Up the Seine to the Battlefields

n of Renaissance splendor, who can rival Francis I? In the Louvre, in Paris, you may look upon the face of this great king, one that Havre grew to know as well as the faces of her own fisherfolk. That long oval, that fine Gallic brow, the prodigiously elongated straight nose?the nose even Titian must render distinctive rather than distinguished?the bearded cheeks and chin, the full Roman lips, and above all, the eye?dark, protruding, voluptuously lidded?the seeing eye of the lover of art and of a beautiful woman?here before you on the canvas you, too, grow to know, with an intimate sense of satisfaction, the countenance as well as much of the nature and character of the man who opened the great doors on France's Vita Nuova, on her new, on her truly modern career. Francis I had come from Italy, flushed with his triumph. He was fresh from his victory?he had won Milan from the Sforzas. His mind was saturated with the Renaissance spirit; he was still warmed with the glow of her intellectual activities, with the power and splendor of her artistic development. KING FRANCOIS THE FIRST From a painting by Titian Francis I brought to France, as he was to prove in his enterprises at Havre, a new view of kingly conduct. This was the gift he brought from Italy with which to enrich his own kingdom?and Havre. He had seen the great Italian and Venetian ports crowded with shipping. What had France to show compared to these great world centers of maritime power? Two ...