Bayard Refusing the Presents of His Hostess, in Brescia
Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (French, 1767-1824)
c. 1789
- Medium
- Black and brown chalk, with stumping, and pen and brown ink, heightened with white goauche, on off-white laid paper
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 36.4 × 51.3 cm (14 3/8 × 20 1/4 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- H. Karl and Nancy von Maltitz Endowment
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Considered a model of chivalric behavior, the Chevalier Bayard (1473–1524), a French commander active in the so-called Italian Wars (1494–1559), was wounded during the fall of the city of Brescia in 1512. Bayard is taken to the home of a local noblewoman to recuperate, and she offers him a fortune in ransom money for her family’s protection that he gallantly refuses. In his drawing, Girodet mingles the emerging French vogue for the Middle Ages with the reigning taste for the antique. Bayard looks like an ancient Roman hero, while at the same time, the dress and trappings of the scene are medieval in a highly romanticized way.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
