Diane de Poitiers Posing for Primaticcio

This genre painting by the Belgian artist Nicaise de Keyser, executed around 1850, depicts Diane de Poitiers posing for the Italian painter Francesco Primaticcio, known as Primaticcio, in the presence of King Henry II. Diane de Poitiers, the king's favourite and Duchess of Valentinois, was a favoured subject of the School of Fontainebleau, where Primaticcio, who had come to France under Francis I, directed the château's major decorative projects. The scene evokes, in the nineteenth-century Romantic taste for the French Renaissance, the intimacy of Henry II's court and the patronage exercised by the royal couple over the Italian artists established at Fontainebleau. A work of historical reconstruction rather than a contemporary record, it testifies to the enduring fascination, three centuries later, with the figure of Diane de Poitiers and the artistic refinement of the Valois court.