Rebecca Zorach’s Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance offers a wide-ranging study of the elite visual culture of France under the Valois-Angoulême dynasty. In this book, based upon her dissertation at the University of Chicago, Zorach studies the many manifestations of the Fontainebleau style, from panel and wall paintings to sculpture, prints, ceramics, diplomatic gifts and royal entry decorations, costume, and the many copies after the antique that populated the galleries and gardens of the palace. The book’s plentiful, high-quality illustrations exemplify both the author’s arguments as well as the incredible fertility of artistic production during this period.

Zorach’s central argument is that visual art in France during the sixteenth century was marked by what she terms “figures of excess.” Paintings, prints, and other products of the Fontainebleau school are certainly notorious in art history for their superabundant use of ornament and their apparent origins in extremely recondite literary and mythological sources. Nevertheless, these works remain on the margins of the modern discipline of art history due to a historical bias against “decorative” arts as well as the works’ own resistance to interpretation, except in France, where they are studied and preserved as part of the national patrimony. The court’s own unapologetic appetite for copies of both antique and Italian works has also marginalized it in a discipline that has historically valued originality, while the large numbers of foreign artists involved (is Rosso Fiorentino “French”? “Italian”? Both? Neither?) have presented problems of academic classification.

In her book, Zorach fearlessly confronts the opacity and hyperabundance of this unusual visual language. She demonstrates that a multiplicity of meanings, many of which we may never recover or fully understand, were as much a part of these works as the plethora of ornamentation that threatens to overtake or erase them (and often succeeds, as in the case of Jacques Androuet Ducerceau’s frames within frames). She structures her study around the notion of fluidity; the four elements she chooses—blood, milk, ink, and gold—are all substances which were understood as “metaphors for the production of value” (27) during the sixteenth century, in whose abundance the nation prospered, and in whose absence the nation declined. Where modern viewers may perceive only eccentricity and willful obscurity, Zorach discerns the presence of these elements and their corresponding sociopolitical values in the many works produced by the Fontainebleau school.

Although the structure of the book is not explicitly chronological, the ordering and differing emphases on the four elements allow for an underlying sense of progression through the reigns of the Valois-Angoulême kings. In the chapter “Blood,” the reader begins with Francis I’s signature theme of male sacrifice and the resulting abundant generativity (despite repeated military defeat) in the Galerie François Ier at Fontainebleau. In “Milk,” Zorach traces the obsessive use of breast imagery by the artists of Francis, his son (Henri II), and his grandson (Charles IX), whether explicitly in antique-style statues or implicitly in heavy festoons of stucco fruit. Here, the effortless productivity of France is literally expressed by the many spectacularly lactating female figures in court portraits and mythological imagery who perform what Zorach terms the “breast press.” In “Gold,” the clarity of his predecessors’ vision collapses under Henri III’s reign, in which the debasement of French currency leads to criticism of his and his court’s (perceived) excessive spending on ephemeral goods and entertainments, such as fashionable clothing and the famous “Balet comique de la Royne” (1581). The chapter on “Ink” does not explicitly lend itself to this subsumed chronology, but its intensive study of the Fontainebleau print culture demonstrates how the excess that figured a positive abundance under the first two Valois kings was disseminated beyond the immediate court environment through the medium of the print. This increased visibility of the court’s signature style subjected it to both emulation and criticism; hence these visual metaphors for abundance were eventually perceived as decadence under Henri III, a monarch whose sexuality was seen not as fertile (as in the case of his grandfather’s and father’s numerous heirs), but rather as perverse due to his lack of offspring and his bevy of young male favorites, the mignons.

Zorach clearly sees the Fontainebleau style, embodied in new works as well as copies and even copies of copies, as an expression of power springing from the intersection between politics and sexuality. The success of a French royal dynasty necessarily depended upon the virility of the king in producing a similarly robust son, and initially Francis I and his heirs presented a vigorous contrast to their predecessor Louis XII, who remarried twice in a desperate attempt to engender a male heir. The imagery and literature of sixteenth-century France is erotic in its essence, and Zorach repeatedly cautions the reader not to be too quick to leap from a sexually explicit image to its Neoplatonic philosophical underpinning. Such prurient post-Victorian impulses lead us to miss the impact these images were expected to have on viewers at the time, whose level of comfort with erotica was, oddly, much greater than ours is today.

By grounding her discussions of these images in the experiences of their original audience, Zorach persuasively argues that the viewer’s response to the work was actively anticipated by the artists of the Fontainebleau school and encoded into their works. The art is thus inherently dialogic, to the degree that even incorrect interpretations are an essential part of the conversation. In her discussion of the decorative program of the Galerie François Ier, Zorach stresses the total experience of the work, which was intended to exceed both the intellectual and physical capacity of the individual to grasp it. The viewer was dependent upon the king to interpret it, and the act of interpretation became another performance of the king’s power and an illustration of his authority—and authorship—over the experience. The necessary presence of the authoring king (Francis, in the case of the Galerie) contributed to the works’ loss of meaning to successive generations, illustrated by the almost casual giveaway of the Cellini saltcellar to a Hapsburg archduke (in gratitude for his role in the wedding of Charles IX and Elizabeth of Austria) less than forty years after its commissioning.

As Zorach demonstrates, the art of the Fontainebleau school was courtly but not rarefied. Instead, she shows how it continually intersected with and confronted contemporary political issues, as each monarch attempted, in different ways, to exercise his creative authority over the nation. She distinguishes between each monarch’s “renaissance,” inherently different due to changing circumstances and personal vision. In his attempt to establish an alternative national mythology, Francis’s renaissance is characterized by his enthusiastic adoption of Classical motifs and mythology, in which French citizens would rally around the sacrificial figure of their king, regardless of their Catholic or Protestant beliefs. Zorach persuasively reinterprets the “Death of Adonis” fresco—a work “that has not seemed particularly problematic to most interpreters, but should have [been]” (59) —as an evocation of the story of Cybele and Attis, wherein the castration of Attis explicitly de-Christianizes the idea of blood sacrifice and evokes ancient Gaulish priestly practices, all the while incorporating the familiar figure of the dead Christ. Francis’s iconographic project was a failure, however, and by the time of Henri III, this abundance had been recast as excess as a result of economic inflation and the young king’s overturning of land-based hierarchy in favor of his elevation of the mignons at court.

This study presents evidence for the beginnings of the pattern of collective self-presentation that the French royal court would continue through the rest of its existence, as it periodically embarked on extremely ambitious programs of symbolic visual culture with initially tight message control that gradually became debased over time through overexposure and satire, both of which were facilitated by the mechanical reproduction of prints. Thus Louis XIV’s Versailles, the literal embodiment of centralized power, became instead an isolated bower under subsequent child and adolescent kings, while Marie Antoinette’s use of costume as a way to express unity with her new subjects after her coronation was eventually used against her, as she was criticized for her excessive expenses and attention to fleeting fashion (and, like Henri III, her adherence to normative sexuality was questioned in political cartoons and published scandal sheets).

The art of Fontainebleau has been studied with the most depth by French scholars, such as Sylvie Béguin (L’Ecole de Fontainebleau: Le maniérisme à la cour de France, Paris: Editions Gonthier-Seghers, 1960) and André Chastel (French Art: The Renaissance, 1430–1620 (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), whose work centers on the object, in the French art-historical tradition. Zorach’s work serves as a complement to Henri Zerner’s wider-ranging survey of the French Renaissance (L’art de la Renaissance en France: L’invention du classicisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1996) and provides a counterpart to Terence Cave’s The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), updating it with a more modern concept of the visual as “text,” where images overflow with significance for both makers and viewers. By acknowledging modern concerns with the economic and political implications of excess, Zorach enriches her study and provides concrete reasons to use the term “early modern” for this period, even though the images themselves are complex and, now, obscure.