The Annunciation

The Annunciation

Martin Fréminet

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The decoration of the Chapel of the Trinity at the chateau of Fontainebleau occupied the senior artists of the French court for many years. Following the deaths of Toussaint Dubreuil in 1602 and Étienne Dumonstier II in 1603, Henri IV summoned Fréminet back from Italy to take over the project. This recently discovered sheet was an early idea for the lunette depicting the Annunciation above the high altar. Typical of Fréminet’s style of Mannerist revival is the inverted composition, where the central figures of the Virgin and the archangel Gabriel are calm and diminutive in the middle ground while the foreground corners of the lunette are filled with densely packed subsidiary figures in poses of elegant contortion. Fréminet’s muscular, Michelangesque style had a strong impact on the development of the second school of Fontainebleau. A large presentation drawing by Fréminet in the Louvre, Paris for the high altar shows the lunette as it was painted, with some changes from the Metropolitan’s study, most notably the figure of the angel Gabriel was changed to standing. However, the altar was ultimately built to a different design, begun eleven years after Fréminet’s death, which obscured a large portion of the Annunciation fresco.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.