François I (1494–1547), King of France

Girolamo della Robbia

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Portrayed here at age thirty-five, François I sports a faint smile and a beard, which he is said to have adopted a few years earlier to hide scars from an accident. The king also wears a shirt adorned with double knots shaped like figure eights—an emblem of the House of Savoie, from which he descended through his mother, Louise, duchesse d’Angoulême. Modeled on roundels of ancient rulers that decorated François’s now-destroyed château de Madrid, the bust was commissioned by a courtier, Louis Prévost de Sansac (1496–1576), to hang above the entrance to the château de Sansac in Loches, Indre-et-Loire.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art