| The French sixteenth-century School of Fontainebleau produced a large number of paintings, with numerous copies and variants, depicting nude women, often with elaborate coiffures, jewelry, or transparent drapery that emphasizes the nudity and heightens the eroticism. Many are in bathing or hunting settings; some include allegorical or mythological allusions. The aura of sexuality in these apparent portraits is pervasive and unique, but many scholars have ignored this element. Little is known about the subjects, artists, dates, patrons, or purpose of these works.;This dissertation has two purposes: to investigate the identity of the sitters and to explore the uniqueness of the eroticism. A number of these works have been thought to depict Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henri II, or Gabrielle d'Estrees, mistress of Henri IV; such suggestions are generally unwarranted. This study concludes that, of some eighty paintings considered here, only five can be plausibly linked to these ladies.;Beyond the question of identification, the broader meaning of these images revolves around their unmistakable eroticism, which is presented with unprecedented directness. These paintings were at the same time both portraits and stereotypes, suggesting a specific identity while simultaneously submerging that identity to depict a more general erotic ideal.;Their iconography was influenced by contemporary attitudes and practices about sex, marriage, prostitution, courtesans, and mistresses. The sophisticated eroticism exhibited in these pictures is closely related to the emerging institution of the royal mistress; both made public a reality that had previously existed in more private and hidden forms. In similar fashion, contemporary literature shared the overtly sexual atmosphere of the paintings. Finally, typological precedents for nudity and allegory in portraiture were provided by both classical antiquity and Renaissance Italy. These sources are all explored in this study.;Several features appear for the first time in this dissertation: the division of the images into composition types, the number of versions discussed, the chronology of when these paintings were first identified as Diane or Gabrielle, the suggestion of a possible connection between bath subjects and childbirth, and the assembling of numerous opinions about attribution, dating, and subject in a typological catalogue. |
