Antoine Caron

de Dominique Cordellier, Frédéric Hueber, Ketty Gottardo

Coming from Beauvais artisans, Antoine Caron had a remarkable artistic rise, working for five successive kings and for the queen mother Catherine de Medici. His training in the province, then on the royal shipyards, allowed him to become a versatile artist, who could respond to the orders of the city as well as those of the court. Member of the Parisian painters' corporation, he has, for his lifetime, produced paintings and drawings that were transposed into techniques as diverse as illumination, painting, sculpture, engraving, tapestry and stained glass. The craze for his inventions was such that he was often copied during his lifetime. It was rediscovered in 1850 by Anatole de Montaiglon and studied by Gustave Lebel then by Jean Ehrmann, but his career still had many gray areas, and the corpus that was attributed to him remained heterogeneous. Based on the exploitation of new documents, on the examination of works as well as on the social realities of the profession of painter in France in the second half of the 16th century, this book proposes to return to the main stages of Antoine Caron's career. as well as his abundant production which, together with Jean Cousin and Baptiste Pellerin, is one of the most important artists of the French Renaissance.