Procession Of The League - French School At The End Of The 16th Century

Oil on canvas rented. French school from the end of the 16th century, entourage of François Bunel le Jeune (1522 - 1599).
Our painting, a true historical testimony, represents an episode in Parisian life at the end of the 16th century. The composition features one of the processions organized in Paris between 1590 and 1593 by the League, the union of the most intransigent Catholics. In the heart of the Ile de la Cité, in front of the stalls that unfold at the foot of Notre-Dame (in the background), a procession made up of soldiers and armed monks is acclaimed by the crowd who witness the noisy parade. The Holy League was formed at the height of the wars of religion and in 1589, it did not accept the accession to the throne of France by a Protestant, Henri IV. She fights him as she fought her predecessor, Henri III, accused of too much religious tolerance and who had one of her leaders, the Duke of Guise, assassinated. In Paris, the capital city that refuses its new king, these spectacular processions of armed clerics are a means of bringing terror to the population and showing the determination of ultra-Catholics. Only the conversion of Henri IV to Catholicism in 1593 will calm the spirits. Numerous works, attributed to François Bunel le Jeune or to painters of his entourage, depicting these processions of the League are kept in French museums: at the Carnavalet museum in Paris (fig. 1 and 2), in the collections of museums in Rouen, Bourges, Valenciennes and Pau (fig. 3) or even at the Palace of Versailles. The theme of the League procession is cleverly exploited by propaganda hostile to the Parisian League. Popularized by the poets of the Satyr Ménippée (1593), this theme also nourishes a whole family of paintings whose authorship is initially attributed to François Bunel, an artist loyal to Henri de Navarre.

François Bunel II dit le Jeune (Blois 1522 - Paris 1599): Born in Blois around 1522 and active in this city, the portrait painter François Bunel is the son of the painter also named François and known as Bunel le Vieux. In 1583, he was attached to the service of the King of Navarre, the future Henry IV, as a painter and valet de chambre. If he painted the sovereign before 1583, as a child Henri IV kept in the Versailles museum and a Procession of the League belonging to a private collection may suggest, none of his paintings representing the Béarnais in his maturity has reached until today, with the exception of two prints (fig. 4), both in a single copy.