Unusually, this exhibition was staged in two centres (or four, if you include the permanent display of the remnants of the stalls from the upper chapel at the château de Gaillon, in lower Normandy, at the abbey of St Denis, and Michel Colombe’s altar retable and other pieces in the Louvre). The theme of the specialist contributions in this exhibition ‘book’, rather than ‘catalogue’, is that of the lavish artistic patronage of two generations of the d’Amboise family, of ancient but modest aristocratic origins in the Loire valley. Of the nine male children of Pierre d’Amboise (d 1473?), chamberlain to King Louis xi, governor of Touraine and provost of Blois, three became high officers of state, or eminent soldiers, and six leading churchmen. The latter were Jean (d 1498), bishop of Langres, Aimery (d 1512), Grand Master of the Order of St John, Louis i (d 1503), bishop of Albi, Pierre (1450?–1505), bishop of Poitiers, Jacques (1450–1516), bishop of Clermont and abbot of Cluny, and Georges i (1460–1510), cardinal-archbishop of Rouen. From the succeeding generation of male descent, five became clerics, of whom two were bishops, Louis ii (1477–1517), cardinal-bishop of Albi, and Jean ii (1473?–1512), bishop of Langres. Georges ii (1487–1550) followed his uncle, Georges i, as cardinal-archbishop of Rouen. There were two monastic appointees, François, prior of Saint-Lazare, and Geoffroi (d 1518), abbot of Cluny. As ecclesiastical patrons, the older generation had the most impact, with the exception of Louis ii, who commissioned Italian muralists to paint the nave vaults at Albi.

The first part of the book is focused on Abbot Jacques’s chapel in his Cluniac Paris residence. Due to the paucity of documentation, it is not possible to be too precise about its dating. In their essay on its architecture and sculptural decoration, Agnès Bos and Xavier Dectot conclude that it was probably completed at the end of the 1490s. With the aid of a pre-Revolutionary watercolour, and the surviving evidence in the chapel itself, an attempt is made to reconstruct the space’s original appearance. The roof vaulting, the surviving components of the Pietà, formerly standing behind the altar, the sculptural elements in the apse ceiling above, as well as the north Italian mural paintings of Mary Cleophas and Mary Salome (discussed by Cécile Scailliérez), and the sole surviving stained-glass window (Sophie Lagabrielle), convince one of the outstanding artistic importance of the ensemble. Within fifteen years of completion, the hôtel was briefly used as a residence by Mary Tudor, after the death of Louis xii. Afterwards it was divided into apartments, and not used again by the abbey except once or twice in the eighteenth century. The authors believe that, during the short period of its occupation by the Cluniacs, there may never have been an appointed priest-in-charge, nor even a permanent altar. The chapel’s purpose would have been for the occasional use of the abbot and visiting Cluniac priests, to fulfil their obligation to say Mass regularly. They suggest that, on such occasions, probably a portable altar would have been placed upon the permanent altar table.

The second part of the book is a discussion of the three other Amboisian episcopal chapels. Two short essays address the lost chapel, of before 1491, in the summer residence of Louis i at Combefa, a few miles north of Albi (Jacques Dubois), and Pierre’s private chapel at the château de Dissay, just north of Poitiers, of before 1505 (Thierry Crépin-Leblond). From Combefa, a fine polychromed stone Entombment with two-thirds life-size figures of mourners, oak choir stalls and a traceried wooden door were subsequently granted sanctuary in the parish church. Although the grand collegiate mortuary church at Dissay is lost, its relationship to the bishop’s apartments can be distinguished. The latter were directly linked to the first floor of a tower next to the chevet of the collegiate church by means of a gallery. This led into an oratory, from which the bishop could view the high altar. In the château, his private chapel is covered in decorative and figurative wall and ceiling painting. Unfortunately, the narrative scenes, particularly the image of the Fountain of Life at the west end, are badly damaged by vandalism and restoration. The painter can be compared to the executant of a scheme at the hotel Sardini at Blois, who was a Frenchman.

It is frustrating that so little of the window glass from these chapels has survived. In Paris there is only one panel extant, and there are total lacunae at Gaillon and Combefa. Michel Hérold speculates on the identity of the glazier. The building accounts are inconclusive, yet Étienne Hamon’s recent attribution of the château’s original architectural plans to the master mason, Colin Biart, a denizen of the Loire valley, whose presence is recorded at Gaillon, tempted Hamon to nominate Antoine Chenesson, in place of one of the traditionally attributed Rouenais glaziers. Chenesson is frequently mentioned in the accounts, particularly during the critical period of 1508–9, when ‘Chenesson d’Orleans’ received substantial payments, including regular work and ‘verrines d’Orléans … qu’il a livrez et livra au château’ (418 livres). The latter implies that some of the glass, at least, was manufactured in Chenesson’s Orleans workshop. At Dissay, in the nineteenth century, fifteen painted glass panels were discovered amongst the ruins of the château. Unfortunately, they are only of journeyman quality and, as Hérold remarks, from a region quite undistinguished in the production of stained glass.

At this point the Château de Gaillon deservedly receives a generous thirty-six pages of discussion. Xavier Pagazani’s architectural analysis is useful, with its plans of the chapel at three different levels. The informative sixteenth-century drawing of the building’s riverside, from the Kronstadt Collection in the Stockholm National Museum, provides a surprising amount of reliable detail. The essay on the woodwork in the upper chapel, by Bos and Dubois, is a welcome and measured statement of current art-historical thinking, particularly on the monument’s formally contentious dating. The academic consensus now seems to be that, apparently by means of a Herculean effort, and with the aid of some thirty joiners, the stalls were more or less finished before George d’Amboise’s death in 1510. There will always be disagreement, it seems, about exactly how many of the craftsmen, named in the accounts, sometimes with Frenchified spellings, were Italian.

An important advance in our understanding of this furniture would be the ability to reconstruct the arrangement of both screens and clergy stalls, not to mention the other furnishings. The issue is contentious and, unfortunately, the putative reconstruction of a major screen and the ground plan are not wholly satisfactorily addressed. A major hurdle is that there are few archaeological pointers to the layout of the upper chapel, and its interior structural format. Several ancient texts confirm that there was a raised oratory at the north-east end for the cardinal-archbishop, and it has been assumed that there was a similar feature to the south. These ‘galleries’, with the cavernous spaces beneath them, would have largely obscured the pair of double-sided windows in the lower zone of the chapel. They would have been barely visible from the chancel floor. The recorded carved terracotta figures of Christ and the twelve apostles must have been placed in front of the echelon of six single and four double windows that embraced the ‘chancel’ space, at the level of the springing of the vaults. Given the documented lavishness of the furnishings and decoration at the east end, the authors’ attempt in their reconstruction to accommodate the stalls as well seems too much like trying to get a quart into a pint pot.

One of the delightful features of the chapel’s furniture is the juxtaposition of both Gothic and Italianate decoration on the same object. This is particularly noticeable on the surviving screen work. This often-found duality of the French Première Renaissance was stressed by Henri Zerner in a review of Thomson Reference Thomson1984, which is worth consulting in respect of Abbot Jacques’s Parisian Cluniac palace.

The authors’ ingenious reconstruction, from the fragments at Écouen, of a complete ‘choir screen’ shows it standing at the west end of a notional chancel. The space to the east, however, is little more than 10m in length from screen to high altar. The attempt to fit the stalls into this space is, surely, unrealistic, given that we cannot even be sure how many stalls there originally were. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that a close examination of the end stalls shows that there must have originally been return stalls, a fact that was not reflected in Viollet-le-Duc’s reassemblage, now at the abbey of St Denis, Paris. In the new plan, return stalls have not been allowed for. But why bother to decorate both sides of the screen so carefully, only for the reverse to be obscured by a large body of stalls? In fact the original siting of this screen is unknown, and, in any case, even if the stalls had abutted it in this way, the chancel area would have been uncomfortably crowded. Also one has to bear in mind the placement of the sculpted donor and other figures, which were also recorded as having been at the east end.

There are a number of other problems raised by the placement of the stalls in the chancel area, which one cannot go into here. A more convincing estimate of the original tally of stalls might be arrived at through the careful measurement of the five refugee panels from the Gaillon seat backs, now at Écouen, Berlin and New York, an archaeological examination of Viollet-le-Duc’s reassemblage at St Denis, and a search through his papers in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The two single ranges of four prie-dieux, always presumed to have fronted the stalls, would also need to be carefully examined. The formula favoured by this reviewer would have been to place the stalls at the east end of the ‘nave’ space, with the major screen further west, somewhat on the lines of an Oxbridge collegiate chapel. This would, however, have made the space between the entrance at the west end and the screen more of a lobby than an ante-chapel. Doubtless, this suggestion will have its critics, but it is based on the known limits imposed by such confined spaces, and the absence of need to screen off a chancel space in a traditional way in what was, in any case, a private chapel.

The authors suggest that at Gaillon, as was the case to a lesser extent five years later on the Amiens Cathedral stalls, an Italianate decorative carving style was grafted by native carvers on to a set of northern French Flamboyant choir stalls. They must have been using models provided by their Italian colleagues. Only the marquetry element at Gaillon is unique for its date in France. Even here, however, given its Italian technique and its superficial appearance, it is perhaps surprising to learn, as the authors perceptively point out, that the figure drawing is equally filtered through a Gallic perception.

Now that the exhibitions have closed, it is heartening that the monuments and much of the associated material will continue to be accessible. This up-to-date and generously illustrated book certainly sheds more light on these crucial early Première Renaissance monuments. The period of French art history, into which these chapels fall, is not well known outside France, and is still, pace Anthony Blunt, generally poorly understood. Crépin-Leblond, the guiding spirit behind this initiative, was, in the final analysis, reluctant to claim that in any way there was an ‘Amboisian’ style. This is sensible, given the differences in the protagonists’ vocational backgrounds. In spite of the depredations of the French Revolution, however, it is still possible to affirm that four clerical members of the older generation of the d’Amboise family were probably responsible for creating the most important episcopal chapels of their time.