the combined height to 21-1/2 inches. It’s now believed that the 1707 inventory is talking about the Double Head at the Getty.

Speculation that it was by Primaticcio led to a huge price at the 2009 auction ($2.6 million)—though not from the Getty. It was acquired by Galerie J. Kugel, Paris. It showed it, identifying it as “the only bronze by Primaticcio still in private hands.” In the two years since the auction, research has generally bolstered that idea.

It’s one of a group of bronzes after Roman antiquities that Primaticcio (and many helpers) produced for Fontainebleau. Vasari remarked that Primaticcio used the best bronze casters. The Double Head is not a straightforward, Thing-O-Matic copy. It’s a Janus-like head where the usual male faces are replaced with faces from the famous female statue, the Cesi Juno. Deciding exactly how to meld two faces would seem to require the attention of a master.

The Getty owns a small collection of Fontainebleau/French Renaissance works, including a pair of bronze figural andirons bearing François’ emblem, the salamander; a painting of an eclipse by the ever-weird Antoine Caron (ex-collection of art historian/Soviet spy Sir Anthony Blunt); and a spectacular ten-foot-high cabinet once owned by Norton Simon. Cheapskate J. Paul Getty defied curators to spend $1700 on it in 1971.

In the 1980s the Getty scooped up drawings by Rosso, Primaticcio, Étienne Delaune, Luca Penni, and Nicolò Dell’Abate. In the past few years, it’s added several additional School of Fontainebleau works, most notably a large (22-inch) Pan Cuts the Reed (above) by an unknown Fontainebleau school artist, mid-16th century.

Fontainebleau, the real French one, is now a museum like the Louvre and Versailles. The redecorating didn’t stop with the death of Primaticcio. Much of what today’s visitor sees is Empire style, dating from the time of Napoleon. Meanwhile the Fontainebleau school won one of American kitschdom’s honors in 1993 — a tableaux vivant in Laguna Beach’s Pageant of Masters. Two gilded actors portrayed Cellini’s Salt Cellar.