Henry II style

The Henry II style was the leading artistic movement in France during the sixteenth century, a Gallicized adaptation of Italian Mannerism that followed the High Renaissance and is considered part of Northern Mannerism. Although named for King Henry II, the style spanned roughly 1530 to 1590, across the reigns of five successive French monarchs. Francis I and Catherine de Medici brought Italian artists trained in the circles of Raphael and Michelangelo to France to work at the Palace of Fontainebleau, establishing the School of Fontainebleau, where French artists learned Mannerist techniques that they then applied to architecture, the style's most enduring legacy, producing sculptural ornament such as niches, pediments, pilasters, caryatids and festoons and reworking classical themes, including Philibert Delorme's own French order of column. Major projects in the style include the Palace of Fontainebleau, the Palais du Louvre, the Chateau d'Anet and the Tuileries, shaped by the architects Pierre Lescot, Philibert Delorme and Jean Bullant, and by the century's end the style had evolved toward a more consistent classicism with hints of the coming Baroque, giving way to the Henry IV style.