The Judgement of Paris
Pierre Courteys (c. 1520–1591)
2nd half of the 16th century
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Limoges enjoyed two golden periods as a centre for the manufacture of enamels. The first was in the middle ages – roughly from the twelfth century to 1370, the year when the city was sacked by Edward the Black Prince, which in effect killed it off – while the second was in the sixteenth century. Although these later enamels frequently adorn plates, ewers, and other at least potentially functional items, they are almost without exception the equivalents of pictures, and some – such as the present series of rectangular plaques – have no ostensible functional purpose and are instead purely decorative.
As was the case with the ‘istoriato’ (narrative) maiolica that was being produced in Italy at very much the same period, sixteenth-century Limoges enamels were not infrequently based upon print sources, whether for whole compositions or individual figures. Most are in black and white, which only increases the links with the world of prints, but – as here – they can also be resplendently coloured. It is no surprise, therefore, that six of the present group are directly derived from etchings by Jean Mignon after drawings in the Louvre by Luca Penni, an Italian associate of Giulio Romano, who moved to France around 1530. The seventh and last, on the other hand, is adapted from a fresco by Rosso Fiorentino, whose subject matter is far from clear but which is not part of the story of Troy, in the Galerie François Premier at Fontainebleau. This final scene is obviously meant to be read as the flight of Aeneas and his father Anchises from Troy, and it is the inclusion of a woman being carried by a second man, together with the absence of Aeneas’s son, Ascanius, from the scene that makes it an uneasy fit. For the rest, the plaques depict ‘Cassandra Stopping Deiphobus from Killing Paris’, ‘The Judgement of Paris’, The ‘Abduction of Helen’, a ‘Battle before the Walls of Troy’, ‘The Trojan Horse being Hauled into the City’, and ‘The Fall of Troy’, which almost without exception make perfect sense in this context.
Almost nothing is known about Pierre Courteys, but he may well have been a pupil or associate of Pierre Reymond. What is plain is that he was a favourite of the King, since he executed at least twelve gigantic reliefs, each nearly five and a half feet high, for the Château de Madrid (nine are now in the Musée de Cluny, and the other three in the United Kingdom), and sixteen Dürer-inspired plaques which were incorporated into a splendid altarpiece for the Château d’Ecouen (now in the Louvre). It is far from inconceivable that these plaques were another royal commission, not least since the French kings traced their legendary descent from Aeneas, a connection celebrated at much this time in poetic form in Pierre Ronsard’s epic ‘Franciade’, who began writing it in the 1540s, but whose first four books were not published until 1572. Certainly, the popularity of this sort of subject matter is attested to by the existence of a much more extensive and significantly earlier series of polychrome enamel plaques of unknown authorship based upon the ‘Aeneid’.
- Material/technique
- enamel on copper
- Measurements
- 43 × 54 cm
- Acquisition
- acquired by Prince Joseph Wenzel I von Liechtenstein
- Artists/makers/authors
- Pierre Courteys
- Inventory number
- SK 220
- Signature/inscriptions content only available in German
- sign. unten rechts in Gold: COURTEYS
- Provenance
- acquired in 1738/40 by Prince Joseph Wenzel I von Liechtenstein, presumably during his stay in Paris
- Place of origin
- Limoges
- Iconography
- The Judgement of Paris
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