Avignon school, a body of late Gothic painting, not necessarily of a single stylistic evolution, produced in and around the city of Avignon in southeastern France from the second half of the 14th century into the second half of the 15th. Subject to both Italian and Flemish influences—in contrast to the contemporary art of northern France, which was entirely Flemish in character—the art of Avignon, with that of nearby Aix-en-Provence and other centres in the surrounding region of Provence, represented some of the most vital developments in French Gothic painting.
The Avignon school had its beginnings during the period of the “Babylonian Captivity” (1309–77), when the papal court resided at Avignon under a series of French popes, the only period of its history in which the papacy was not centred at Rome. The immensely advantageous papal patronage attracted many artists, mainly Italians; the most prominent of these was the Sienese master Simone Martini, who worked at Avignon between 1335 and 1340. Under his direction and that of his successor, Matteo di Giovanetti da Viterbo (in Avignon 1342–53), the papal palace at Avignon and a number of secular buildings in nearby towns were decorated with frescoes that firmly established in Provence the Italian, and specifically Sienese, pictorial tradition: decorative elegance of outline and detail, easy, harmonious handling of numbers of solidly modeled, graceful figures, and, most important, a monumentality in the treatment of figures, born of classicism, that was completely foreign to the highly linear, precious elegance of contemporaneous French painting, inspired as it was by the miniature arts of manuscript illumination and stained glass. The strong Italian tradition established at Avignon was in fact one of the more important means by which Italian monumental classicism was transmitted to the north before 1400, in anticipation of the monumental Flemish painting of the 15th century.
After the departure of the popes in 1377, Avignon and Aix maintained their positions as important artistic centres. Early in the 15th century, Flemish influences, already entrenched in northern France, began to reach Avignon. The precise realism with its intense interest in detail, the crisp, rhythmic line, and the sensitive colour of Flemish painting fused with the Italian tradition, which tended to neutralize the tension and angularity typical of Flemish art; these two influences are seen in varying proportions in the work of a number of artists painting in Avignon. Despite the strength of the two traditions, these artists also maintained an independent approach that remained typical of French art and was expressed in spacious monumentality of composition (in contrast with Sienese overcrowding), individuality of iconographic types, and a freshness and grace in the treatment of detail that revealed a particularly strong love of nature. The most prominent 15th-century artists of the Avignon school were Enguerrand Charonton, Simon de Chalons, and Nicolas Froment. The masterpiece of the school, however, is the anonymous “Avignon Pietà” (Louvre, Paris), painted before 1457 at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon and attributed by some to Charonton. This highly original work is an intensely spiritual combination of monumentality and penetrating realism.
In the second half of the 15th century, increasing virtuosity replaced the original vigour of the school. The forces that were at work at Avignon, however, influenced the mainstream of French painting in the late 15th and 16th centuries.