Editing Simon Vouet (section)

==Legacy==
[[File:Vouet--St Francis of Paola resuscitating a child--1648--Quebec-- église-Saint-Henri-de-Lévis.jpg|thumb|260px|[[Francis of Paola|''St Francis of Paola'']] ''Resuscitating a Child'' (1648), L'église-Saint-Henri de Lévis, Quebec, "the apogee of French seventeenth-century painting."]]
As one art historian writes, "When Vouet returned to Paris in 1627, French art was painfully provincial and, by Italian standards, more than a quarter of a century behind the times. Vouet introduced the latest fashions, educated a group of talented young artists—and the public as well—and brought Paris up to date."<ref name="Posner" />

Vouet's style became uniquely his own, but was distinctly Italian, importing the Italian Baroque into France. A French contemporary, lacking the term "Baroque," said, "In his time the art of painting began to be practiced here in a nobler and more beautiful way than ever before." In his anticipation of the "two-dimensional, curvilinear freedom of rococo compositions a hundred years later...Vouet should perhaps be counted among the more important sources of eighteenth-century painting."{{r|Crelly|p=60}} In his works for the French royal court, "Vouet's importance as a formulator of official decorations is in some ways comparable to that of [[Rubens]]."{{r|Crelly|p=85}}

[[File:Vouet-Dorignt--Anne of Austria initials--grotesques--1647.jpg|thumb|left|An engraving by [[Michel Dorigny]] reproduces a section of the elaborate murals Vouet painted in the Palais-Royal in Paris for [[Anne of Austria]], a decorative scheme no longer extant.]]
Vouet's sizeable ''atelier'' or workshop produced a whole school of French painters for the following generation. His most influential pupil was [[Charles le Brun]], who organized all the interior decorative painting at [[Palace of Versailles|Versailles]] and dictated the official style at the court of [[Louis XIV of France]], but who jealously excluded Vouet from the [[Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture|Académie Royale]] in 1648.
 
Vouet's other students included [[Valentin de Boulogne]] (the main figure of the French [[Michelangelo Merisi|"''Caravaggisti''"]]), [[François Perrier (painter)|François Perrier]], [[Nicolas Chaperon]], [[Michel Corneille the Elder]], [[Charles Poërson]], [[Pierre Daret]], [[Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy]], [[Pierre Mignard]], [[Eustache Le Sueur]], [[Claude Mellan]], the Flemish artist [[Abraham Willaerts]], [[Michel Dorigny]], and [[François Tortebat]]. These last two became his sons-in-law. [[André Le Nôtre]], the garden designer of [[Versailles]], was a student of Vouet. Also in Vouet's circle was a friend from his Italian years, [[Claude Vignon]].

During his lifetime, writes Arnaud Brejon de Lavergnée, "Vouet's stature increased continually, his paintings becoming ever more beautiful, particularly in the last decade." But, "although his career was as brilliant as can be imagined," Vouet "played no role in the foundation of the [[Académie Royale]]" that was to be so dominant after his death, "and was neglected by the biographers and more influential amateurs. Between 1660 and 1690 only [[Poussin]] and [[Rubens]] were taken seriously...and later generations drew their own conclusions from this." Further eroding his legacy, "Vouet was undoubtedly at his greatest in these ensembles [his magnificent decorative schemes for chateaux and churches], most of which were destroyed during the [[French Revolution|Revolution]]" of the next century.<ref name="LavergnéeExhibitReview">Brejon de Lavergnée, Arnauld. "Paris: Vouet at the Grand Palais" (review of the exhibition). ''The Burlington Magazine'', Vol. 133, No. 1055 (Feb. 1991), pp. 136–140.</ref>

Though never entirely forgotten by connoisseurs and collectors (such as [[William Suida]]), Vouet fell into a relative obscurity that was not remedied until William R. Crelly's monograph of 1962,<ref name=Crelly /> and then by the major retrospective of Vouet's work at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1990–1991 with its colloquium<ref name="Loire">Loire Stéphane, editor. ''Simon Vouet: actes du colloque international Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 5-6-7 février 1991'', Paris: Publication Information, c1992.</ref> and catalogue,<ref name="Thuillier">Thuillier, Jacques. ''Vouet: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 6 novembre 1990-11 février 1991'' (catalogue of the exhibition). Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, c. 1990.</ref> which Brejon de Lavergnée says fulfilled "its aim of rehabilitating the artist."<ref name="LavergnéeExhibitReview" /> "The Simon Vouet retrospective…is still vividly remembered. Since then, studies of the painter, his circle and his students have abounded, defining the image of the artist and his workshop ever more clearly."<ref>{{cite web |url= http://www.thearttribune.com/Simon-Vouet-the-Italian-years-1613.html |author=Rykner, Didier |title = Simon Vouet: The Italian Years 1613/1617 (review of the exhibit) |access-date= 2019-10-24 |publisher= thearttribune.com }}</ref>

The exhibition's organizer, Jacques Thuillier, "is surely justified in claiming the altarpiece of the ''Presentation of Jesus in the Temple'' as among the greatest masterpieces of seventeenth-century monumental painting," writes Brejon de Lavergnée, who further asserts that in the artist's works of the 1640s, such as ''Saint Francis of Paola Resuscitating a Child'', "one can see Vouet concluding his career with pictures of an immense gravity informed by an intense spiritual energy. Images of the greatest force, these paintings constitute the apogee of French seventeenth-century painting."<ref name="LavergnéeExhibitReview" />

<gallery mode="packed" heights="220px">
File:Simon Vouet--Two Modelli for Altarpiece in St-Peters--1625--LACMA.jpg|''Two Modelli for Altarpiece in St. Peter's'' (1625), [[LACMA]]
</gallery>