COLOMBE, MICHEL. - Sculptor, b. in Brittany around 1430-40, d. before 1519. From 1491 he settled in Tours, where in 1500 he received the commission to execute a medal in honor of Louis XII.

In 1507 he completed the monument to Francis II of Brittany in the cathedral of Nantes, conceived perhaps on the suggestions of G. Perreal, who had recently returned from Italy, and executed with the collaboration of Guillaume Regnauld, of G. of Chartres and of Italian marble-workers. In 1508 he sculpted for Card. Georges d'Amboise the relief with St. George Slaying the Dragon, today in the Louvre. While the medal of Louis XII is still strictly bound to the Gothic taste in every part of it, both in the monument to Francis II and in the relief with St. George the portals of the Italian Renaissance fashion are most evident, reflected especially in the architectural and decorative elements which nevertheless overlap or intertwine rather than fuse with the traditional ones. So that the merits of C. as a sculptor must be indicated above all in the delicate modeling of his images, where the acute realism of the Gothic tradition is as it were veiled by a gentle sense of melancholic poetry.

Bibliography2 works

BIBL.: P. Vitry, M. C. et la sculpture française de son temps, Paris 1901; M. R. de Falvelley, s. v. in Enc. Ital., X (1931), pp. 777-78.

Emilio Lavagnino

@incollection{ec3_colombe_michel, author = {Lavagnino, Emilio}, title = {Colombe, michel}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {III}, pages = {1998}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1949}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/colombe-michel} }

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Colombe, Michel

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